I generally think Atlassian is a really solid company building good products and I really don't get the hatred. I'm also open to acceptable alternatives to Jira and Trello.
Edit: ooh, just saw that they also own statuspage. And everyone uses/likes statuspage.
The hatred pretty much comes directly from the fact that as developers we are not the customer, just the user.
What do developers want? Not to wait for flipping ever on every damn mouse click. To be as fast and minimal as possible. Stay out of the way so I can get work done.
What does the customer (the person who selects the product and signs away company $ for it) To "manage" developers with more of the latest utter bullcrap management cult incantations that are fundamentally useless while being time expensive to developers who have just a little bit of talent. Kanban. What the actual f&^k? Seriously. Does it cost develeoper time? How much? Is it worth that time?
So yeah, bits of jira as a bug tracker were designed ok, then made worse and worse and worse and slower to run and worse I have to do what now? and slower and worse and what else is there non-atlassian like literally anything else is worth a shot.
Years ago in a fit of "do something about the misery" I looked at the atlassian website, saw "contact the founders" and thought I'd let them know how much worse this crap was getting and how much I didn't like putting up with it as a user. Some flunky created a goddamn jira ticket, then closed it! Never seen by the founders. Being an angry idiot I sent another one filing a bug that "contact the founders" is not seen by the founders so is wholly dishonest. You can guess how that changed everything.
They don't and didn't care. They hate me and my kind is the only reasonable inference I can make. What am I meant to do? Turn the other cheek so they can make more money kicking me in the shins? Yeah so there's one place the hate comes from. We are forced to use a product made by a company who hates us.
Hopefully that clears it up one perspective for you. Others may see things differently of course.
The other teams I oversee use project management tooling too. And I see them. I’m here to tell you there are SOTA companies, led by engineers, that use Gantt charts.
I used to think the anti-Jira, anti-management crowd was inherently right. Now I’m quite a bit more skeptical of those views.
I would still think jira is a bad tool (in the same way that JNCO jeans are bad pants), but at least using it wouldn't be painful.
But actual minutes to load stuff? That is insane and I can see where the loathing would come from.
Exaggerating it to several minutes is less egregious by an order of magnitude.
Self-hosted JIRA also opened up to lots of customisations and hacks, which often weren't performant.
These complaints seem like they have a couple of potential causes.
One very common load time issue is downloading too much data at once, especially on boards. I understand some work has been done to make this better, but you may get some relief by creating new boards with very limited number of issues on it - you want the board's primary filter to be specific (eg a board just for stuff assigned to you, rather than for everything asssigned to your team).
The weird subviews tend to be configurable, and Atlassian has been moving more and more towards defaults (and locking down those defaults) for these configurations that push a specific persona/way of working. I'm sure they have data that supports those choices, and there is strong selection bias going on here, but almost all the consulting I did was trying to figure out how to work around those defaults (the simple ones you can just change!)
Probably, a lot of those issues could be fixed by your administrator - you may even have permission to fix them yourself, though that process can still be quite cumbersome and labyrinthine.
So many complaints about JIRA come down to complaints about how it's configured. Atlassian knows this, and I think they are trying to make it better, but it's a hard problem. I enjoy the endless customisation available as an admin but it takes time and effort to understand what's possible, more time and effort to design those changes, and the most time and effort to make those changes match what the teams need. It's a hard problem to fix.
Sometimes people, frustrated by this big bohemoth, will pick an opinionated tool that matches their way of working. This works great for as long as that tool keeps focused and the needs of the team don't grow.
If consultants exist for a product, you know up-front that the product is intended as an "enterprise," end-all-be-all product, intended to be bought by high-level people, implemented by middle-level people, and configured to frustrate low-level people. It's not the product; it's the implementation, and it's a misalignment of incentives. Most companies big enough to afford JIRA are going to have the same kind of middle layer that winds up making people complain about JIRA on forums like this.
But that all depends on culture. The poster seems to be an engaged manager, pays attention to the data and uses it in a sane way and has hired a group of strong developers.
This is not your average setup…
- Jira isn't well integrated to things like GitHub Enterprise or GitLab Enterprise. Instead it tracks on a regex that mars commit history or messages. It's fundamentally disconnected from the VCS workflow.
