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Comment by justinjlynn | Hacker News Reader

This is so close to reality it really hurts - like a good The Onion article... excellent satire.

Powerful tools are flexible enough to be used correctly by knowledgeable people and help people become knowledgeable. Badly designed tools are tools which don't help people become knowledgeable and don't prevent unknowledgeable people from harming themselves or others using them.

Atlassian tools, like JIRA, are almost always powerful and flexible -- capable of great good in the hands of knowledgeable people. However, they are not well designed tools, and so - the vast majority of JIRA installations and setups are just as broken as the orgs which install them and JIRA offers absolutely zero assistance or resistance to that brokenness.

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Right, it turns into a political game instead of a powerful and useful tool. We have no control over how we use JIRA. It's all prescribed by someone and we don't even know who or how to reach out to them. Even the middle managers don't know how JIRA is being prescribed. They go one step worse and make Tableau dashboards from JIRA to track their own metrics that are so bad it's just... like The Office. We play the game though every day and get great feedback. This feedback is never from our customers (internal) though. Although they give us great feedback as part of the game too. Our actual delivery is very inefficient and slow though. The hierarchical structure of the org is such that feedback never makes it up the chain because that's highly discouraged. So they just keep wasting money.

Yes. Long feedback loops and perverse or misaligned incentives == PAIN. Tools like JIRA do absolutely nothing to discourage nonsense like that - and, in fact, provide features designed to support workflows which require them.

Yeah. it never makes sense to make any noise about it either because the people you can reach either don't understand the problem or don't have the power to fix it. It only makes the person making noise look bad.

sigh

Yeah.

The bad news is that I've never heard of a workplace that's managed to change that culture once it's set in. The good news is that there are plenty of places to work which don't have that nonsense - which you can work in, if you can find them; which, to be fair, is pretty difficult. That said, it's worth the effort.

That's one of the questions I ask potential employers - "Say I'd like to make a small change to the workflow, in order to meet an oversight requirement - for example, on a project I'm engineering - how would I go about doing so using your work tracking system? How many people would I need approval from to do so? Let's assume the effect is internal to my project and would require no other team to change how they work. Is that possible?"

The answer usually says a lot more about the prospective employer than any technical questions about their code-bases do - and those are generally easy to suss out with a quick inspection, and SCM log perusal, anyway.

This is super common, and it's one reason why I have always volunteered (even though it sucks) to be the Jira Person. I'm experienced with it and have a good handle on how not to make it a big giant workflow mess, and I can then make sure that, by not being shy about who's running it and managing it, that feedback goes somewhere actionable.

JIRA workflow is managed by another department. Our IT department is like 50k+ employees. I think there are 100k in IT and Ops.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Absolutely common. And I'll happily consult for companies in that boat but I would do a lot to avoid working for one.

Imho the power and customisability of Jira is great. The problem is just its UI and performance. There are solutions to that though. You can always JXL your Jira (https://jxl.app).

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