You don't hate JIRA, you hate your manager - Derek Jarvis' Blog

Nah, I also hate Jira. It's slow, bloated, complicated, and has 1000x features I, as a developer, don't need.

But then again, I also hate the manager that makes me use it in ways that frustrate me.

But then again, the reason my manager loves Jira and wants me to use it that way, is that they can run a bunch of automated reports like "We did X work this week, consuming Y hours (Or points or whatever) and we predict that we will be done in Z timeframe".

Buuuuuut, that's all bullshit. Garbage data in, garbage reports out. Jira gives managers the CONFIDENCE that they know what's going on, instead of just talking to developers, having conversations, etc. As it turns out, programming is hard, and doesn't have clear A->B->C predictability. So those tasks that are left? non-exhaustive. Those hours we did? Didn't take into account the thousand little things that didn't go into the backlog (And would take longer to add it than to just do the work and ignore the extra time spent on the task). That burndown chart? Completely useless.

Jira is used to skirt around the complexity of software development. It enables bad management to exist much easier, because it allows said managers to not engage with the team or product in any meaningful way, then to push up the chain "progress reports" that are meaningless, then, when deadlines are passed, managers get to blame it on the developers for not tracking enough work in Jira.

Jira enables bad management.

On the other hand, bad managers abuse every tool they are given, and bad managers existed before Jira, just instead of automated reports, they had email reports and hand tracked hours. So whatever, the tool was built to service a broken industry anyway.

Having used some alternatives, I hate Jira.

No, I most definitively hate Jira (and also my manager). Jira is the only software I've had to use where 10+ second page load times are a regular everyday occurrence. On their cloud hosting, so it's not like we could do anything to fix it other than filing tickets... which we were told to simultaneously keep doing so they can track it but also stop doing because it's working as intended and we were wasting their time and abusing support.

JQL is absolute garbage, and it doesn't even take hindsight; they took SQL but in an attempt to simplify it, they broke everything about it. Whether any particular functionality is a field or a function to run on some other field is a mystery. And if you're using Jira Service Management, it gets infinitely worse; everything is bolted on in a terrible way.

Every interaction between their "Kanban board" and "ticket" system is confusing. They pull from the same database, except not quite, except they do. It's a representation of data, but not the same representation the data is in. If you have any kind of custom workflow setup at all - which the blog both criticizes as bad and uses as a reason to explain why Jira is the only good option (????) - it will simply never do the right thing unless they map 1 to 1.

There are all kinds of perpetually missing features. Multiple assignees are a big one, there is simply no correct way to represent "John and Bob will spend some time together brainstorming about a new architecture" or simple things like pair programming, despite that being a fairly significant task that should somehow be accounted for in planning. You can half-ass it with custom fields or sub-tasks, but then the entire ecosystem of tooling built on the assignee field crumbles.

Likewise, you can't assign issues to a "virtual" position of any kind, all you can do is leave them unassigned or make (and pay license costs for) a fake user. It's not possible to represent concepts like "the first available person from the Ops team" or "whoever is currently managing the security team" unless you make it into a status and leave it unassigned, which causes a massive amount of issues when multiple teams led by different managers are working on one project or someone is temporarily or permanently unavailable for whatever reason (vacation/sick/etc). Planning software that cannot deal with people being unavailable is worthless.

Permissions are a complete mess. There's all kinds of funny interactions between admin and project permissions, and some things are in what could have obviously never been the correct spot. How it ended up with project releases being an administrative permission speaks volumes about how poorly everything is designed. Happy tenth anniversary to the cloud ticket, the original server one has another decade on it. Twenty YEARS of the most basic feature imaginable not existing when the initial implementation was patently incorrect to begin with.

Jira is a pain, slow, bloated, and ugly.

Trello okay is for student projects, too basic.

ClickUp was decent when I used it professionally, I still use it for personal project management.

Azure DevOps is baby's 1st JIRA, but somehow Microsoft made it worse in every way.

Jira was ok until they dropped self-hosting option. Why should I keep internal development data at third party server?

Other Atlassian software, though... oh, what a mess. And it only was getting worse with any new release. I am glad we have dumped it all.

Jira is a customizable ticketing platform. I manage a different ticketing platform at my company (ServiceNow), and I see a lot of crossover in system complaints.

