“Jira is brilliant”

I've never read that sentence before!

My feeling is... developers hate Jira, managers love Jira. And that is expected. The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc.

An example of a very misused metric: In one of my jobs, managers started using Scrum Poker results as a productivity measure. “My team scored 100 points in the last sprint.” Imagine the chaos this generated. Quickly teams began to hate the Scrum poker.

Jira is probably just a scapegoat in corporate theater, something needs to be to blame. Jira is a good culprit.

I'm a developer, and while I don't love it, I certainly don't hate it, and I don't see it worse than any other task-tracking tool. I haven't used trello or asana in a hot minute, but they were way worse in terms of UI and UX.

I'm not totally sold on the whole points poker process though, but that could be a criticism of agile as a whole.

Planning poker, story points, etc. are not an intrinsic part of agile (or even Scrum, from what I understand). Honestly, I'd not use them at all because they're not worth the time investment.

"Agile as a whole" does not require planning poker, or story points, or burndown charts, or Fibonacci estimates, or Kanban boards, or any of that. Neither does Scrum. Google "Agile Manifesto" and "2020 Scrum Guide."

If it isn't in the 4 values and 12 principles, it's not required in Agile. If it isn't in the guide, it isn't required in Scrum.

> I'm not totally sold on the whole points poker process though, but that could be a criticism of agile as a whole.

My understanding of agile is give your developers the tools they want, the information they want, and the ability and incentive to communicate widely, quickly, and frequently however they want, and get out of the way. You have to devolve responsibility and accountability for meeting business goals down to the team level though, and that team has to act as one.

None of that has anything to do with "points poker process", or any process. Obviously everyone has a process, even solo developers working on their own hobby, but that process is "what works best".

> The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc.

There's an unfortunate tendency for some people to scoff at the immutable fact that to write software, you have to talk to other human beings. And that if a company is paying you good money to do it, they are going to want to know when it will be done and what ROI they are getting on your salary.

Sure, there are stupid meetings and stupid metrics. But to lump "meetings" and "metrics" into a "hated" category is the mark of an immature dev who doesn't understand why he/she has a job and a salary in the first place.

It’s why I just can’t take some dev communities seriously. Too many immature / inexperienced people will talk eachother into thinking that their “I should just be able to sit here and code!” mentality is justified or even viable. Who the hell else gets to work like that? The utter hubris.

I work like that, but I love occasional meetings to catch up with peers. My immediate team of 3 people has a twice-weekly "standup" meeting, and communicate through the rest of the week in a slack channel. I have a weekly catchup with another team and a monthly with a couple more, and once every 3 months a large pan-org community get together in person, typically with a beer and curry.

Of course there are terrible meetings too. I currently have a PM who had 5 meetings with me a week on two minor projects. I don't go to those meetings, I just update the jira when there's an update. I need to do that as I am working on 40 things at a time and I don't have the mental capacity to remember how many plates I'm spinning. That's far more efficient, it's asynchronous, easy to keep on top of.

I see some colleagues struggling to get anything done because they are in meetings 6 hours a day, they go from one meeting to another without even a pause for a break. In those meetings they then try to half-listen and send emails about other subjects. They don't need to be in those meetings.

It sounds like you don't work like that, you talk to other humans at occasional meetings. I do mostly "just sit down and code" and it's a problem. Your situation sounds healthy and productive to me, I want to be more like that.

I talk to other humans at productive meetings - about 2-3 hours a week on average. Those that need updates don't need my time -- they're stored in the jiras. Crucially that information is still available months and years later.

If I didn't communicate, how else would I know where the problems are, or what other people are working on so I don't duplicate effort.

90% of my week is not in meetings though, and about 0% of my week is in business metrics (plenty of metrics on things like availability from monitoring systems, but nothing out of jira, because what's the point in trying to record metrics which nobody cares about)

Yeah it's very entitled. Like only software developers do actual meaningful complex work and everyone else just sits in meetings and does nothing.

> But to lump "meetings" and "metrics" into a "hated" category is the mark of an immature dev

To me, these things are normal occurrences in organizational theater. I ignore that. But after sitting in a few 12-hour meetings, participating in some metrics-based programming (MBP) and filling out 100 fields in a deployment request tool, I UNDERSTAND if someone hates this kind of thing, is not only 'immaturity'.

