We’ve been using Linear in my latest company and it is actually quite good. No bullshit fast UI, boards, issues linking with Git, a support that can take a feature request that is often implemented in a week or two after asking it.
I’ve tried out Linear (only peeked into it) and it’s the perfect contrast of performance against Jira.
They have a predatory business model. “Hey we’re cheaper than the competition”. Once you’re soaking in it and need features, they have options but it’ll cost you. I reckon they have slick sales people who know how to pander to the egos of middle management as well. You know … The people who don’t actually have to use the tool but sure like to feel like they somehow matter.
All my homies hate agile, Jira, scrum, kanban, etc.
In truth none of these items are inherently wrong - what’s wrong is leadership picking up new tools and adopting management structures expecting them to solve fundamental organizational issues.
Instead they only serve to magnify the outcomes of your existing corporate culture.
Strong agree! It drives me crazy how much hate scrum agile gets because when it’s implemented intelligently I’ve found it really helps align everyone’s expectations (I’m a dev)
It’s funny that “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” is the first of the tenets of agile and the most ignored. I think most people’s frustrations with agile are from people worrying too much about processes and tools.
Scrum/Agile has 2 advantages over waterfall.
-
things that don’t work get stopped early, without stigma.
-
the team works together towards an overall goal, it is not individuals working on individual tasks.
The “agile” tools themselves rarely encourage either of these practices.
Jira
- assigns tasks to individuals.
- treats closed and cancelled differently.
-
I think you hit the main issue right there. Devs don’t hate the tool, they hate that the tool doesn’t solve the issue. Like trying to drill a hole with a screw and a hammer.
Want issues?
Start with Jira
yeah sure, happy teams start with jira but they end up as angry and sad teams
Idk man, better than a post it Kanban… which is where I came from.
If Jira is shit, it’s not Jira, it’s your Manager. It takes some effort to learn and use, but when it’s set up and maintained, it helps a lot, especially for Virtual Teams.
Edit: But their Ai is shit. They gave it for free and now want to charge money for it. Nah bro, not for that retard.
Yeah, jira is going alright for us at work, but there are a lot of supporting people maintaining it and prioritizing things in meetings that we engineers don’t have to attend.
Everybody gangs up on hating Teams instead!
Teams and the entire Office-Package is pure pain on Linux. We have mixed OS (based on preference) but we all use Office and it’s a dread for our SW-Department. =[
I know teams is probably the most hated product in tech savvy corporate America, but I do at least give MS credit that I can let it live in a Firefox tab and my audio & video work fine for meetings.
But when anybody tries to use a Teams-equipped conference room? Whoo boy!
I think it’s because Skype was on that level 10 years ago until it got the Microsoft Enshit-Treatment.
Audio working in Teams? If I accept a call and then plug in my worthless usb headset, it just doesn’t function.
One time out of five or ten to be generous, making a room and inviting just 1 person just foesnt work either, gotta call up a third person to make the sound work.
I mean how hard can it be …
I think I need to compliment our IT department. I have experienced 0 problems with teams. Sometimes my network quality falls, but I just switch to my phone and everything continues.
Disclaimer: Never used the captions, meeting summary etc. Just the basics
The UI and UX is shit. Performance is shit. It’s not only about configuration.
With Jira everything is an issue
Where happy teams go to die.
Here’s my Jira experience. MS shop, have a programming department, but I’m not in programming and programming isn’t our core product.
Need something that requires a Jira request. I use MS Edge because that’s what IT recommends and it’s not my computer. The only putative upside is that it knows who I’m logged in as. I click on the link for Jira, it asks me if I want to sign in with my account, which I assume is the MS one since it has the right email/user for it. It tells me that’s the wrong one. Would I like to use my Atlassian account? Sure, let’s use the same email. Whoops, you don’t have an Atlassian account, but there’s an MS account for your company. Do you want to use that, or something from the usual list of places that will log you in (Google, Facebook, MS)? Note that the MS option is only included in the list of third-party logins even though it knows my company has MS logins setup. So I click the MS option, and it may or may not ask for my password, because I’m already logged in via Edge, but it will certainly do my 2FA. And now I’m finally able to tell IT what is bothering me, and they wonder why people always seem frustrated.