- Enterprises want to manage visibility by team, but Jira provides few if any tools for managing multiple projects within a single Project. The data structure doesn't map to how many enterprises need to use Jira in order to do reporting.
- Many enterprises rule over definitions of p0 and p1 for anything. Local context gets rolled over by this and Jira just becomes a kind of table splattered with cards.
- Jiras query system is skin deep at best and doesn't support things like querying all issues of a given epic. Much of this is fueled by their plugin API. Do a GET request on any issue and take a look at all the null fields or objects with just pure nonsense in them.
There's probably more to this list, but the point is that Jiras problem is mostly its own doing. ZenHub does a great job of filling these gaps.
It should be the other way around, because once you have a good mental model, you can get the data you need without it being plated for you. But the presentation fools people into thinking they have insight, so they come to depend on the tools that generate this illusion of insight.
It's not too dissimilar from powerful people being cut off from reality by sycophants and yes-people. Or managers who say 'bring me solutions not problems'. Once you outsource filtering, you lose control.
Linear (linear.app)
Pick 100 things you wanted improved about it, limit yourself to just your top 100, Atlassian did absolutely none of those and yet made them all worse. Every year. And I'm sure it makes good business sense. They know who is signing their cheques, that is who they care about. And I'm also sure they're very relaxed about how developers loathe them, discount me totally and look at the rest of the comments or any time it comes up. That's their right. They can laugh at us all the way to the bank. If you had more money than your great-grand children could spend in lifetime of Brewster splurges why would you care that your users hate you? You've got far more important toys to play with.
I work with JIRA cloud for 8 years now and while there are hiccups it just works.
Their dropdown list doesn't show the currently selected item
As a user, it's ok. It wouldn't be my 10th choice, but it's not the worst tracking tool out there.
Back then, Jira really was good and fast compared to everything else, which was pretty much bugzilla or a roll-your-own corporate ticket system. It was also the first thing we managed to get a bidirectional link from an issue into Subversion commit messages and back again, and it ticked all the boxes for... a development team.
Then came the "let's make it a generic issue tracker" approach, so yes, "as fleshed out or complete as it is" is indeed true. They've chased every niche that they can find that needs an issue tracker but making it so configurable.
It's just a shame it's a complete dumpster fire now. Slow. The search never returns what you're looking for (Confluence is worse if that's possible), and at some point and size, you're going to need a full time member of staff to look after... an issue tracker.
This feels like we're almost at one of those moments where Slack came along and reinvented all the instant messengers, and whatsapp/discord/whatever replaced skype (or arguably MS did that all by themselves). I know the apocryphal story for start ups is 'don't write a TODO list app, or an issue tracker', but there should be a better alternative. Youtrack always feels like it should get more traction, but perhaps Jetbrains are happy with it being an MVP for their own purposes.
If Jetbrains Spaces gets some more adoption and maturity it may just kick Atlassian's backside. :)
But yeah, JIRA is far from the worst of these tools IMO.
I don’t mind bitbucket either. We self host both.
Suggesting that 9000 people lose their jobs feels like a needlessly hateful way to express a dissatisfaction with a company's products.
Does that mean they will lose their jobs? Yes.
It's still the best outcome for the world and those people will get other jobs, hopefully making better products.
Okay, we can quibble about the exact qualification. But I, like many others, am often quite upset about all sorts of stupid inefficiencies of Jira, and, to give a nod to a sibling thread: Bitbucket even more so. Now, you say "fine", I say very mediocre. And the thing with developers and their tooling is that we're often quite spoiled such that this mediocrity just doesn't sit well with us. In a lot of places, there is choice such that we can pick the most efficient, non-mediocre tools for our taste. But Jira is just such a de-facto industry standard, that there's less tolerance for shopping around, and many of us get stuck with it.
If you're in a sluggish enterprise, and you're conditioned to sit on the phone for a change request, or wait a minute and a half for your IT website to load, sure, Jira may be a breath of fresh air. But for a lot of us, Jira is the IBM of project management: no one got ever fired for buying it, but few people are happy with it either.
Thankfully, they told industries like mine to go fuck ourselves when they discontinued the self-hosted options, and thanks in part, to COVID, there has been a lot of competition growing lately for developer tools like these.
How can Atlassian have all that staff and such shit products?
