I love startups and I love working on that space, but you must stay aware that it’s a tiny galaxy within a much larger universe of software that is built and sold like any other engineering project.
And in this “enterprise” (for want of a better word) space, management is important. Not because managers are omniscient or omnipotent, but because at the end of the day, when a customer is paying a large amount of money for something intangible, they need people to talk to, they need figures to see, they need metrics. And in business, the customer is king. Again, except for the startup galaxy where customers are two a penny
I agree that client relations is important, but that's something that happens in many businesses. Like the comment I replied to, you assert that a managerial apparatus is necessary for that. I don't think that's the case. It's true that managerialist-dominated companies often prefer to work with other companies of a similar culture. But that doesn't have anything to do with what makes for efficient software engineering.
[1] e.g.: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3412380/the-hottest-en...
Enteprise but Startupy: MS Teams
Not startupy: BMW need a solution to track how many defective gearboxes are detected every month, sorted by supplier, model and assembly site, data fed in from the various factory control networks, verified weekly by each quality responsible on an intranet and sent monthly to top mgmt.
What I’m saying is that the second type of project represents more than 90% of the software being coded out there today.
A startup by its very definition (or at least PG’s definition) does not operate in this space , because it’s not exponentially scalable
Even if correct, I also don't think your point invalidates mine. I have done contract work for small companies that build "second type" code for large companies. One doesn't need Jira for that. As I said, one needs good client relations, but that can certainly be accomplished without a lot of top-down mangerialist claptrap. Indeed, it's my experience that things are better that way. They don't need metrics. They need their problems solved. Those two sometimes go together, but they're quite often opposed.
I also don't understand how you believe Jira can be best for tight feedback loops, but also agree that the tight communication and focused teams make Jira unnecessary. That seems contradictory.
I get that Jira may be a way that works for you, for a local definition of "works". But there are a lot of good ways to make software.
If that were true, startups would never succeed, because established companies would use their greater resources and market power to gobble up market niches before startups could get momentum. In practice, everybody here knows that's not true.
I think the true way to optimal resource usage is not through ever-increasing process and managerial layering. Instead, it's through tight feedback loops where small cross-functional teams iterate closely with the people they're serving. Which is exactly how most good startups work. If you were really right about pursuing a financial optimum, the first thing (very resource-constrained) startups would do is get a copy of JIRA and hire some middle managers to carefully parcel out the work against precisely designed specs and timelines. That they don't should tell you something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism, and also see https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A76WZ96/