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Comment by rchaves | Hacker News Reader

Jira, for sure, and it seems hard to run away from, almost everyone use it

It seems like the only alternative is to fund my own startup, with me as a sole shareholder, just to forbid Jira forever

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Non-cloud Jira as a workflow manager is pretty good. It’s intuitive, powerful, quite fast (again, on-premises version only). But my current company uses the cloud version as an agile project management tool, and it’s awful just because it is soooo slow. And they keep changing the UI, sometimes with good ideas, sometimes not, but because it is so slow nobody wants to use it to update their progress. For example I update my times once a month because it’s an awful experience, and just use a spreadsheet the rest of the time.

I have used cloud JIRA and non-cloud JIRA. They both have the same (99%, at least) awful UI and UX. They both routinely lag out performing even the most basic operations. They both crap out on me if I leave a tab open overnight and try to do something in it the next day. They are both miserable to use. On-premises is not some solution.

However at least you (well, someone in your company, maybe not you) has the capability to upgrade the hardware Jira runs on if necessary. (Where I work we use Jira on-prem and it's fine speedwise.)

Also, on-prem means you can decide when to upgrade i.e. you are empowered to prevent the UI from changing daily (in our case at work we haven't upgraded for years).

Here’s an on-premises instance of JIRA hosted by Atlassian: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER

It’s way faster than any cloud instance I’ve used. Sure, it’s just public browsing, and most features are hidden behind login, but good luck getting that performance from the cloud version.

Wow, thanks for sharing! This is legitimately the fastest Atlassian product experience I've ever had. Probably by an entire order of magnitude. It makes a little more sense how they bamboozle execs into foisting JIRA on their entire org now.

I can definitely believe that a well-tuned, properly specced on-prem JIRA can be faster than the cloud version ever can be, now. TIL!

I know Jira is difficult to get rid of once it is entrenched, but I’ve found Shortcut to be a great alternative.

https://shortcut.com

Shortcut was formerly called Clubhouse for anyone who used it before September 2021 [1].

Somewhat ironically, they renamed the company to de-conflict with the other Clubhouse (the audio chatrooms app) although at this point said app has all but faded into obscurity less than 6 months later.

With respect to the Shortcut product itself, my experience with it ~1.5 years ago was positive and I would try it again.

We switched off to Jira + Confluence for feature parity that Clubhouse lacked, at least at the time. But it looks like they are very rapidly iterating on the product and adding new features (threaded comments look awesome). I look forward to giving it another shot and watching as it evolves.

It looks like they also now have a Confluence competitor [2], currently in private beta.

[1]: https://shortcut.com/blog/clubhouse-changing-our-name-to-sho...

[2]: https://shortcut.com/write-beta

Jira, bitbucket, and confluence are complete abominations. I hate Jira so much that it will be among the first questions I ask when I interview for my next job. I miss gitlab so much.

We use Notion instead of Jira (notice Notion is marketed as note taking tool).

The fun thing? Notion can do way more as project management than JIRA does.

The only reason Jira hasn't been voted up to the top of this thread is that the people who have to use it have become too depressed to vote.

Jira is fucking awesome compared to other corporate ticketing systems (CA rally and servicenow)

As a way if enabling corporate bullies and toxic managenent behaviour, I would agree Jira has no peers. Want to ambush somebody in a meeting? Open your jira tickets in the 5 minutes leading up to it. Even better, create some new, obscure category and pile them into there over a week and ask your target why they aren't done during the bi weekly standup.

As a mechanism of abuse of employees it is superb.

What you describe has nothing to do with Jira, but with how people are using it. If someone were to do the same thing in e.g. Linear would Linear be responsible for the bullying?

Ticketing systems can be communication and tracking tools that serve practitioners, or they can be surveillance and control instruments that serve bean counters and micromanagers. It is possible to configure a JIRA instance either way, but JIRA’s extensive workflow, permissions, and reporting systems target the latter in ways that other ticketing systems just can’t.

Counterpoint. Want to automate reporting the amount of toil on a team based on ticket assignment with pretty much any language that can talk HTTP? Want to create super-easy dashboards that are easy to read and use, and then export that into code? Is your company trying capital-A-Agile and wants to experiment between using scrum, kanban, fragilefall, whatever? Jira can do all of these things, and it can do them easily.

What you're describing is a people problem IMO.

What about gitlab ? Why wouldn't that be an alternative ?

The reason parent poster can’t replace Jira isn’t that there aren’t alternatives, but because a large part of the corporate world has decided that Jira is the best issue tracker because it has the most bells and whistles; it supports the SCRUM / Kanban / whatnot style workflows.

Also, it is not that great.

This is something my team is struggling with at the moment. Gitlab issues (and Github issues, and similar) are fine if what you're doing is only software development. The problem is that Jira works really well for tracking all the things, not just 'bugs in our current software', and having something that keeps track of all the work in one place makes life a lot easier.

Right now, my team uses Jira for tracking bugs and features and whatnot in our custom software development. We also use it for tracking issues and work related to our infrastructure, access requests to our various data centers, budget requests from the team, software and change management planning, site audits, and probably a couple other things I'm forgetting off the top of my head. And yes, there are likely better products for each of those things individually, but then you wind up in the hell of "oh wait, audits go over here in Freebly, but software releases are over there in FrobniTZr", and if you run those tools it's suddenly fifty-leven more hosts and apps to support and keep patched.

Much like Excel, Jira might not be the best tool for all our use cases, but it's pretty good at several of them and good enough at the rest that having everything in one bucket outweighs the potential benefits of a better tool.

On the other hand, if someone would like to fire up a start-up to develop a similarly flexible on-premises work management product to replace it, you'll absolutely find me in line with my wallet open...

Lack of service desk in other applications has always been what keeps our org on Jira (on premises). Anyone have any suggestions on deeply integrating service desk tickets with engineering tasks?

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