• People ask for a tightly controlled workflow and then get mad when they can't freely move between states. There will always be exception cases so don't lock down your states in Jira unless it's for some audit reason.
• Too many custom mandatory fields to enforce some sort of process compliance. If you have a process you want people to follow, do your job and educate and have recurring trainings on the damn process. The system can't do the educating for you, and if everything is locked down and mandatory all the time it means the ticket can't even be worked on in phases, or the requester responded to quickly, without having to spend five minutes on data entry - for every ticket.
• People try to use a particular ticket type for something it's not meant to be used for and get mad when it doesn't work. This seems to be less of a concern on Jira than ServiceNow but use the correct ticket types for what you're doing and you won't have a problem.
• People hate the underlying processes put in place, and blame the system. This is what the article is addressing.

I do have to agree with this article as a whole. There are a lot of managers who see what Jira can do and expect employees to do it all without considering whether it will be worthwhile. Especially if you're not running agile and sprints, Jira isn't the tool for everyone. Most companies have a Microsoft 365 license and Planner works well for team task tracking in general (and it's integrated with Teams).

At the same time, some employees just hate the idea of ticketing at all and rage against the idea of being held accountable for their tasks, and sucks to be them I guess.

Nah I hate jira because it’s so damn slow to do any action

I’m okay with tickets, it’s the price we pay, but there is a serious lack of “in and out” with jira. As a dev, I want to spend as little time as possible in a software like jira.

I have a love-hate relationship with Jira. Overall, I guess we are able to make good use of it in my team and it does actually help keep track my work (both for myself and my manager). Most of the complaints I might have against Jira are more about dealing with Scrum BS than Jira itself.

As for the software itself, the only thing I really dislike is text formatting. I wish Jira just used Markdown, but instead they have their own WYSIWYG editor. Which would be fine if it worked properly... Almost every time I create a ticket or comment, text formatting gets messed up after posting (especially numbers and bullet points).

The text formatting is also inconsistent with other Atlassian. Bitbucket and Confluence have some support for Markdown but they each do it differently. Using all three of these Atlassian products should feel like a unified experience, and in many ways it is, but text formatting is an inconsistent buggy mess.

This blog post is just strawmanning for a tool that rightfully deserves to be criticized.

The other common problem is a non-Manager - a "manager" who doesn't talk to you and doesn't know much about what you're working on. They just want to check a dashboard, see all green lights, report to their managers that the light is green, and collect their pay check.

I know this person. They were a manager. They were my last manager. Thank the compiler I got moved to a different team when the org realized said manager had no idea what they were doing, shuffled some seats around and removed this manager from the company.

The best project management system I've ever used was note cards taped to a wall. Not only could you see status at a glance, the act of moving the card from "In Progress" to "Done" was extremely satisfying.

I agree with the author in that balancing actual work vs. meta-work like writing tickets/documentation/scoping tickets is always going to be a pain point regardless of the project management system in play. Jira can be fine in that regard, but it also gives PMs & managers an opportunity to tinker with things and "improve" workflows in the glorious name of adding value.

It reminds me of the old quote about democracy: "Jira is the worst form of project management software except for all the others".

Has anyone used JIRA on a laptop, you only have about 1/2 the screen to actually work with.

Nope, I absolutely hate Jira and everything that I needed to do in it at my old job. Luckily for most stuff we had other issue trackers (multiple, but that's another issue), but whenever I had to touch Jira or any other Atlassian tool, it was a bad time.

We used JIRA effectively at my last job, the things that made it work for us:

• stop adding shitloads of required fields. Title, description, branch, priority (defaulted), status (defaulted), type (bug/feature). We might have had some others, but that was all I remember being required.
• stop writing shitty descriptions: spend more time writing something that your co-worker can use. Respect their time enough to try to include enough detail for them to actually use the ticket. Be available to answer questions when they are assigned a ticket you wrote.
• you don’t need extremely granular statuses: the functional role of the assignee is enough to determine what “state” it’s in, trying to codify a unidirectional flow of tickets is maddening and overly complicated. Work is messy, it flows back and forth, you do not need a “rejected by qa” status. Just leave it open and reassign to the developer with a comment. Managers find out when individuals are submitting half-assed work on a regular basis, you don’t need JIRA for that (unless you need metrics to fire them… different problem).

I agree with the premise of the article, JIRA is a communication tool, not a management tool.

My team does a simple Kanban with sticky notes on a white wall, like in Silicon Valley TV show.

A bit off-topic, but why do people still insist on writing its name in all caps? That was the original name, granted, and you can still find it here and there in the tool, but it has been called "Jira" for years now.