And I'm not try to change anything, my experience is that if we can convince those in charge to stop having unnecessary meetings or using metrics incorrectly, something worse will replace those things, like no meetings, but super micromanagement. ... because the nature of the organization that does these things is to continue doing them, in other ways.

Understanding that stupid/pointless/badly run meetings and toxic cultures exist is not the same thing as immaturely assuming all meetings are automatically time-wasters or that all corporate cultures must be toxic.

Exactly. Also developers often say they want less meetings so they can do more work, or something akin to that. But meetings _are_ work. And where I've worked there was always room to present feedback is a meeting felt unnecessary.

This issue is that jira does not measure roi

Yes, but orgs that want to do this would likely have done it regardless of the use of Jira. I have my team use story points yet I don’t ever use them to measure team or individual velocity. The fact that Jira enables incompetent managers (which is not the same thing as ‘managers’, one is necessary and one is not) to be incompetent is in my opinion a fairly low-level mark against it.

The reality is that most developers don’t know what degree of organisation / visibility is required for it to even be tenable to do their job in the context of a wider organisation. ICs, and the experience of ICs, should certainly be taken into consideration when picking PM tooling, but it’s not a bad mark against an org to also take into consideration the very real needs of management, PMs, etc.

There are always going to be those people that will categorically associate management with ‘bad’ and I just simply cannot respect that opinion. It’s the equivalent of being mad at your parents for setting a bedtime. Some of the Jira hate definitely comes from people with that mindset.

I use jira, I do not use points, sprints, scrums, etc

Jira doesn't require those features. My workflow is "Ready, On Hold, In Progress, Done". It's a glorified task list with assignees, tagging, emails etc, that's corporate-wide -- no need to get random people to get accounts, everyone has one. All over our documentation and configs are references to "TKT-1234", which explains the background to a specific thing far more than an inline comment could.

It does the job just fine, I didn't need to jump through any hoops to get it working like that.

The alternate system engineers in other departments use is email. Tracking things in email is awful.

You can use Jira for far worse things, but that's not a problem with the tool, that's a problem with the culture.

> My feeling is... developers hate Jira

I'm a developer and I like Jira. People who hate it are probably forced to use some bloated setups. We just use Kanban and the backlog and that's it. It's great if you don't turn it into a fully blow project management tool.

Exactly this. After layoffs and a small restructuring last year, we created a new project for our team in Jira and didn't include anything that had been added by upper management in the previous project, used a simplified workflow, and further changes are talked about by the team at retro. Went from a pain to easy to use.

Read the rest of the comment and what he loves about it. He's not a dev.

Teams would be fine with two things:

1) Let a Team channel be a normal-ass chat instead of some weird forum-in-a-chat-interface. Shit gets lost. Creating a new post feels very formal and high friction, because it’ll push everything else out of view (another, minor problem: teams’ padding and whitespace is way out of control). Make it configurable! That’s ok. The weird chat-as-forum thing is fine for a very low-traffic announcements channel (and very bad for anything else) so having it as an option is alright.

2) Allow “create a meeting for this Teams channel” that puts any meeting chat directly in the channel.

These two problems force conversations away from the “Team” and into meeting-specific chats and DMs. It’s really, really bad. It silos knowledge and makes it hard to tell wtf is going on.

Teams is horrible for distributed or hybrid work because of these two deficiencies.

On Number 2, you can schedule a meeting in a channel that have meeting show in the channel and keep the chat there.

There is probably some feature request somewhere in Microsoft weird tech channel with thousands of comments and upvotes and some MS person appearing every three years to let us know they "are looking into it".

There were a couple years-old ones on public feature request sites last I checked. They’re ignoring them.

It’s frustrating because Teams can already do normal chat rooms, and can already schedule meetings. Just not in the most-useful places to have those two features. It’s not brand-new feature development from scratch.

It's probably somewhere in a Teams channel, and nobody in microsoft can actually find it.

2) Is that the equivalent of a slack huddle?

Nah, you can schedule meetings (like, coordinate it through Outlook with a scheduler tool and the invite emails auto send and all that) in a chat, but not a Team channel. Chats in Teams are not in a Team (god the terminology gets confusing) but are more ad-hoc, like direct or group messages. You can pin chats but there’s no “THIS is THE ‘general’ chat for project X, this is THE support chat” et c that looks the same for everyone. The chat interface is separate from the Teams and Team channels. You can’t create a meeting from a Team channel (at least, I’ve not seen a way).

