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Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

Catering to many different kinds of people explains some of the bad stuff, but it does not explain, why seemingly every single Atlassian product including Jira sucks at parsing Markdown or supporting Markdown well. In the big picture maybe some things suffer from catering to too many audiences, but in the small, it is just lack of good engineering. Basically any markdown parser you can install at no cost and even with pushover license for any popular programming language works better than what they cobbled together. Is it a case of some "senior" person sitting somewhere sheltering their brain child?

Also they seem to be immune to feedback, which they wanted to collect in Confluence, using some popups.

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>it does not explain, why seemingly every single Atlassian product including Jira sucks at parsing Markdown or supporting Markdown well.

Australian here, I can provide some clarity on that. Australians in general are fairly lazy; we like to do the bare minimum necessary to get the job done so we can knock off work and grab a beer at 4pm. Atlassian is an Australian company, and has generally inherited such an approach, so there's little tolerance for putting extra effort into things like adding the finishing touches to markdown parsing or improving performance (or even preventing it from regressing).

> or even preventing it from regressing

Here they are in good company with Google.

Unfortunately we’ve been piss farting around and never got round to writing a markdown parser for Aussie++.[1]

If you could do a bloke a favour and chuck up a pull request while we nip down the pub for a coupla you’d be a bloody legend.

Alright piss off now mate.

[1]https://aussieplusplus.vercel.app/

Ah, they systematically eschewed quality and engineering from their development mindset. I remember their gaslight routine whenever a proposal was made: “oh we should never divert from the 80/20 rule and whenever you work on a 20% feature, you are morally stealing from the remaining 80% of the customers. Shame on you!”

It does explain it though? Not everyone who uses Atlassian products use markdown, and I'm pretty confident that the biggest users of Jira aren't software engineers so why would they invest time and effort there?

I wonder where you get your confidence. In my experience as a software engineer in the Bay Area for 25 years, every company I've worked at (all medium to large either ISVs or internet companies) used Jira and at every one of those companies Jira was used most heavily by software engineers.

> In my experience as a software engineer > every one of those companies Jira was used most heavily by software engineers.

You don't see the correlation?

Anecdote for anecdote, I've mostly seen Jira used as a help desk tool. Back when I was in school, the professors used it to assign students to classes.

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