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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> Either way, I don't see why the people doing the work should not be allowed to (collectively) choose their tools.

Because in a big company you’ll find some things are documented in a combination of jira and confluence while another are in big figma boards and nobody knows where to look (my gf’s company has exactly this problem).

Also in a big company you want to have two teams collaborate but one uses one tool set and the other a different stack and there aren’t enough licenses for both.

And so on. It’s like having each team use its own code formatting rules or coding standard.

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For the first problem, I would argue the tools people work with and the formats they publish should be two completely different decisions. Work however you want, but sure as hell publish in a standardised format supported across the organisation.

For the second problem, I guess I don't have much to say because I haven't tried running a large company. I just have never heard any good reason to be stingy with licences. On the other hand, the time I have wasted and the extra work I have done to get around problems caused by upper managment being stingy with licences has cost a lot more than the licence would.

I guess this will immediately make people discard my opinion, but I don't actually feel very strongly about each team having its own formatting rules or coding standard. It's not hard to adapt to the local conventions and the consequences of formatting rules are incredibly local.

> I would argue the tools people work with and the formats they publish should be two completely different decisions

That is a position that has been lost ages ago; the desktop model has given way to the app model. Instead of having files and then programs that work with those, we these days have data enclosed inside apps.

I don’t understand. Would it be sensible to require people using Figma to instead use Jira? Two tools with completely orthogonal use cases. It sounds like you’re describing a different problem.

GP said 'things are documented in' - while neither's an ideal tool for long-term product-oriented 'how its supposed to work' docs, both are definitely used like that.

(You probably wouldn't choose either for that from the beginning, but you start using Jira for issue tracking/feature planning, of Figma for feature design, and end up with them holding a lasting record of how the feature is intended to be.)

“You must use this tool for this specific collaborative process” is not the same thing as “You must not use this tool at all”.

As 'zokier pointed out[0], we live in the age of apps. If you're not allowed to use this tool for collaborative process, often enough you may just as well not use it at all - as moving data between apps is usually a manual process that's boring, time-consuming, and lossy. Modern apps are tools of control, not cooperation.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402497

It seems that at her company, some people do use Figma for internal documentation. SHM.

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