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Comment by gboudrias | Hacker News Reader

Do people dislike them? I only know them for open-source projects.

The company I don't think so. The products.. a bit more - not because they are bad products, but because they are enterprise products which comes with all the enterprise baggage that makes user experience range from meh to painful

> all the enterprise baggage that makes user experience range from meh to painful

Could you give specific examples?

Jira online GUI was, comparatively, far too slow when we were evaluating tools for our startup.

Thanks for the feedback. We have just completed some replatforming work for Jira, and for some customers it got a lot faster, for some a bit slower.

Regardless of which camp you are in, we have dedicated teams focusing improving Jira performance over the coming few months.

If there is any more information you can provide around your situation, we'd love to hear it in order for us to ensure we fix your specific issue.

Scott CEO, Atlassian

A discussion two weeks ago pointed out that much of the hate Atlassian endures from developers towards their JIRA product is employer-inflicted:

>nunez: JIRA is a really nice product, but one's experience with it heavily depends on who "owns" it

>wwalser: the hellish existence [...] where JIRA comes up [is] because of one of three things:

· Your admin(s) set it up once and hasn't bothered to iterate on those workflows

· The business mapped their autonomy stripping processes onto JIRA intentionally [...]

· You're on an instance that is serving too many people with too few resources

source: How Atlassian Built a $10B Growth Engine | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16052743 (2018Jan:226 points,170 comments)

It's no specific feature it's the fact that large enterprise requirements very often translate into a product that isn't very pleasant to use.

Jira allows for a very rigid, formalised process for everything to be built. Few companies resist the temptation, most go all in while chanting "compliance, compliance, COMPLIANCE!" and as a result you have an environment that is a pain to use, has too many mandatory fields everywhere, one allowed status transition workflow (or one per issue/content/whatever type)- it's bureaucracy as a service.

All that takes a lot of time to set up and makes changes within the organisation even harder, because you have one more thing that makes it rigid.

I feel like many people have strong opinions about Atlassian. They are also a Java shop--which is something people also have strong opinions about.

At a previous job they switched from a hodgepodge of systems and centralized onto Jira and Confluence and I have longed for it at the places I've worked since. I do realize the cost and maintenance (configuring and customizing it to get the most out of it) requires a lot of upfront attention. My most recent job uses them and although I haven't used either heavily yet, I find the gui way more confusing and feel like the pages are almost comically slow and heavy.

Regarding the Java shop: here's a video of an Atlassian employee giving a talk on rxjs and redux-observable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk2bVBZhmcc None are specifically Atlassian's products, but it feels like their frontend is pretty normal (I would even say, advanced) and is quite dissociated from whatever Java they may be using on the backend.

Also, they started rolling out a different (React-based) frontend for Jira several months ago. Can't say that particularly improved Jira's performance, but still... I am not sure viewing them as just a Java shop is fair anymore.

And they also seem to be using graphQL now.

I may not have been clear, Java was only really relevant for hosting onsite. Other comments in this thread mention competitors using other server-side languages that can be served from a RaspberryPi. The only way it'd slow down the client is if your server was poorly tuned or underpowered. In my own experience, managing Java applications have their own set of skills.

The client side bloat I've noticed are both in visual clutter and performance using the Atlassian hosted version...so I doubt it's related to Java (outside of maybe scaling issues?). I don't doubt they have a modern front-end. It feels like one of those hip, new, modern, chunky sites that take too long to load and I try not to revisit. I don't mean to knock on React or modern frameworks, they have their uses and fill needs, but the end result often isn't a pleasant experience. The version I remember using years ago was a bit slower than most static sites, but almost seemed boring and corporate in use (which is a compliment for something you rely on for your job).

Their products, especially APIS, have issues. Serious issues that are not being addressed because it's not their currently hip product.

I'd love to hear more about the APIs we need to improve. We are exploring using GraphQL for our next revision of APIs, and your experience would help us with that effort. If you're interested - we'd appreciate your feedback.

Scott CEO, Atlassian

I haven't touched it in over a year now, but you might want to look at Bamboo. That product seemed rather stale and there's plenty of +1'd issues/requests on your jira.

One exceptionally bad example I remember is returning HTML for certain 404s even though caller requested json. It was for missing artifacts among others IIRC.

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