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Comment by james412 | Hacker News Reader

You'd honestly work for the folk responsible for the BitBucket redesign, or the 6 billion lines of dynamic JS loaded for every Jira page?

I'd sooner work the curb while living in a coal bunker

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I know bashing on Jira is a popular pastime on HN, but I'm always surprised folks are not more introspective around why it's still so popular in the enterprise. It's because there are a million and one ways that teams like to work, and any one project has lots of different stakeholders with competing needs, and there really isn't any other tool that can scale out to this many use cases.

I've certainly pulled my hair out a million times with Jira, but TBH I'm extremely impressed with their redesign. They've really scaled back the complexity IMO while still giving my team the customizability we need (we started on Trello and quickly hit roadblocks).

> why it's still so popular in the enterprise.

I was responsible for bring Jira into my team at 'megabank' not long after it launched around 2003/4, because the alternatives were horrific to set up and use. That was pretty much it.

I was amazed at how rigid Jira is when I started using it (we used a heavily in-house customized version of Sabrina before, and Rally as well). Sure, if you have loads of time you can work with an admin to write custom code for it, but at the level of what one of many teams can do with it directly, it offers virtually no options.

You want to split stories and leave sub-tasks behind? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.

You want to Subtask estimates to accrue to the Story estimate? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.

You want to customize the sprint report based on custom labels? Nope, probably not Agile.

You want to plan the capacity of your team to see how much work you should take into an iteration taking into account vacations and partial availability? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.

And on and on, with very basic needs...

Maybe he can close out this 9 year old feature request to add custom domains to cloud apps: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-6999

The lack of this feature is probably intentional

Did you click the link? There's a Group Product Manager explaining that it's a huge amount of work, they want to do it, and can't do it now. After the lead eng on the feature gave a detailed description of the work involved (20 teams were sucked into it).

Every engineering org has things like this – features that they know the customer rightfully wants and should have, and seem to the customer to be simple, but in reality bring your eng org to its knees.

Just seeing that JIRA url gave me PTSD-4242

I didn't say that was my well researched opinion/plan!

You made me laugh because same thought when through my head

Maybe he thinks he can improve it or that things change. I've worked for MS in the past, it's not a dumpster fire like a lot of open source advocates would have you think. It was a fairly neutral experience, but they certainly have a lot of smart people working for them.

Maybe he's the guy that can turn that around.

Lapses on that scale are not an engineering issue, they're likely a culture issue. Atlassian are a successful business that sell to engineering businesses, but that doesn't mean their leadership know or care about engineering. I'd stake a large bet on the reality he could not turn it around. Atlassian are basically the Oracle of ticket trackers

> Atlassian are basically the Oracle of ticket trackers

That's the best way of putting that I've ever heard. Stealing it.

Atlassian undoubtedly has very smart people working there, but the absolute cluster mess of JIRA and their other flagships indicates deep management incompetence that favors shiny new feature over cleaning up the mountains of jQuery debt.

Atlassian has the Google problem: buying and half-ass integrating a competitor, shipping new features, that gives promotions to the people involved, but "menial maintenance" is not seen as necessary anywhere...

Ha, I curse Jira daily and I am glad to see I am not alone. So many baffling performance problems or design choices.

I mean, maybe he can help fine tune GPT-4 to dynamically output the dynamic JS every time Jira page is loaded. Probably would have less bugs/more features. Also, depending on how they sample the code it could be a new experience every time you load a page! Exciting!

Well this is a bleak world view.

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