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by jmclnx 606 days ago
These are the factors to me:

* formal meetings, where I was, 30 hours of meetings a week.

* Users wanting us to read their minds

* bureaucracy, need to ask permissions to do one little thing

* Jira

2 comments

Using Jira slides into tracking all minutiae in Jira. People begin to think if it ain't tracked in Jira it didn't happen. You cant just do work now, you gotta write Jira first.

I call it Jira diarrhea

Jirarrhea
Jira is AWFUL.
I _once_ worked in a place where Jira was without question "a great thing that improved productivity'.

They had a person who'd been trained by Atlassian and worked full time on configuring Jira (and Confluence) - in a workforce of maybe 25 developers 5 designers and 4 QA/testers. (out of around 100 people, the rest heavily top loaded on project management and $1000 haircut account managers)

She was _so_ good at setting up Jira so that it worked super well for the developers, and enforced decent requirements and requirement change management on account managers and project managers. The dev and QA all loved her.

Senior management flew that company into the ground about 8 months after she started, leaving 100+ people unpaid for their final month, and stiffed everybody on outstanding leave and 3 months of superannuation (retirement).

She did get 3 of my best devs work at Atlassian within days. She is very very near the top of the list of "people I'd go and poach from whatever they're doing if I landed the right project that needed and was prepared to pay highly for their skillset.

Is that Jira config in a blog post somewhere? Imagine how many person-years of bureaucracy it would save.