So, now that I’ve gone through that once, I can save a single click by not choosing the Atlassian account option and go directly to signing in with a third party. I can only assume this is supposed to be the streamlined process.
I mean, it just sounds like the people from your Tools/Infrastructure/IT/Devops/whatever-it’s-called-for-you department are fucking incompetent and can’t properly configure a Single Sign-On. Took mine a few years as well, I think the ticket was stuck in the queue behind the “restart some servers when nobody’s watching to see how long until they find the issue” tickets, which they seemed to be working on weekly.
Also, I can’t think of any reason why SSO can’t work with Mozilla or Chrome also, not just with Edge.
The problems with single sign-on and retained sign-on made it into The Boys. Most relatable scene in the show for me. I’m not saying my crew are geniuses, but this seems pretty endemic.
JIRA is fine as long as you forego using fucking align. Goddamn fucking align is a the biggest waste of upsell that they catch product managers in ever.
Just do a lightweigt process in a few docs and Excel, and meet in person often enough that you know what folks are doing. That’s SOOOO much better and more natural for getting real work done. Great ideas die in JIRA among endless planning meetings and premature decomposition and estimates.
Starting a new week on Monday, wondering how they f up tge experience on that web site this time…
Yeah, we were also once happy.
And then we started using Jira.
RIP
Issue resolved
No defect
Will not fix
At least you’re not using Azure Devops boards, Service Now or Basecamp. Those are all worse in my opinion. I miss Jira.
[Actively using Azure Devops and ServiceNow] oh…
Jira teams start with happy*
For those complaining about Jira… I used to be one of you. After changing jobs and using several alternatives, I am begging to be back on Jira. Manage Engine is currently the bane of my existence.
That might very well be the case, however, why are all of these apps so incredibly bad?
Jira especially seems like the definition of feature creep. It’s more bloated than a lactose intolerant child after a tub of ice cream.
That’s the company’s fault for using all the features
Because having more ticked boxes than the competition sells. Doesn’t matter if it’s of any relevance.
We switched to a different tool that’s developed by the same company I work for, and there has been nonstop complaining about it ever since. Jira might not be the best tool, but it’s better than the alternatives by miles.
Also technical shit posting on Confluence is just the best. (I don’t like Atlassian, I just want to go back to Jira)
I also wonder if people complaining about Jira are still on Jira Server. Jira Cloud is a much nicer experience. Certainly not perfect, but I’ve yet to see an actual viable alternative (once worked someplace that tried to move all project management to Gitlab… 🤮).
Cloud is way worse than server in my experience. Server was only bad because it was usually configured poorly and IT would never give admins to anyone who actually needed it. Cloud is bad because it’s slow as hell and can’t be configured correctly because the ability to configure it correctly has been sitting in “Gathering Interest” on Atlassian’s issue tracker for two years despite thousands of votes and comments.
I worked at a engineering focused contract where we moved all our project management to gitlab and it saved so much time for everyone. Only hard part was collating data up to management in a way they could understand but I was happy to spend a few hours every few months to do that than using jira in any capacity
I’m sure it’s fine for small-scale usage, but overall it’s extremely inflexible and doesn’t really scale well at all. There’s also a lot of very basic functionality that’s straight up missing. For example, there’s no way to have a global epic priority. You can rearrange epics in an epic board, but the ordering of the epics there is not persisted elsewhere. There were many, many other shortcomings we kept running into.
Oh, and after a lot of our tickets had been imported (which itself was a huge undertaking since the auto import tools are complete trash), it started to be very slow. It feels like a very unfinished, unpolished product.
We use Gitlab’s CI/CD features extensively at my current job and it’s very, very nice. That’s what they are actually good at, not project management.
I find Linear to be reasonably pleasant.
Same. Or Shortcut. They both are good at being useful but not being your fucking LIFE. Do the important bit and go away.
JIRA is a middle management job creation tool. Which is why it’s everywhere
Jira Server is the on-premise Jira, right?
We had to change to Jira Cloud. (Vendor lock-in, mainly because of time-tracking appendix tools of that.) It’s horrendeous. UI and UX is horrendeous. The DOM is horrendeous. Performance is horrendeous.
My CSS Hacks to fix the UI to a degree I can reasonably work with it are a lot more work now with the generated DOM class and ids. Sometimes they at least have test IDs which can be used.
