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Comment by khanan | Hacker News Reader

Atlassian has gone from a trusted enterprise-partner to a complete shit-show in just 18 months. This surprises nobody. There will be classes taught in how to fuck up a good business and Atlassian will be the prime example.

Regards, /someone who migrated 3500 users from Atlassians products recently due to their "cloud only"-bullshit.

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They were not trustworthy years ago already. Using Atlassian products, one has had to look out for disastrous announcements about their customer data usage way before 18 months ago, especially, if running a business inside the EU, and at least trying to adhere to data protection laws.

To be fair to Atlassian - their products did suck quite a bit before 18 months ago as well. Just now they still do, but with ai!

At the risk of sounding like the hipster who liked your favorite band first, I didn't trust Atlassian long before the last 18 months. Much like Microsoft Word, I think JIRA peaked about a decade after launch and since then it's mostly been unnecessary UI changes and features I either don't care about or actively do not want.

P.S. I protest their software's revisionist autocorrection to Jira. It was JIRA when I started using it and forevermore it shall be.

You'd have to look at their profit numbers. They have a huge captive base of customers, like Adobe it might take decades for things to get bad enough and alternatives to arise before their profitability is impacted. And the executives who benefit will have cashed out long before then.

Recently saw an example of somebody who vibe coded a tool to mass export the contents of a 'Confluence' wiki into an instance of self hosted mediawiki, preserving everything.

Mediawiki as a whole has a feature set that 95% of organizations will only scratch the surface of. There's a ridiculous number of possible plugins and customization if you have somebody who knows what they're doing with it.

The majority of companies that need an internal KB/wiki do not have as complex needs or use cases as wikipedia itself or the wikimedia foundation.

I've been at more than one company that migrated _from_ MediaWiki to Confluence. It usually boils down to "non-developers have to use this and Markdown+plugins is hard".

Turns out no matter how much better the thing is, the users have to know what they're doing more than the operators do.

visualeditor has been a thing for a long time now, no non technical user needs to ever touch markdown

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor

It's the same GUI WYSIWYG interface you get by default if editing a page on public wikipedia.

99.99999% of people will never even attempt to edit a page on wikipedia.

Also VisualEditor sucks if you've never used VisualEditor before and sucks even more for anything complicated. This is the kind of tonedeafness non-technical users get to their feedback all the time.

I'm not surprised. We're trying to migrate from Jira and Confluence (because we can't have our data outside our servers), and while Jira has many alternatives, it's difficult to find worthy competitors to Confluence. They either have an awful UI/UX, or don't have as many features. We're looking at Xwiki, but simply try to have multiple users simultaneously edit a table and you'll see why everyone prefers Confluence...

I'm partial to YouTrack but I also haven't used it in 10 years and it was painful to set up.

Been there before too (though an alternative to MediaWiki). A few important pages were migrated but we just ended up with two wikis with lots of tech info on the old one and lots of marketing info on Confluence.

I started to consider it a show show way earlier than 18 months ago. Jira is so terrible to use that it is hard to phantom how they are able to be paid for their product

Jira is how it is because almost any product that grows to be that flexible will develop the same problems.

They failed to rearchitect it to something suitable for the inherent flexibility though, so it remains a disaster area, but one that is uniquely able to fit the whims of any manager that can then mandate it for everyone else.

Maybe the workflows, etc., are inherent complexity, so that any similarly-flexible product will have the same problems.

But the awful client-server architecture, where anything you do takes several seconds of waiting for the client to send who-knows-what to the server and get data back, even selecting something from a dropdown... that is absolutely just Jira. A competing product would be able to deliver much, MUCH snappier UX. Jira is just the crappiest, slowest UI that I have ever had the displeasure of being forced to work with.

I invite you to write such a trivially flexible workflow system, and see what happens to the performance of your user interface.

They needed someone over there with the power to say no.

if you track their 5 year stock price you'll find the market fully agrees with you. It was $458 in 2021 and is $112 now.

The market caught on quickly that Atlassian's software fits into the group of software like Oracle or SAP that no one uses by choice and only uses because it was forced on them.

> ... Many forms of issue tracking have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that Jira is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that Jira is the worst of the issue trackers except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our company that the people should track, continuously track, and that client opinion, expressed by all project management means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of management who are their masters and not their servants. ...

-- Churchill, House of Commons, 11 November 1947

Wrong thread??

No. I was adjusting a classic quote about something that is decried as awful and no one wants to do... except all the other alternatives are worse.

It's not so much that people want to use Jira... or that they're forced to use it... but rather that people try using some other system and despite how much they dislike Jira, that other one has bigger failings.

Could go for a Bjarne Stroustrup quote with a twist:

> There are only two kinds of issue trackers: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

... but I like the Churchill quote.

Go through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_s... and after a year they'll be begging to go back to Jira... not because its great, but because the other tool lacks some necessary feature that Jira provides. Jira does everything that everyone wants, and it's awful... but everything else is worse.

Any recommendations for alternatives for just Confluence and JIRA?

I've been looking at switching to Notion and Linear, but just haven't had the time to complete evaluation.

I can't remember a time in which Atlassian was trusted.

To where? Where did you convince c-suite to move to?

Trusted enterprise partner? lol, lmao even.

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