Re:Why Jira Sucks
by jiggawatts on Thursday December 31, 2020 @05:06PM
(#25597733)
There needs to be a balance between productive work and management overheads. I've worked at hundreds of organisations as a consultant, and what I've found works is the following: 1 manager per 5 real workers where each worker spends 20% of their time on meta-work such as change requests or project tracking.
I've seen many examples of both extremes:
Sometimes I see people working totally unsupervised, essentially just playing and tinkering with whatever random technology seems interesting to them that day. This can be a huge waste of the company's money. Surprisingly often these people are counter-intuitively very productive despite the apparent time wasting. If you take away the 20% management overheads, someone being unproductive 20% or even 40% of the time is either the same or only slightly less productive overall!
On the other hand, the bureaucratic hells of 80%-90% overheads are all too common. These are the organisations where managers would say with a straight face that the floggings will continue until morale improves. These places can be so soul crushing that all of the talented staff leave for better jobs, which is not only a brain drain but also leaves the worst employees behind. Eventually management redoubles their oversight to try and squeeze some productivity out of the remaining dregs, but this just results in even the mediocre staff jumping ship, leaving only the most unskilled, unmotivated, and unproductive staff remaining. Jira often becomes one of the whips used in places like this to flog the remaining unfortunates.
TL;DR: Some management is required but the extremes are bad, and the extreme of too much management is much worse.
I've seen many examples of both extremes:
Sometimes I see people working totally unsupervised, essentially just playing and tinkering with whatever random technology seems interesting to them that day. This can be a huge waste of the company's money. Surprisingly often these people are counter-intuitively very productive despite the apparent time wasting. If you take away the 20% management overheads, someone being unproductive 20% or even 40% of the time is either the same or only slightly less productive overall!
On the other hand, the bureaucratic hells of 80%-90% overheads are all too common. These are the organisations where managers would say with a straight face that the floggings will continue until morale improves. These places can be so soul crushing that all of the talented staff leave for better jobs, which is not only a brain drain but also leaves the worst employees behind. Eventually management redoubles their oversight to try and squeeze some productivity out of the remaining dregs, but this just results in even the mediocre staff jumping ship, leaving only the most unskilled, unmotivated, and unproductive staff remaining. Jira often becomes one of the whips used in places like this to flog the remaining unfortunates.
TL;DR: Some management is required but the extremes are bad, and the extreme of too much management is much worse.