Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

> Imprecise asks from managers and leaders cause a disproportionate amount of turmoil and wheel-spinning.

This isn't just for managers, that applies to everyone. I'm currently working through a backlog of tasks, some of which are years overdue (or no longer relevant). The primary issue as I see it, is that the vast majority of these tasks are minor issue, not worth allocation someone to full time, they are also so poorly worded and lacking in description that nobody is going to be able to look through the backlog and pick something to work on for a few hours.

Tasks and bug reports linger when you don't provide enough context for someone to easily get a sense of what you're asking. You could spend weeks working on something only to find out that it's either not relevant or that you're going in the wrong direction.

Clarity is hard.

View on HN

I have a rule. If something has been sitting in the ticketing system for more than six months, I close it out. People will bug you about things that are important and you can make a new ticket. And if you are in a position where the highest value thing you can do for a company is to look back and fix the things that were never high priority, do yourself a favor and look for a new team or a new company… It’s not good to work on low priority work.

That's a terrible and destructive practice. You can set the priority to 'low' if you want. You can filter low priority tickets out of your todo list. But don't close the ticket unless you are actually confirming that it is no longer an issue.

> That's a terrible and destructive practice.

Harsh words :) Care to elaborate on why?

For what it's worth, I don't literally delete... I mark it as "backlogged" and then it goes into the vast pool of backlogged tickets that are searchable, but no one is going in there just to look around because there's so much in there. And I think that's healthy... if you are working at a successful company, priorities are likely to shift over time. Something might be top of mind today, but you look at it two years later and it turns out it was never important. Or there's a bug that came up once but wasn't a big deal and doesn't seem to be re-occuring.

Open-but-backlogged is OK!

I'm sorry for using such harsh words; I was flabbergasted and lost my calm. As for why, there's so many reasons that it's hard to find where to start, without launching into a thousand word essay.

- Usually closed means either this has been done or else we've thought about this and decided it doesn't need doing; closing a ticket just because it's old adds noise to that signal, especially when you can already filter by date.

- Creating new tickets that are duplicates of closed tickets also adds noise, time and confusion when searching for those issues, and for people who were monitoring those tickets, and can make the status of the work unclear to people other than yourself.

- Tickets are valuable documentation; duplicating tickets is duplicating work.

- There are many possible reasons why someone isn't hounding you every six months about an old ticket, which aren't all "it doesn't matter anymore". Maybe it's not their personality to do so. Maybe it's because they thought they already did what was necessary: create the ticket and leave it in capable hands. Maybe it's because they got frustrated and switched to a different product.

- Priorities shift over time, but not always in a direction of older --> lower priority. Sometimes everything gets swept off the table to fight a fire, but once the fire is out, the old stuff becomes high priority again. Sometimes a blocking issue needs to get resolved first, and that can take time. Sometimes a ticket requires a lot of resources that only become available down the road.

Etc!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com