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Comment by henning | Hacker News Reader

Whoa. You've been breaking the site guidelines egregiously lately. We ban accounts that do that. I don't want to ban a long-established account like yours, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.

We've had to ask you this sort of thing more than once before. This kind of thing is not ok on HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and respectfully.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29777845 (Jan 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25900942 (Jan 2021)

I’ve used a lot of project management tools. They all suck once you get beyond GitHub project management scale. Jira is at least customizable and generally well supported so it can mostly fit engineering needs. Last thing you want is your engineers begging you to please switch to Jira instead which I have seen.

Harshly put, but the point is a good one. It feels incongruous for an upstart startup to say using upstart startup software is too risky - especially for something as fungible as project management software. Seems more like a lack of imagination than prudence.

Startups are risky. Adding more risk on top of that without specific expected gains in an area that doesn’t incur much ongoing cost is a bad business decision.

I agree, you need to de-risk your startup, not the opposite. After all, lots of startups fail because of the risk involved.

I agree with your point generally, but this is project management software we are talking here. It’s not like this is a year old product you’re betting on. Dude even Asana has been out for like 10 years.

I will state this plainly. It’s laziness. He knows how to use Jira and doesn’t want to spend time learning a new tool. There is no risk involved with these anymore. It’s not a risk, it’s effort.

Using Jira is a form of organizational debt. He didn’t want to put in the work up front to set up something better because he knew Jira already, which is fine. But everyone on the engineering team pays the price every day now because Jira is awful. You have to decide, is it worth spending 10 hours on the weekend learning Linear or do I make my whole organization suffer? He chose the former. But it’s not a risk mitigation thing. It’s a time trade-off thing.

I've used "big" Jira, notion, small Jira, Trello and linear - Jira is still my choice out of all of the above. Usually the problem with Jira is that an organisation enforces everyone to use one Jira instance, but teams in the org want to use different workflows. One wants story points, one wants t shirt sizes, both want them to be "requirements" and you end up with a badly configured Jira instance that requires you to fill in a bunch of fields. JQL is great, albeit slow on large instances but show me the equivalent filter on youtrack for "show me all of the tasks user X had completed that are still pending review in the last 12 months" in an instance with 100k+ issues that is any faster.

We have a nickname for products like JIRA: MLPOS ML stands for Market Leading... POS speaks for itself

I have a theory on JIRA - or rather on Project Management.

So PM is supposed to be three things in one - planning, monitoring and adjusting. Now "true (scotsman) leadership" constantly keeps adjusting plans to meet changes in the environment.

But usually this is too complex

In addition do not co-ordinate future development. that's not like military planning - soldiers do not say "we are going to invent a new rifle then be at the rooftop at 6pm ready to fire it"

only co-ordinate with what you have

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