People don't hate Jira because it's written in Java. They don't know or comprehend that something like Jira or Confluence or Minecraft can be written in Java.

Jira does, somehow, faintly smell of Java. There's just something about how slow it is, and how maximalist it is in supporting every whimsical idea that any rich corporate customer has ever asked of them. No matter how poorly the request blended with everything else Jira does.

Mind you, I've only ever used Jira when its been setup, poorly, to fit in to a badly designed "scrum" process. People say it can be usable if you turn most of its features off. But the same is true of "smart" appliances, and that doesn't make me want to buy any of them.

jira's slow because it's a badly written piece of crap

requiring 20mb of data transfer for each page load isn't java's fault

Every company I worked for eventually used Jira, and it's always set up poorly to half-support a badly designed process. At this point that's just a regular Jira installation, I guess.

Java isn't slow, quite the opposite in fact.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21

Don’t worry, enterprise Java programming patters will fix that “performance” thing right up. Call a function? Goodness no, not without an helper class being instantiated first. Oh you wanted to instantiate a helper class? Better call a factory to do that. Not directly - have you heard of Dependency Injection? We configure that via XML here.

See? Fast performance isn’t a problem any more. You can make it go away in the time it takes you to load Jira.

JVM startup time is how it got that reputation, I'm guessing benchmarks tend to exclude that.

Back in the early/mid 2000s, Java-based applications often had a Java splashscreen as it loaded, so even non-technical people made the association.

Java is not slow.

Indeed. We moved off of JIRA years ago, but not that many years ago that this isn't still funny every time I think of it:

    veidr 2016-08-22
    Haha, JIRA is very "enterprisey":
    > Unable to find source-code formatter 
    > for language: python. Available 
    > languages are: actionscript, html, 
    > java, javascript, none, sql, xhtml, xml

That's me commenting, but I can find it easily whenever I want just by searching my company's chat for "XHTML".

We were using their hosted service, and it was a dumpster fire inside a meth lab...

(I did have a fine experience with JIRA before, though I want to say it was 20+ years ago (?) but my takeaway was that you needed a full-time JIRA admin person (and of course back then "on-premises" wasn't a thing, because it was the only thing...))

Yup, Jira is indeed very hatable before knowing its implementation details.

I don't know if it's a strong argument for Java however, saying that god-awful software written in it is universally despised, but for reasons other than the language choice.

Saying that a software is god awful when it's commercially successful is not a good argument. Certainly tons of people and orgs out there are deriving value out of it. I still have to see anything that comes closer to Confluence for arranging organisational knowledge

Do you imply a positive correlation between quality and commercial success? I don't think I can name many instances of this, really.

E.g. by far the most commercially successful video games are the bottom-of-the-barrel casinos for kids.

I am implying that there's evidence that more people like it and are willing to pay for it than people not finding it upto the mark. Yes, that's the definition of a successful software.

How would you explain SharePoint if this followed?

Oh, how I hate our management for forcing SharePoint on us.

Software success seems to be 90% about advertising and finding innovative ways to destroy your competition. Microsoft are the masters of that approach.

Do people who loves JIRA exist for real?

What's not to love?

Infinitely configurable and extensible system that can accommodate any workflow and any process that comes to mind.

It can be used and also misused, but blaming Jira for its misuse is like blaming Lisp because it's too flexible and too powerful.

Indeed. Blaming Jira because it's missing this or that feature, or because the managed version is being slow is fine. Blaming it because it's an implementation of the twisted processes of your organization it is not (and that's what most people usually do, even if unknowingly)

That's exactly the problem, we need a JIRA that is quick, efficient and not a death trap of a corvette for a 16yr old mental adult. Pretty please....

linear

That's precisely the problem, that simple workflows need infinite configuration.

But there aren't truly great products on this market, that every organization does things differently puts limits on what is achievable.

Sure. Get out of HN bubble, go attend almost any Atlassian event -- their main user conference has thousands of users attending -- and you will easily run into people who love Jira and/or Confluence.

I believe some managers do.

Yes, hello felow developer, every alternative I used in the last 30 years was worse in enterprise integrations.

I agree, it's not that Jira is good but the alternatives were worse

if you have a complex workflow that is supported by Jira, then you could use a simple too by switching to a simple workflow.

Keeping the complex workflow but using a dumber tool (E.g. having to track it via post-its, emails, chat, six different spreadsheets on different SharePoint servers plus sign off in two different custom in-jhouse webapps, would be worse in every aspect).

So when people say they hate Jira, they really hate the combination of Jira + the workflow under it.

I'd happily live without complex processes. But IF I have to use a complex process, I do love having one tool to handle it with, instead of eight. I did this switch FROM the 8 different spreadsheets and webapps, into the Jira/Azure DevOps/Whatever, several times. And I loved it every time because it's a less bad solution. It's not a good solution (that would be reducing complexity in the process). But for sufficiently complex organizations and tasks, some times you need a complex process and a complex tool to maintain it. And I guess in that situation no one will love the tool even though it's the least bad one.

When the alternative is Azure Devops...

I wouldn't say I 'love' it, but at the same time I don't really get all the hate. I've recently moved from a large'ish (50+) dev shop to a much smaller team of 3. JIRA was and is used at both places. It continues to serve both orgs equally well.

Perhaps what people hate are all the ceremonies and bureaucracy that arise around JIRA in dysfunctional organisations, and not the product itself? The red tape and bullshit was just starting to take over at the old place (part of the reason I jumped ship), which made 'standups' that should have taken 5-10 minutes a 90-minute soul-destroying odyssey. But that's not JIRA's fault either.

Worked at AAA game developer. They had shit ton of custom workflows build on top of JIRA.

Imagine you want to add a weapon to the game. With one click you could generate 100s of tasks for all the related stuff. It touches pretty much all the game. This is very very incomplete list for what Jira created tasks:

- concept, 2d, 3d art

- sounds, and there's quite a bit of them: just gun sound, reloads, impact on different surfaces etc

- animations - this is a large one

- writing: for example, background info on the weapon

- gameplay design: how the gun fits into the game

- world design: where the gun can be found, who (some fraction?) uses it

- quest design: maybe the gun is a reward in some quest, or is used in a particular way

- balance

- obviously, programming for all the above

- and even more obviously, testing all of the parts.

And that's one workflow. You had those for many parts of the game.

> Do people who loves JIRA exist for real?

I wouldn't say that I love JIRA, but every time I work at a company that doesn't use it, the alternative in place always feels much worse.

Unfortunately that won’t be possible, since the “I love Jira” set is empty :)