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Comment by Maxburn | Hacker News Reader

So much hate everywhere for this product, I'm glad I don't use it.

I'd say first try for yourself instead. I have, for over a decade, and while it's pretty slow and has some annoyances: it's not quite bad enough to hate for me, the alternatives aren't that much better and mostly have other annoyances, and it can get the job done.

it is actually one of the better ones in the field.

Get stuck using Mercury, err, HP, umm, I mean Micro Focus Quality Center for 15+ years and JIRA will feel like a breath of fresh air.

Jira is much better than a lot of similar products and people in this post seem to think that their dislike of their job is caused by their tools and not crappy PM process.

Jira's slowness became worse and worse in the past ~5 years. I used to remember the Jira hate and not understanding it because it indeed got a bad rap because people blamed Jira for a shitty PM process - with a proper process, Jira itself wasn't bad and I enjoyed using it.

However the last few times I've used it, it wasn't the PM process that sucked - in fact I loved my PMs because I got to offload most of the Jira upkeep to them and never touch the tool myself. However every time I have to use the pile of shit myself I end up mumbling quite colorful language.

Jira's main problem is that for most developers, this enormous piece of enterprise software is strictly inferior to a swimlane app they could build in a week. Lots of features in there for the benefit of managers and PMs that ultimately amount to more administrative work and process for developers.

Some places it's bad enough that Jira is used to appease the people with the purse strings, and the inputs have no bearing on reality at any given moment, while all the real workflows are tracked using paper note cards pinned to a cork posterboard that sits on Joe's desk behind his monitors.

I think people just hate all the administration that needs to happen when dealing with large task backlogs in general. This hate gets projected onto Jira, but it's not clear to me that there is a good alternative.

E.g. we were forced to switch from Jira to Rally, and it turns out that Rally is much worse.

Most people hate the enforced workflows from their employers. But as every modern web"app" the site is also slow as hell.

OK I recognize that, currently dealing with a salesforce product that is painfully slow. Seems the company that purchased that solution can't do anything about it.

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