All they goddamn need is a way to permanently attach Chat rooms to a Team, as a channel, basically. The channels are these weird forced-threaded things that are more like… blogging? With comments? In a chat interface? Or a forum but it’s impossible to follow several threads because of the interface? They’re horrid and have a UI so bizarre that I’d buy it as parody.

I had no idea but I haven't used teams since about 2018. I guess it might have changed considerably.

OH MY GOSH yes. I first started using Teams and these two things drive me crazy.

Just make it like Slack, and Discord, etc. its a solved problem!

I can personally vouch that Jira can be inflicted on engineers in a “KPI led” way.

yes same, in fact the access to metrics (for use in part in KPIs) was a primary driver of our adoption of Jira

And a screwdriver can be used to destroy. Doesn't mean that's the only way to use it.

> Jira is brilliant. It is team-led. Different teams have different approaches, [...]

That doesn't sound real. There's supposed to be some central department(s) that collect ideas from the process framework of the season or requested by customers (especially those items for levels that are not requested), add their own ideas and create a superset of that as configuration with everything set to mandatory. The result is infliced upon everyone, except of course the department that was responsible for the definition.

Interesting; I think this is a demonstration of how much what seems like a "Tool" is actually "organization", because my current experience is completely opposite:

* In MS teams, I can create conversations, group chats, organic meetings, and add people (and include history) as I want and desire. I prefer it for quick discussions with my colleagues and to get a rapid problem solving or critical incident conversation where I don't immediately know who I need / what it's about, and it'll scale as I add people. I push a button and talk to people, push a button to add people, push a button to video chat, all seamless.

* Slack is structured and formal and based around enterprise-created channels and workgroups, with way too much noise in each massive channel and way too little content that's even remotely relevant to me. Outside of channels, conversations are horribly gimped: A) I can only have one conversation with each set of people, I cannot simply rename a chat and have three different chats with same people around different topics B) If I add people to an existing conversation, it will create a new chat without history (this may have improved recently as I know we sent a TON of feedback to Slack admins). Basically, to get anything done you have to create channels, which is great for "top down, I know ahead of time what I need / want to enforce" structure, but awful for "this started as a one-on-one and is now a massive discussion with 17 people"

I'm looking at some of the other comments, and it seems they have some weird gimped version of MS Teams. E.g.:

>>"Allow “create a meeting for this Teams channel” that puts any meeting chat directly in the channel."

This... is how it works for me. I start a conversation with some people, then I add people, then I click "Call", then we all video call together, then we are done and keep typing in it, repeat as needed.

Weird!

> Basically, to get anything done you have to create channels, which is great for "top down, I know ahead of time what I need / want to enforce" structure, but awful for "this started as a one-on-one and is now a massive discussion with 17 people"

In Slack, you can turn a group DM into a private channel and keep the history.

https://slack.com/help/articles/217555437-Convert-a-group-di...

That sounds like you have a very top-down organization and they have setup Slack to mirror that dynamic. Slack by itself does not have those restrictions.

Individuals can create Slack Channels (often too many channels). You can setup adhoc groups through DM and can add people to that group . You have the choice when adding people to a chat to block the history or give them full access to the history. At any point you can convert a adhoc group into a Channel and decide if it will be private or public. You can click to start a call or to start a zoom with those present in the group or channel. it's pretty seamless, too.

It sounds like the difference is your organization.

Yes. That is the very first sentence in my post :).

A lot of our presumed perspective and experience with tools is actually our experience with organizations and policies.

Conversely, majority of issues I've read here with Ms Teams, are not part of my own experience - Teams I use is way easier and more flexible and user friendly than the slack I use.

Is it the case that more startups used slack vs more enterprises used teams and that sealed in some stereotype?

I wonder about that too. I've used both and personally I consider neither vastly superior to the other or even that much different.

If by “team lead” you mean the noisy few set the rules and the rest of us have to deal with it, then that also matches my experience of Jira.

Isn't that just human interactions in general? Society etc.

My team is 3 people so we're all the "noisy few"

I don't want to use any tool or methodology.. I just want to do my work.

I'm assuming that's a funny/sarcastic comment, but the scary part is... there's a chance it might be serious! :-O

No I'm serious, the whole 'agile' and Jira thing just wastes my time and distracts me from the work.

