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> I never thought I'd miss JIRA so much

Curious on what you [were] using? Something created in house? I am not a fan of Jira but not having it to track issues or create bug requests does indeed sound like a nightmare.

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The bug tracker, deployment, and testing tools are very mature. It was the task tracking by spreadsheet on my teams that got to me, and lack of unified project management tooling across teams. This made tracking dependencies and planning more difficult (leading to more meetings). There are definitely in-house tools available. It's just another "YMMV considerably" element of things.

A lot of this reflects the "professional executive" MBA-ization others have mentioned. When folks who've never been engineers, or never worked on shipping products are the ones managing engineers, it creates dissonance (and BDUF[1]). I'm pretty biased, having entered the company after a decade on well-oiled scrum and XP teams - the predictability made it SO much easier to focus on the actual work. I've always believed that fewer things 100% complete are better than many things in partial states. That just isn't the case there and caused issues for me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Design_Up_Front

edit: formatting

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