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> I tried their AI stuff on the free trial, didn't work at all, tried to cancel, can't cancel the free trial online and had to write a load of support tickets (of which the support ticket contact form bugged out multiple times).

Absolutely insane that this is legal. The only reason to do this is to trick and abuse customers. It would be trivially easy to legislate away if our government cared to.

Atlassian seems like a typical entrenched big company, albeit an extreme example. They make money by selling to the bosses of their users and being the default name brand for many cases. Once a company gets to a certain size and doesn't directly compete much on quality internal corruption and incompetence can run rampant.

It's explicitly not legal in California and some other places.

Also for business customers? I would expect such regulations to only apply to b2c contexts.

California's law apparently only applied to B2C, but there was an FTC rule that applied to B2B as well which has been paused by a federal appeals court while they consider if the FTC followed the law in making the rule.

>> internal corruption and incompetence can run rampant

This affliction happens to almost every company, eventually. Nobody seems to have solved this.

Enshitification

Steam seems to be doing pretty well after 20 years

Valve isn't a publicly traded company with shareholders looking to extract every possible nickel out of the company at any cost.

Think we've found the solution right there

But they are not that much better. We are talking about the company that single-handedly normalized not owning your games, not to mention their contributions to microtransactions or getting children into gambling.

I generally agree with this comment, but what option does a decision maker have here? (apart from similar products that probably will end up doing the same things anyway). Are there equivalent scale/functionality products that can truly serve as an option?

At least for consumer products you can just issue a chargeback if the company does shitty things that prevent you from canceling. I've done that many times. And you can probably file a complaint with the FTC. I've never done that though.

I'm not sure how enterprise works though.

It was attempted:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/ftc-hits-paus...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/09/ftc-us-co...

I worked there and the answer is the engineering talent isn't great, in addition to being very unfocused, and tons of pointless org churn. Bitbucket pipelines/workers was originally implemented, essentially, by two guys (I know, because I sat 2 rows of desks apart from them!) if that tells you anything. I doubt there was more than one person actively maintaining it for the past decade, if they didn't get laid off recently. That office doesn't even physically exist anymore, and the people are long gone.

A result of their performance-review driven development. Every engineer, product manager and team is focused on one thing only. Get through the reviews. That means building feature after feature, projecting revenue/cost savings that may not materialize.

No one is focused on quality of the feature. It is all about speed. No one stops and thinks that may be users doesn't care about it. Data science teams are focused on cherry-picking data in a way that shows positive impact to show to the leadership that things are working. Engineers and teams are disincentivized to improve existing features, performance issues(unless it impacts revenue/some enterprise customer complains) and sometimes being punished for it. They are also steadily downsizing their support teams to cut costs.

Things are not going to improve. You should move away.

Featureatis. Just keep pumping out features with no thought. Today, probably also AI-coded .

Even in mid-sized projects if you keep pushing for only new features you'll get a similar system. At least my experience in 3 or so midsized projects that I've worked on where nothing else mattered than checking of features from a huge backlog.

Ah, been at a company like that once before. After a while a dedicated team was created to go in and fix broader issues and essentially stop the system from collapsing under its own weight.

The search function in Jira has always been unusable. It’s perhaps the worst part of the entire platform, but nice to see they’re still focused on adding features I will never use.

I've always thought I was the only one experiencing this and felt like I was crazy.

I guess it's "good" to know that I'm not alone.

The amount of times I've searched for a ticket that I know it's there (because I either have it opened in a different tab, or because I just created it), but can't find, it's just way to many.

The results usually seem completely random to me. It's like the feature never made it out of proof of concept territory. The only advantage of all the email noise Jira sends out is that I can usually search my email for what I'm looking for.

I've used JIRA back in 2009 and that is exactly what we did to work around shitty search function in JIRA.

