Hacker News Reader

Comment by zac23or | Hacker News Reader

“Jira is brilliant”

I've never read that sentence before!

My feeling is... developers hate Jira, managers love Jira. And that is expected. The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc.

An example of a very misused metric: In one of my jobs, managers started using Scrum Poker results as a productivity measure. “My team scored 100 points in the last sprint.” Imagine the chaos this generated. Quickly teams began to hate the Scrum poker.

Jira is probably just a scapegoat in corporate theater, something needs to be to blame. Jira is a good culprit.

View on HN

> The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc.

There's an unfortunate tendency for some people to scoff at the immutable fact that to write software, you have to talk to other human beings. And that if a company is paying you good money to do it, they are going to want to know when it will be done and what ROI they are getting on your salary.

Sure, there are stupid meetings and stupid metrics. But to lump "meetings" and "metrics" into a "hated" category is the mark of an immature dev who doesn't understand why he/she has a job and a salary in the first place.

It’s why I just can’t take some dev communities seriously. Too many immature / inexperienced people will talk eachother into thinking that their “I should just be able to sit here and code!” mentality is justified or even viable. Who the hell else gets to work like that? The utter hubris.

I work like that, but I love occasional meetings to catch up with peers. My immediate team of 3 people has a twice-weekly "standup" meeting, and communicate through the rest of the week in a slack channel. I have a weekly catchup with another team and a monthly with a couple more, and once every 3 months a large pan-org community get together in person, typically with a beer and curry.

Of course there are terrible meetings too. I currently have a PM who had 5 meetings with me a week on two minor projects. I don't go to those meetings, I just update the jira when there's an update. I need to do that as I am working on 40 things at a time and I don't have the mental capacity to remember how many plates I'm spinning. That's far more efficient, it's asynchronous, easy to keep on top of.

I see some colleagues struggling to get anything done because they are in meetings 6 hours a day, they go from one meeting to another without even a pause for a break. In those meetings they then try to half-listen and send emails about other subjects. They don't need to be in those meetings.

It sounds like you don't work like that, you talk to other humans at occasional meetings. I do mostly "just sit down and code" and it's a problem. Your situation sounds healthy and productive to me, I want to be more like that.

I talk to other humans at productive meetings - about 2-3 hours a week on average. Those that need updates don't need my time -- they're stored in the jiras. Crucially that information is still available months and years later.

If I didn't communicate, how else would I know where the problems are, or what other people are working on so I don't duplicate effort.

90% of my week is not in meetings though, and about 0% of my week is in business metrics (plenty of metrics on things like availability from monitoring systems, but nothing out of jira, because what's the point in trying to record metrics which nobody cares about)

Yeah it's very entitled. Like only software developers do actual meaningful complex work and everyone else just sits in meetings and does nothing.

> But to lump "meetings" and "metrics" into a "hated" category is the mark of an immature dev

To me, these things are normal occurrences in organizational theater. I ignore that. But after sitting in a few 12-hour meetings, participating in some metrics-based programming (MBP) and filling out 100 fields in a deployment request tool, I UNDERSTAND if someone hates this kind of thing, is not only 'immaturity'.

And I'm not try to change anything, my experience is that if we can convince those in charge to stop having unnecessary meetings or using metrics incorrectly, something worse will replace those things, like no meetings, but super micromanagement. ... because the nature of the organization that does these things is to continue doing them, in other ways.

Understanding that stupid/pointless/badly run meetings and toxic cultures exist is not the same thing as immaturely assuming all meetings are automatically time-wasters or that all corporate cultures must be toxic.

Exactly. Also developers often say they want less meetings so they can do more work, or something akin to that. But meetings _are_ work. And where I've worked there was always room to present feedback is a meeting felt unnecessary.

This issue is that jira does not measure roi

I'm a developer, and while I don't love it, I certainly don't hate it, and I don't see it worse than any other task-tracking tool. I haven't used trello or asana in a hot minute, but they were way worse in terms of UI and UX.

I'm not totally sold on the whole points poker process though, but that could be a criticism of agile as a whole.

Planning poker, story points, etc. are not an intrinsic part of agile (or even Scrum, from what I understand). Honestly, I'd not use them at all because they're not worth the time investment.

"Agile as a whole" does not require planning poker, or story points, or burndown charts, or Fibonacci estimates, or Kanban boards, or any of that. Neither does Scrum. Google "Agile Manifesto" and "2020 Scrum Guide."

If it isn't in the 4 values and 12 principles, it's not required in Agile. If it isn't in the guide, it isn't required in Scrum.

> I'm not totally sold on the whole points poker process though, but that could be a criticism of agile as a whole.

My understanding of agile is give your developers the tools they want, the information they want, and the ability and incentive to communicate widely, quickly, and frequently however they want, and get out of the way. You have to devolve responsibility and accountability for meeting business goals down to the team level though, and that team has to act as one.

None of that has anything to do with "points poker process", or any process. Obviously everyone has a process, even solo developers working on their own hobby, but that process is "what works best".

Yes, but orgs that want to do this would likely have done it regardless of the use of Jira. I have my team use story points yet I don’t ever use them to measure team or individual velocity. The fact that Jira enables incompetent managers (which is not the same thing as ‘managers’, one is necessary and one is not) to be incompetent is in my opinion a fairly low-level mark against it.

The reality is that most developers don’t know what degree of organisation / visibility is required for it to even be tenable to do their job in the context of a wider organisation. ICs, and the experience of ICs, should certainly be taken into consideration when picking PM tooling, but it’s not a bad mark against an org to also take into consideration the very real needs of management, PMs, etc.

There are always going to be those people that will categorically associate management with ‘bad’ and I just simply cannot respect that opinion. It’s the equivalent of being mad at your parents for setting a bedtime. Some of the Jira hate definitely comes from people with that mindset.

I use jira, I do not use points, sprints, scrums, etc

Jira doesn't require those features. My workflow is "Ready, On Hold, In Progress, Done". It's a glorified task list with assignees, tagging, emails etc, that's corporate-wide -- no need to get random people to get accounts, everyone has one. All over our documentation and configs are references to "TKT-1234", which explains the background to a specific thing far more than an inline comment could.

It does the job just fine, I didn't need to jump through any hoops to get it working like that.

The alternate system engineers in other departments use is email. Tracking things in email is awful.

You can use Jira for far worse things, but that's not a problem with the tool, that's a problem with the culture.

> My feeling is... developers hate Jira

I'm a developer and I like Jira. People who hate it are probably forced to use some bloated setups. We just use Kanban and the backlog and that's it. It's great if you don't turn it into a fully blow project management tool.

Exactly this. After layoffs and a small restructuring last year, we created a new project for our team in Jira and didn't include anything that had been added by upper management in the previous project, used a simplified workflow, and further changes are talked about by the team at retro. Went from a pain to easy to use.

Read the rest of the comment and what he loves about it. He's not a dev.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com