I know what to do and how to do it, I don't like the whole unnecessary framework around it. Sure, tools that actually help me to do my job are good. But my job is not one that requires very specific tools. And methodologies I hate because they try to constrain my thinking.

For the same reason I really hate participating in religions, for telling me what to think, to show up in church and pretend I agree and be part of their arbitrary group with its arbitrary rules. I'm more of a free spirit. I'm the opposite of a 'team player'.

But of course people differ and I know some people love the sense of belonging and the guidelines.

A large part of my work is communicating with other teams and making sure we all fit together. Jira allows me to do that far more efficiently than phone-calls and a private notebook (like one person I know), or emails (like several)

Read as a feeling instead of a rational thought I can deeply empathise. I recently had my first experience with Jira that enforces sprints and an illogical workflow for a team that should work in kanban with several types of tickets of witch at least two should exist for any work to be getting done, often more because you need a different ticket for the managerial problem and a different for the techical part of the solution and an additional one for the analysis of the problem at hand all written up so anyone could do any task, nicely linked.

It is horrible. I just want to work. It's two lines of a fix in a config file. It does not need such a ceremony but a message on teams.

In my case this is a solution to a problem of fluctuation and growth so described processes can make everyone redundant. I bet the people set this up never even read the agile manifesto.

how do you want to do work without tools?

Well tools that actually help me to do my job, yes. But Jira doesn't. It's just an impediment.

The same with 'agile' that's just forced on us not because it is a great idea but because our idiot CIO loves her buzzwords. It's not even implemented right.

Ps I don't do any development work. The problem is they're trying to shoehorn a methodology that doesn't work for us. I'm not even part of a team that do the same as what I do. But in general i don't like the mental restrictions that having to adhere to methodologies brings.

This explains it a bit better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39338582

Where do you track what plates you're spinning? When you look at some function and you go "what does that feature supposed to do", where do you look up the history? Just in git comments on the file?

Do you simply not track or communicate at all? Do you store it all in a personal notebook? Do you store everything in emails? Files in dropbox? Or do you rely on memorising everything you do, why you do it, when you do it, for who, etc?

> Where do you track what plates you're spinning? When you look at some function and you go "what does that feature supposed to do", where do you look up the history? Just in git comments on the file?

Like I said I'm not a developer at all. I don't use git for work. Nor do I collaborate on my tasks with other people. My brain is enough to keep track of things. Yet the company wants everyone to be "agile" regardless of the role.

> Jira is brilliant. It is team-led. Different teams have different approaches, some love all the features like components, versions, issue types, assignee, kanban boards, scrumms, reports etc etc. Others like my team use it with subject/description/comments. You make the tool fit what the team needs.

> Same with slack, you can create and destroy channels around your team -- anyone can create any channel at any point it makes sense -- problem at 3AM, spin up a channel to discuss it, job done. You can integrate and add plugins nice and easy.

> Remedy and Teams are led top down. They're designed to be organised, not organic. They're not built for the teams doing the work, but for the people wanting reporting. It's more about monthly KPIs than actually improving performance.

I'd say it's the other way round. Everywhere I've seen Jira, the person who can change the tool settings (e.g. make mandatory fields optional, add a transition to allow you to move a card to the column it should be in (because Jira is deny by default, you can only move things in ways that are specifically allowed) is a very distant part of the org chart from the team doing day to day work on it. "not built for the teams doing the work, but for the people wanting reporting. It's more about monthly KPIs than actually improving performance" is exactly how I'd describe Jira, given how I've seen it used (across a great many organisations, large and small - indeed I'd say switching to Jira is the most reliable indicator that a previously fun company has grown too big and it's time to leave).

Some stuff is probably just typical managerial bullshit. But the fact that Jira defaults to working as a slow, drag-and-drop interface with no undo is absolutely an unforced error.

> Never has an anti-trust move been so obvious or damaging.

Atlassian buying Trello and gradually ruining it is worse than MS giving away crappy products for free.

Your jira seems to be set up to reduce your control

My corporate jira gives me full control over the workflows, what fields are shown, etc

That's not a jira problem, it's an organisation problem

There's no way I could extract any usable metrics from my jira, but that's not its purpose. It can however tell me where we are with the new upgrades to Site 95 (waiting on the people running the fibres), or who wanted that new device in Site 5 and crucially why.