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Comment by justin_oaks | Hacker News Reader

I would have thought so, but I think it's because people have low expectations of Atlassian that it hasn't gained traction.

In ranking companies by "Ugh, your product sucks" many people would put Atlassian pretty high. So if their product sucks, why would their cloud infrastructure be better?

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Wait, do people really have a low reputation of Atlassian? The picture o had in mind was that that pay top $$$, are remote friendly, etc. I would have expected their stuff to be much better...

No they suck. Like really really suck. JIRA is shitty, slow and unintuitive. Confluence somehow makes me hate writing any documentation (which I generally like doing).

Yeah, they don't have a good reputation. Not as bad as Oracle (eg "literally evil"), but probably half way there. :)

Their software is "enterprise software", in all the bad ways. eg expensive, slow performance, doesn't work properly, products that don't seem to receive updates after their creating company was acquired (eg StatusPage), etc.

But they have a marketing/PR department, which covers over a lot of those problems.

It’s loved by managers (the ones deciding to buy the product) because it looks shiny and it can auto generate burndown charts.

For anyone actually trying to work with it on a daily basis is a huge pain in the ass. Mostly due to the dreadful performance, which was bed enough with the on prem solutions and has now gotten even worse on cloud. Another wtf example is their wysiwyg editor actually has no own markup, it is stored as plain html and has tons of bugs, such that things you edit will return in a different format after you press save, with no way to restore it. This is just so fundamental input form 101 that you wonder what else is equally buggy underneath, especially this being one of their main values. Every one of their product uses a different such editor, all with their own set of different bugs.

Otherwise, you can’t deny that their products are actually very powerful. If only they cared more about basic usability they could have a really good offering.

Haha that reminds me, there is/was a sort of markup language they used for issue comments etc. I had to spit that out of a bug migration tool a long time ago. Back then there was no documentation for it, but I think it was something like this:

https://jira.atlassian.com/secure/WikiRendererHelpAction.jsp...

Their API was unbelievably slow but still better than having to interact with the web app. Please Oh Deities, let me be on an hourly contract the next time I have to use their products!

Gosh the wysiwyg editor is so, so, so bad. I still can’t believe it’s so bad.

it's not consistent between confluence and jira. they don't listen to requests for improvements (best example is ctrl+[ / ctrl+] for indent / outdent).

the latter is forgivable, the former is not.

Not to mention their own version of “not quite markdown” markdown. It infuriates me to try and format text in any atlassian product because of that. I don’t know a single technical non manager person who enjoys or likes atlassian anything.

Burnnnndownnnnn charttttss!!!

The killer feature, the reason I’ve painfully endured JIRA for about 15 years…

It’s always cited as important but I’ve never actually seen them used in anger.

Yes, the wysiwyg editor is terribly inconsistent between their products. Another thing that is super inconsistent is whether your work is saved as draft or not.

My co-worker once lost 2 hours of work spent on drafting a new JIRA issue (or maybe it was a comment, I don't remember).

There's a feature request in their tracking system for preserving un-saved work. It's been there for almost 20 years now: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-4233

Performance is terrible in their cloud offering, but actually pretty OK in the on prem version.

Guess which one of those two they're sunsetting...

I’ve used Jira and Confluence on-prem for many years. They’re fine, although the performance is a bit annoying and the WYSIWYG editors can get confused sometimes.

I actually like Confluence, it’s a well done wiki solution.

People working remotely can write very slow and complex bug trackers too, you know...

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