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.
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.