Some things, like the board component quick filter, are not even available anymore.
The interactivity functionality is irritating and annoying most of the time.
The browser extension we use further fucking up doesn’t help either of course.
Don’t even get me started on Confluence. Which can’t even find pages when I type the exact page title, or ranks them low. And editing tables is a hassle beyond belief now that responsive tables (self-sizing) are gone. It’s wasteful on space too of course, with huge spacing.
Haha a PM at my job just tried to move everything to gitlab thankfully someone in charge realized how stupid an idea that was…
Honestly 95% of Jira complaints are because people have crap workflows configured. Out of the box Jira is pretty terrible but it’s very customisable and you need to adjust it to suit your needs - and they have to be your needs and workflows.
That being said, there’s that last 5% that Jira just gets in the way. If anyone has ever had multiple teams working on a single product, Jira is very prescribed about how you’re supposed to structure that and If you don’t, it’s a pain.
I’d suggest that 95% of Jira complaints are actually about corporate culture which is felt most keenly through asshole PMs trying to micromanage you through a ticketing system. It’s mostly a fine piece of software - if you have a certified wizard to configure it it can be great… if you have a dummy it’s going to be barely usable - but you can say the same thing about github issue tracking.
The unfortunate thing is that the teams most likely to use Jira are also the teams I most likely never want to work on.
I can type out the entire 10 word long name of my sprint into the searchbar, and it Jira will pull up 22 pages of things that are not even CLOSE to what I searched. It’s a nightmare to try and find my current sprint among the 65 other team’s sprints every month.
I find jiras search to be decent enough, you might get better results using a filter on sprint name with your current sprint in it.
Right, the entire issue is that it basically acts as a massive layer of insulation between reality and bad management. The whole thing is like a fucking paradox - any time you make a change to workflows or procedures there’s this stupid period where you need to “wait for buy in” where it doesn’t matter how outwardly idiotic the change is, you can’t actually call it obviously fucking stupid for like several weeks, or you are seen as being contrarian, or causing trouble. And the real bullshit is that the “better” the tools are, the more this effect is amplified. So as an engineer, I have paradoxically come to appreciate bad management tools simply because when someone does something stupid with them, I can call it out more easily.
Did you ever try Pivotal Tracker? 🤮
That seriously has to be the worst product I have ever used. I don’t understand how it’s still around.
I so agree. My boss likes it and I find it bizarre that anyone pays for that garbage. We are switching to JIRA now due to a decision over his head :)
No, manage Engine and service now are the two big ones I used.
Oh God. Those are the 2 worst ones. They are mainly used for IT tickets, not for developing software. Jira isn’t the worst, but it does lack basic features. It’s just when companies use Jira you just know you are going to have to deal with a bunch of PMs who all they care about is velocity.
There are so many other simplified alternatives these days. Basecamp is one.
You are lucky. I’ve never used those but I can tell you that PT is a huge piece of shit. The UI is among the worst ever. My go-to example for why I hate it is that you can literally be working on a ticket, reading it or writing in it, and if another coworker does something to it that causes it to move positions in the board or list, the fucking thing will literally disappear from your screen in front of your eyes. It feels like the designers have never used software before.
ClickUp is A LOT worse than Jira.
The issue is more that all of these planning tools enable bad managers to implement bad management practices and workflows without any actual tracking for what constitutes bad management. Almost without fail, every manager I’ve worked with who is very attached to these products ends up using them for the sake of using them. And then when that produces shit results it’s all about “engineering buy in” and “process learning curves” and they end up doing real damage to products before someone notices that Jira actions are not correlated with protective management.
The biggest issue is that good, effective management tools actually end up being a double edged sword because of how they shield bad managers the illusion of legitimacy.
What the? I thought Manage Engine was mainly for MDM. If they crammed an ITSM in there, there’s no way it’s as robust as software that was built for it.
Have you tried ClickUp?
Someone else asked about click up, no I haven’t even heard of it until this thread.
Manage Engine over commits on what it thinks it can do and it does none of them well.
Company started on Asana, individual teams jumped to Jira, company eventually followed. I was always accidentally creating blank tickets in Asana.
“Atlassian - for when you want make your security team really work”
