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Comment by mivanchev | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I can relate to that. Jira is extremely slow and counter intuitive to use. So much that I believe it will create friction within an organization, because people will try to avoid using it. Weird filtering system, weird keyboard shortcuts, long loading times for everything. I really don't understand why performance is not the top priority @Atlassian. A very bad example of workmanship and I don't care how well it integrates with XYZ.

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Not to mention the workflows are crack for anyone looking to make themselves powerful and essential without doing any real work. I was in an organization where many meetings were spent begging the workflow czar to make minor modifications to prevent tickets getting stuck in states where the people responsible for them couldn't advance the workflow. At one point we got lectured because some managers (in a major act of rebellion) got in the habit of abandoning and re-creating tickets whenever they hit problems. In another incident, someone coopted an industrial plotter to print out the entire software development ticket workflow to embarrass the workflow czar into stopping his shenanigans, but it didn't work.

The biggest problem with JIRA is management. Workflow hell, death by a thousand fields, shiny addons, etc.

It’s probably inevitable but a policy requiring strong justification for and regular review of any “aftermarket” changes might slow down or reverse the descent. The closer it is to vanilla the easier it is for (almost) everyone. Managers and workflow czars (nice one btw) of course would be inconvenienced but they should be comfortable making really strong justifications for making the lives of developers harder just to make their reporting smoother.

I attended a talk by a Netflix employee where they talked about a sort of organizational immune system to aggressively prune bureaucracy and policy by forcing it’s existence to be regularly justified. It helped me connect the dots and realize that allowing heavy customization was as much a poison as it was a boon.

I'm not even sure why is performance such an issue in the first place. It's not like 50 users can cause a lot of traffic. They have time to literally pre-generate all the views that could change after every action, between the times a user actually makes any change. I get that the data behind the views is complex, but having to wait multiple second for fairly trivial pages is crazy.

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