Edit: I know the answer because I've been a company that did all of this. Build new shit and don't focus on the main product, then lay off your staff.
I had to be very very patient and get ready for repeating something if needed.
Bitbucket is just entirely forgetful, I'm not surprised you have. I found it slow and cumbersome to use.
I'll add another highlight to the atlassian experience: their CI product, bamboo. Also very cumbersome to use. To give one example, if you are debugging a pipeline and want to run just some tests, you have to individually navigate to each test's page and settings subpage to click it on or off- so with a healthy number of tests, you'll really start to notice those slow page loads! (I recommend automating this task with selenium).
I personally dislike jira, but as they say: democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time.
whenever i try and use jira to get things done, it is genuinely bad tool.
As an example, low priority issue that blocks high priority issue is not automatically promoted. This single thing makes jira unfit for its primary purpose in my eyes
Jira out of the box doesn't make your company suddenly more productive. Just like Office 365 doesn't magically work. You need good governance, administration / configuration and proper training to make it generate added value.
If you ask "normal" it person to do this, i'd like to see those 5 minutes
Jira automations are installed out of the box. No third party plugins needed.
It's very very basic jira administration, and it's one of the more powerful tools jira has to offer:
Say what you want about bitbucket, but people have been banned from github for pretty fickle reasons, so it's nice that they can still host repositories somewhere else for free.
But it's good to have competition. Can you imagine if there was only one cell phone provider? Even a subpar competitor in the space can prevent people from being held captive. If bitbucket didn't exist, Microsoft might start charging users per repo for all we know
Sure, I get it, they're working on enterprise features that make them (more) money. But then don't have the audacity to present me an NPS survey to see how incredibly happy I am with their product. Ugh.
So you not liking some products isn't just grounds for you not using a product, isn't just grounds for telling other people not to use the product, it's grounds for everyone working at the company that makes that product, related to it or not, to be fired.
That's one hell of a leap from your opinion to ideas about what's best for the world.
But just FYI that complaining about HN going the way of Reddit is very frowned upon here (if not outright against the rules, I don't remember.)
It's also fairly unoriginal - people have been complaining that HN is becoming Reddit since HN was created, more or less. We're talking a good 10+ years of this complaint.
Keeping a shitty company alive with bad management in place just for the workers isn't good for the market in general.
Disclaimer: I'm just arguing the general principle here. I don't have any strong opinions on Atlassian.
I'd imagine everybody in tech gets told to fuck off pretty rudely if it ever gets to the point of bailouts, so the good news is that your concern is unfounded.
No, it wouldn't have. The ownership might have, but that's ok. Lots of great cars are built in the USA, by American workers, by companies like BMW and Honda and Toyota. If GM had been allowed to die, that would have simply meant more foreign-brand-owned factories in the US.
Why do you care so much about the nationality of the top execs?
We are in IT business for God sake. We make crap ton of money, we can work from pretty much anywhere in the world and the market is still undersaturated by a lot. Obviously loosing job always sucks, but this social movement of caring about workers who were let go was meant to be about poor, low skill laborers with no viable alternative in sight, not heckin programmers lmao
I don't think all or even most programmers are in a position to just willy nilly dance out of a job and find one the same or better. When I quit my last job it took months of planning. It took 3-5 round difficult interviews with 10 different companies to find the one I wanted to be at. That took a little over three months total.
I haven't heard 10% as many complaints from project managers as I have from developers.
I remember using Jira in 2017 on a "legacy" project (as opposed to the "next generation project" as they call it). It was fine. I don't mind backend slowness - one second is no big deal in the grand scheme of things. I actually liked Jira (for its features and functionality).
The problem nowadays is that the slowness has been distributed across both the backend and frontend. It's not enough to wait one second for the backend to respond, you now also need to wait for a pile of shit Javascript to load, parse and execute, which has its own subsequent backend requests that themselves take a second to load.
And God forbid you accidentally click anywhere or need to copy text, as now everything is clickable and incurs the same slowness if you need to undo the accidental action.
HipChat was good. Then they decided they couldn't compete with Slack so they started rewriting it and then gave up and killed it.
So...they've forcefully booted me off their platform.
An entire generation of devs has suffered with Atlassian's broken, unscalable tooling. In my entire career I've never met someone who actually likes their products.