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Comment by semerda | Hacker News Reader

So who are these younger developers talking about now?

Nothing, honestly. JIRA has been painful to use as a developer in the trenches for the 7 years and 3 companies I've used it at, but there still isn't a proper competitor to it that seems to have traction. For what it's worth, we moved to breeze.pm, but the CTO decided to build his own "complete" business management service; project management, CRM, HR, etc. all in one system and integrated with Xero. We'll see how it goes. I'm keeping an eye on Tagia.io, but I'm waiting for the "Slack" to appear.

Who set up those instances? The only Jira instances I have ever used were set up by developers and were really great, but I hear that it's a fatal mistake to ever let a project manager know there's such thing as the workflow editor.

JIRA without spending the time to correctly set it up to match your workflow/approach/business is a complete waste -- for companies who do invest that effort upfront (and evolve it over time) then it usually works great.

I have the opposite experience. The default JIRA Agile experience is great.

It become a problem when a PM gets his hands on it, included about 50 steps with manual approvals etc.

there's an evergreen issue of "do you run your business around the software (jira defaults in this case) or do you make your software operate like your business?"

There's arguments to be made on both sides, and there's never just one answer. Default JIRA flow for some people is probably a godsend compared to what they're coming from, and yes, for other operations, having it mimic what's already in place probably needs to be done.

How Redmine is not a competition?

Way less features. Worse UI as well.

Redmine is pretty good for what it is, but I don't think it's in the same league as Jira... It does a lot of things, but having used it for a while at work I didn't feel that it did anything amazingly well. We just kept hitting annoyances in the UI, various limitations in all sorts of things in the ticketing and wiki, the lack of good reports, etc.

I actually joined the company just as they were about to move to Redmine, and recommended Jira instead after playing around with the Redmine test instance for a while. They were worried about the cost though, and I didn't have much say yet, but in the end switching to Redmine was the best argument for getting Jira. I didn't even have to push for it - after a few months my manager came to me and said he'd already got the funds approved!

Hi. Old time Jira user here. Used to use it heavily ... 5-3 years ago.

Last few years we use Redmine mostly. In the beginning I had mixed feelings about it. Now I'm OK with it.

We sometimes need to switch to Jira in our projects. It's always a pain nowadays. I used to love Jira time reports, now I just don't get them.

My perspective: Redmine covers the basics we need, don't have the feature creep problem and does reporting (time reporting) really really well.

Rant mode continued: In several projects we use YouTrack [0]. Initially I was very excited: e.g. great UX etc .. But! It's time reporting capabilities are just rudimentary.

In the end we do the following: created internal tool too fetch time reports from different systems and to push to our Redmine system (via REST API). Redmine serves our reporting needs well. Still, in some extreme cases also use excel via ODBC..

[0]: https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/

minor correction https://taiga.io/

Which is credence to the fact that this isn't an argument for tool choice, but against processes that developers don't have an appetite for understanding.

Those will be VC fueled and privately held till they need a sucker to hold the bag.

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