Comment by Benjammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Benjammer | Hacker News Reader

All this advanced tracking/planning stuff from companies like Atlassian seem to me like some kind of weird, dystopian "C-Suite-Porn."

The going narrative seems to be this idea that companies have, throughout the history of business, been guided completely by the whims and emotional fancies of the leadership team and/or CEO. And now we're adding tools to surface more and more status tracking information up to the C Suite, which is going to directly lead to better decision-making that moves the company forward.

This seems like nonsense to me. Imo, leaders set the culture, network outside the company, and guide longer-term strategic vision, while directors wrangle the people and manage alignment with higher level goals, and team leads make the projects happen by empowering and supporting the IC's who do the actual day to day work.

I just don't understand the value proposition for a company as a whole to putting more data on the plate of higher-ups at any level above team leaders (1st level management, with all-IC direct-reports). We need analysis and summary tooling that doesn't add any overhead to team leaders and ICs, not more overhead on the people actually getting things done. We need better information on the desks of leadership, not more data points. We need more efficient communication tools, essentially "better nozzles," as opposed to higher flow rate in the company-information-firehose.

These products seem to play directly into the psyche of the typical narcissist CEO who wants to know everything that is going on at the company, right now, and micromanage everything directly. The incentives don't seem very well-aligned with things like "servant leadership" and "cross-functional knowledge," because, how do you make those into a Jira ticket that will be tracked towards your performance reviews? If it's cross-functional then which functional task-board does it belong to?

I was going to use a throwaway but f-it. You, sir, are literally 100% correct.

My day job is working for a company that competes with Jira. There is a huge trend in the enterprise space to replace their PPM tools with something that is "more agile but still has accountability".

What has happened is enterprises realize they need to change how they do business in order to compete. So, they implement agile, slap a new "trendy" software on top of it that isn't Planview and BAM! We're in digital transformation mode - right?

Here's a super dirty secret that will come as no surprise to folks in this forum: organizations that do this see, quantifiably, very low change in velocity. They see higher levels of accountabilty which, a nasty byproduct of this, is siloed teams and company politics (ever heard "that's not my job"?). In fact, people who institute software like this experience an increase in overhead for creating decks, dashboards, and the like to report out on how "accurate" their timelines are. Guess what? The project timeline rebase rate for MOST enterprises is still the same or higher.

What I do find fascinating is that there is a small subculture of companies who are getting that it's not the software that makes them better - its the culture. And the culture starts with their managers. To further this, the ones that we see become most effective that that BS term "digital transformation" and ultimately more competitive/innovative, are the ones who get rid of their managers and hire leaders who can lead a culture, lead teams, inspire them, push them, and GTFO out of their way. In our research, teams and organizations that focus on outcomes instead of deadlines produce faster, higher quality, and measurably larger ROI than ones that don't.

Anyway... sorry for the rant. This is a sore topic in our company right now because we tout that we're helping shape the new world of work yet internally we do the same stuff we've always done.

This is a great comment. I'd go further and say that it can actually be harmful to a business (or government organxation) to put too much "raw" data in the hands of people who lack the context or training to effectively evaluate it. the analyst who generated/cleaned the dataset is going to have a much stronger basis for knowing when to trust the data and when to discount it.

Once the boss has thrown it through a pivot table and generated their own conclusions you're now not only fighting to get the correct conclusions forward, you have to fight management's ego when you tell them they've missed some important aspect in their analysis.

>All this advanced tracking/planning stuff from companies like Atlassian seem to me like some kind of weird, dystopian "C-Suite-Porn."

no matter how good the software is , the people using it can make it suck , especially something like communication software

Ive said that things like jira are all about clarity , organization and making process strict. If you dont have that then the tickets become a bunch of unproductive threads.

Also with enough determination you can turn an excel/google spreadsheet into a good bug tracker

I think their software is pretty good , but bad PMs bad process and it doesnt matter. If you managers cant decide a consistent way to run a sprint youll never be able to efficiently record and track it.

Its like we are putting the cart before the horse. Before we can create a good organization tool we need people that want to be organized.

> seem to me like some kind of weird, dystopian "C-Suite-Porn."

I hate Confluence and am absolutely stealing that phrase!

I think he/she was commenting more about JIRA.

Confluence is actually pretty useful.

In your opinion. My own experience with Confluence is that it's essentially write-only memory. So much documentation that goes in to my companies Confluence becomes outdated _very_ quickly, but is rarely, if ever, actually kept up-to-date. This leads to a system whereby people appear to be generating a lot of functional utility for our company and our documentation purposes but it's little more than noise when you are actually trying to find that utility.

Still better than emails and office documents scattered around the internal network.

I'll absolutely grant you that it's better than internal networks. No arguments there. I think that I do prefer e-mail, though, because, at least with Office 365 and Outlook, the search function is actually useful compared to my experiences with Confluence.

Don’t forget about the search that is only ever useful when you know what’s on the page you’re searching for.

I do (obviously!) hate JIRA, but I just don't like Confluence. It feels like where documentation goes to die, the search function is useless, and I find myself constantly hunting for tiny little buttons and links to attachments.

Essence of your post is so well reflected in the video on the bottom of this page.

https://agilecraft.com/

So much mumbo jumbo that says absolutely nothing.

> These products seem to play directly into the psyche of the typical narcissist CEO who wants to know everything that is going on at the company, right now

Or a future AI "CEO" that is optimizing across a portfolio of companies.

I do not believe that the tradeoff you are making by optimizing around data collection rather than getting things done will ever pay off, regardless of how perfect the top level algorithm is. Call me a pessimist. Maybe when we also have AI programmers at the beck and call of this AI CEO then it might be fine.

Your comment has given me a lot to think about.

I think you distill the real responsibilities of different layers of an organization really well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com