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Comment by VonGallifrey | Hacker News Reader

When I clicked on the site the very first opinion called Jira shit because they had 20 different boards for the same thing, 2000 tickets in the backlog and 20 different mandatory fields for each ticket.

Which is absolutely not the fault of Jira. Jira does not make you create 20 boards and per default a Title is all you need to create a Ticket. By the complaints own wording they had 2000 tickets because management refused to delete outdated and irrelevant tickets.

A new tool would not fix this since I would bet that management would insist that all 20 boards with all tickets in the backlog would need to be transitioned to the new tool. The mandatory fields are obviously also highly important to management, those need to be configured in the new tool as well.

Instead of complaining about the obviously bad management they just complain about Jira. That is, I think, very common when complaining about jira.

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If one company uses a tool badly that's a bad company. But if most companies use the tool badly that's a bad tool.

Jira certainly seems to push people towards having a handful of manager users who are the only ones who can create boards/transitions or adjust which fields are mandatory, and this leads to bad behaviour - if only one VIP can create boards, they'll probably create 20 once and then never create another. "Title is all that's required" may be the default in some editions of Jira today but it certainly isn't widely used. And "transitions are impossible by default and only possible if enabled by the admin" is a uniquely bad Jira-ism that other tools in this space don't have - there may be occasional use cases where you need e.g. an action that's impossible to undo, but it's an awful default.

Well... for us every team gets a "Project" and the Team Lead is admin for the Project. The TL can then Create Boards, Issue Types, and Workflows. The Team is in control of what their Board and Workflows look like. Not some far away manager and if we do need the company Jira Admin to do something, it just needs a IT Support Ticket and that will be handled.

We set up our Board and Workflow fairly minimal. Which is probably why I don't have any problems with Jira.

> And "transitions are impossible by default and only possible if enabled by the admin" is a uniquely bad Jira-ism that other tools in this space don't have

What do you mean by that? The default Workflow in Jira is that all Issues can transition into any status.

> The default Workflow in Jira is that all Issues can transition into any status.

The default workflow in some newer editions has a transition that allows that yes. But custom workflows don't have those transitions unless and until an admin manually adds them. If the person who set up the workflow didn't think of some edge case, you're SOL.

Since the person that made the workflow is always the Team Lead we are never "SOL". It is a 2 minute thing to fix a workflow.

Sounds to me like you probably never edited the Jira workflows yourself. If it takes your company more then an hour to change a workflow then that is a decision to artificially limit things.

Also: Custom workflows start with with the "Any" transition on all states and when adding a new status it also has the "Any" transition. If that is different in your workflows then that is a deliberate decision.

> Sounds to me like you probably never edited the Jira workflows yourself. If it takes your company more then an hour to change a workflow then that is a decision to artificially limit things.

I've never been able to edit the workflow, except at one company where I had access to the "beta" Jira but not the "real" one. This is across, like, five or six different companies - again, if it were one company I'd say it's a bad decision by that company, but the fact that it's so consistently done this way tells me it's something about the tool.

> Also: Custom workflows start with with the "Any" transition on all states and when adding a new status it also has the "Any" transition. If that is different in your workflows then that is a deliberate decision.

Wasn't the case as recently as 2020 (the last time I had access to create my own custom workflow, and I'm pretty sure that was a newer version of Jira than many large companies are using). Are you using the cloud version or something?

I am using the Cloud version, but I have been using Jira over the last 10~12 Years at different companies. I can't remember a time where transitions where restricted by default. I always preferred a less restricted workflow if I am working with a I can trust, but I can't remember needing to change workflows to enable transitions from a default.

What I wanted to get across is that Jira makes it very easy to give control to the Team that is using a specific Board or Workflow. If your company don't trust their Teams with that then that is a failure of the company and not a failure of Jira.

Would you at least agree that it's bad that Jira is slow as shit, in both its hosted and on-prem forms?

Management didn't insist on that.

It isn't slow for me. So no, not in my experience.

Yup, we have a self-hosted one and speed is fine.

The problem with JIRA the product vs. any instance of JIRA is feature bloat in the product has allowed for people to spin their wheels with all sorts of whiz-bang categories, labels, charts, and other nonsense.

The dopamine hit from tweaking charts and organizing digital clutter is probably the same area of the brain where the social media infinite scroll dopamine hit happens. If JIRA the product didn’t offer all these dopamine hits for doing busy-work, aka “features”, and stuck to basics then people wouldn’t be complaining about the tool and how their management/admins have implemented some nonsensical process.

Medium sized orgs have a full-time jira person to manage all this. I’ve seen this now at three different orgs.

This hits the heart of it for me.

I've used Jira (last job) and Linear (now). I don't really see any compelling reason that Linear is "better" than Jira. Jira was always pretty easy to use and navigate for me, and we had team-focused views for ourselves.

Even on this site, several opinions I looked at are about the idea of process or the implementation of a process—not really about Jira. And several of the ones about Jira just came off as whiny nitpicking and not actually meaningful.

Linear being strongly opinionated helps keep Project Managers (broad term for manager types) in check. Jira trying to be everything to everyone means KPI management is just a few clicks away.

I'm not going to "stan" for JIRA, but I've developed software before Jira with Bugzilla and other smorgasborgs of tools.

JIRA was a dramatic improvement at one point, however, it is bought and sold to managers, so it is unsurprising it eventually converges to managerial overengineering.

> it is bought and sold to managers

That is the root of the issue.

I've seen many small orgs adopt trello, slack, discord and other tools organically. I've rarely seen a small org willingly choose jira or teams; that is a choice that is almost always imposed by non-users of those tools.

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