Comment by braythwayt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by braythwayt | Hacker News Reader

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I gently suggest that you examine this thinking, hard.

You obviously don’t believe that you have a choice in the matter today. But you also seem to have a helpless belief that you won’t have a choice in the matter tomorrow, nor do you seem to believe there are things you can do to have a choice tomorrow.

So instead, you are wishing that something else would force the universe to give you what you want, but without you actually changing your circumstances such that you can freely choose not to use JIRA tomorrow.

I urge you to shift your thinking and make it your business to recognize that you actually do have a choice today. You can work somewhere else. That has some costs you may not care for, but it’s healthy to say, “Overall, I like the choice I’m making” and then to be happy with the outcome.

Next, I urge you to believe that you can make choices today that give you even greater freedom to choose not to use Jira tomorrow without making difficult tradeoffs.

When you have greater confidence in your own freedom of choice in these matters, you will be happier today and tomorrow, and you will let go of wishing that other forces will act to give you what you want in life.

Summary: Working on your own agency is far, far better for you personally than hoping that the universe will conspire to make other people stop choosing to ask you to use Jira.

This is all well and good but I don't think the thinking is wrong, Jira is built and sold to managers who have the authority to impose it on their engineers, (typically dumping a lot of management responsibility onto the engineers in the process but that's a different issue). There's really not much you can do in a lot of orgs except hope that Jira starts to stagnate and rot.

So I understand the frustration when someone from the engineering side builds something for it -- "why, oh god why are you trying to extend its life?!?"

Nope, nope, nope.

If Jira didn’t exist, someone would build it, because said managers have the budget and authority to spend.

If we want a different management culture, we have to work on the culture directly. Which is the entire point of agile, lean, and other movements.

As for managers buying it and imposing it on their engineers, we need to recognize that said managers are users too, and their needs matter. It’s not like there’s a good tool and a shitty tool, and the engineers and managers put in a requisition for the good tool, but the CFO plays golf with the shitty tool’s VP of Sales and they buy the shitty tool.

Managers want Jira for a reason. We may not like the reason, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong, and it especially doesn’t mean that if we burned Jira down to the ground its replacement wouldn’t address the reasons managers want Jira.

If we believe that software can do what managers and engineers need doing without being as craptastic as Jira, we need to build it.

But we can’t ignore what managers need. We either give them something else that solves their problem, or we stop worrying about Jira and get them to approach software development in a new way.

There are tools that solve the problems. It's called GitLab Issue Boards or Phabricator.

GitLab Issue Boards tracks capex?

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