I always got sad when I create a ticket and I see the "ticket created" toast, and then I'm like "oh shoot I forgot to add a screenshot" and go to click the toast to go to my ticket but the toast disappeared. Because then I know that I'm gonna waste the next five minutes of my life looking for it.

FWIW Github has similar shitty search interface. Not sure why.

ironically it's the one place where an agent might be of some use and they created one and it's terrible.

at least they didn't break their pattern of disappointing users. consistency is key.

YouTrack's search is one of the main reasons I use it. Nice query language to filter down on any fields, including custom fields, never had an issue finding things. It's great. With the number of useless search functions in so many products, I'm happy that at least my issue tracking does it right.

Half the time I just grep the ticket key in Slack because it's faster than using Jira's own search.

I have a small CLI script that runs JQL `text ~ "$1"` (with per-repo filters on project/component).

I don't have to switch to the browser most of the time!

Jira is buggy as hell these days. Lots of desyncing that forces me to refresh the page. I can have a ticket open on a sprint board and the modal spontaneously closes after a while, forcing me to reopen it frequently. The other week there were tickets that simply refused to show up in their respective sprint board no matter what I did; later the epic magically appeared on the board out of nowhere, then finally the individual tickets themselves reappeared.

Gotta love the value that vibe coding has added to this world.

I'm sure Atlassian's shareholders appreciate your sacrifice.

Atlassian also shutdown their self-hosted offerings. I'm not sure which version they were on with their datacenter edition, when that got cancelled. Part of it might also simply be a lax approach to QA, now that they don't have to support thousands of installations in on-prem environments. When you can just push out an update, your QA has to be much much better.

Jira has had issues like this even before vibe coding was a thing. Over the years, I've had to reload the page so often, I do it almost instinctively now, like some kind of hospitalism.

You can add to this list: Every single input field they have in Confluence and Jira is misbehaving or broken. Apparently, we can't just have a text input widget that works well. Also apparently, this billion dollar enterprise cannot afford to write or use a proper markdown parser, and apparently we, the user lowlives, cannot be trusted with the full "pwer" of basic markdown laugh.

Jira has vim-like bindings for navigating tickets on boards and years later the feature barely works. It has bugs like pressing the j/k keys changes the URL and random fields but stays on the same ticket or doesn't render the newly navigated-to ticket, etc.

> Anyone have any insight into why things have got so so dysfunctional?

My theory is that there is no incentive for things to not be dysfunctional. At my org anyway Atlassian is almost as entrenched as Google, and we can't even conceive of using something different.

I use plane.so for personal projects after learning about it here. It's a lot simpler and the UI takes some getting used to, but it's fast and it works.

It can't be that hard to just dump/export the entire JIRA in one day and migrate it to something else like linear.app? i was already exporting HTML dumps of the entire JIRA and using it in local tool calls to ground agents as far back as last year instead of wrestling with JIRA API to get it to work. This was before linear became popular.

The migration would take 1-2 engineering man-days I suppose. But its money well spent.

How do you export all of jira? any tips or github repos?

There is an export button on Jira. https://youtu.be/-wGRKzYmA7o?t=92 was what I used. For the workspace docs there is also an export button that can export all the documentation for the project(the export would be in HTML). I then used a simple script built with an LLM to convert all of it into markdowns.

Sounds like every other SaaS company that was bought by investment fund to milk it dry till everyone migrates off of it.

Not surprised. Quote „…with significant institutional ownership from Vanguard, BlackRock, and others”.

Stack ranking

Here mine: you cannot link an existing branch to a jira issue. Maybe this is easier said than done but I can't find their reasoning anywhere

Until it starts actually affecting their bottom line, how is it a misstep?

You yourself just admitted that you still use their products often.

Umm? Is there single step Atlassian did it right? It's a cancer of software development the suits force us to swallow while real development and useful documents are outside of their service because it's so stressful to use.

If they're making money, it's not a misstep. it's business.

Confluence is ok and has improved recently.

Jira is garbage (frontend, backend). Tough but true.