Often this extends to the entire organization, where you have like this parallel dimension of spreadsheets and planning existing on top of everything.
Eats resources like crazy to uphold.
It'll be nothing but LLMs talking to other LLMs under the guise of organizational productivity in which the only one deriving any value from this effort is the companies charging for the input and output tokens. Except, they are likely operating at a loss...
Customers and investors ask for delivery timelines and amount of resources invested on major features or products, and you need to give an accurate-ish answer, and you as a company will be dealing with hundreds if not thousands of features depending on size.
In that kind of a situation, the only way you can get that visibility is through JIRA (or a JIRA type product), because it acts as a forcing function to get a defensible estimate, and monitor progress.
Furthermore, due to tax laws, we need to track investments into features and initiatives, and JIRA becomes the easiest way to collect that kind of amoratization data.
Once some AI Agent to automate this whole program management/JIRA hygiene process exists, it will make life for everyone so much easier.
When customers give you money, they expect a date.
When investors give you money, they want to see whether or not you are investing in the right initiatives.
When you open a company, the IRS, SEC, and other regulators expect some amount of financial compliance.
Do you want me to come to you and give you an ultimatum to give me an exact date, calculate amortization, and defend existing investments, and if any of those slips you are the fired? And do that with all the hundreds and thousands of initiatives on a daily basis?
That's the alternative.
Welcome to the industry - you're paid to make purchasers happy, not you. Purchasers don't care if you DuckDB or OracleDB - they care if the product they paid for will be delivered on time and meet the needs stipulated in their contract.
If you want to be happy and only deal with engineering problems, you sadly have to deal with the poopshow that JIRA is.
So I'm not sure your contention has much merit, unless you wish to return to the woods and stop using HN, otherwise you're just enabling the supposed waste you appear to detest.
Or alternatively, you could hop off the high horse and understand the headaches the people you report to at work deal with, and thus maybe learn some additional context that can help you at your current or future job, and maybe think of a way to remove the drudgery in a process that annoys everyone.
I am very smart "
So yes, this is theater, and it only makes someone happy for as long as they aren't aware (or can pretend to not be aware) how the sausage is made.
My experience is by the time an org gets hundreds of priorities and can't effectively delegate to sub orgs they're already fucked and there's no point working there if you want to do anything meaningful.