[codycraven]

It sounds like you've been hurt by the some terrible management practices, I'm truly sorry that some managers think their job is to control their subordinates.

However, regarding ticketing systems, in team environments, it is very effective and helpful to have a system that manages the data about the work that has been completed, is being worked, and is planned to be worked on .

Part of that system might be defining restrictive workflows for some teams, not for control, but to ensure the agreed upon process is followed for quality or consistency.

One of the many problems Jira has is that if you don't have a Jira admin on your team, it's impossible to build an effective and efficient workflow for your team. Coupled with Jira making many things global by default (it takes a lot of care to make a change that only affects specific Jira projects) most configurations end up being a pile of garbage automatically inherited from changes an admin(that is not part of the team) made when intending to change something for another specific team.

[agalunar]

Caveat: this is going to be a meta comment rather than a comment about the topic proper, and so maybe not appropriate for HN, but I think it's worth discussing.

> It sounds like you've been hurt by the some terrible management practices, I'm truly sorry that some managers think their job is to control their subordinates.

When we assume someone was hurt, and imply they hold an opinion only because they were hurt, we risk delegitimizing their position. The interpolated message we might be sending is "your experience is personal and not representative of the subject at hand, and so your thoughts are only applicable to your situation; so, after we express our sympathy, your thoughts can be dismissed." Or the message we might be sending can be patronizing: "you hold your opinion for emotional, rather than rational, reasons; I'm sorry that you are so unfortunate."

To be clear, though, I'm sure this wasn't your intent, and it makes me glad to see someone being compassionate (i.e. that you bothered to consider the experiences and feelings of the parent commenter).

A personal story: I was raised devoutly religious but left the church in my twenties. My family and friends assumed I left because I wanted to be free from guilt, had been hurt by a culture that belied the doctrine, and so on (and they said as much). My change of belief occurred after recovering from a few years of mental illness, and while it is true that I may not have left when I did were it not for the opportunity to reexamine my beliefs (while trying to piece back the fragments of my life into a sense of self), the reasons why I left were the result of a lot of research and thinking. It was mildly frustrating when people assumed my decision was made for emotional convenience, when in reality, the research was uncomfortable and contemplating an unfamiliar universe was scary.

I recognize the irony here – the issue I'm highlighting in this comment may be something that only I feel is an issue, born from a personal experience. But I think it's more common than that.

[liamwire]

I sincerely appreciate your articulation of this, thank you for taking the time.

[closeparen]

>ensure the agreed upon process is followed for quality or consistency

That is what I mean here by "assembly line" and "control." Making sure that processes lead and individuals follow.

Citing consistency as a terminal value in the same breath as quality is also exactly what I mean by the middle-manager aversion to local differences.

[chousuke]

Beyond trivial scale, you need good processes so that individuals can do their jobs. If you have no processes, change and development becomes extremely difficult because people will be hunting for documentation all the time, stepping on each other's toes, and making mistakes that they should not be making because they forgot a trivial procedure that was a prerequisite to solving their actual problem.

I work with a variety of different environments, and depending on the environment I can either solve my problem in minutes and get it deployed in another few minutes or solve the problem in minutes and spend hours figuring out how to safely deploy it without breaking everything. JIRA is terrible if you do anything that it offers by default, but when used properly it can absolutely help with this.

[tyingq]

>However, regarding ticketing systems, in team environments, it is very effective and helpful to have a system

I think the point is that Jira is particularly granular in the way that it lets you do things with permissions, workflow rules, roles, metrics, etc. There's a fair number of places that use that granularity to create a weird digital sweatshop.

Meaning the complaint is more about really deep "micromanagement as a service" than what you might get with lighter tools.

[brazzledazzle]

Micro managers are everywhere, even in places that may seem culturally incompatible. I’ve yet to work for a business that prioritizes regularly evaluating managers for their management skills. It’s only addressed when shit really hits the fan. Managers are primarily evaluated by their own managers on deliverables. As long as they’re getting results and entire teams aren’t quitting simultaneously there’s no need to question anything. As long as a manager is toxic in ways that don’t break the law or violate major company policies any attempt to address this by a direct report carries the risk of termination or retribution. Does it contradict your company’s cultural values? Rules for thee.

And I wouldn’t assume you’re not one of them. The worst cases I’ve run into aren’t even the psychos that embrace micro management as part of their “management style”. It’s the ones that genuinely believe they aren’t engaging in the behavior. They’re not micro-ing, they’re “helping” their team because they are an awesome manager and their team is almost awesome, they just need to be monitored very carefully and given “suggestions” until they nail it. But they’ll never nail it. Because no one is as smart, experienced or does a task “just so”. They view themselves as a mentor to all. All decisions must be theirs to make. Jira becomes the perfect tool since the team effectively becomes little boxes that accept tickets or stories and return work both performed and delivered as specified.

For any managers reading this that don’t see a problem with this or see some of those behaviors in yourself please understand that you are sacrificing your team’s happiness and motivation at the altar of your own insecurities. No one can grow where they’re not trusted and no one can improve their skills when they’re never given latitude to make meaningful decisions. Your people will make mistakes. They will accomplish things in ways that are different from how you would do them. It might even be objectively worse. That’s ok. That’s how you grow into a strong team with confident members.

[52-6F-62]

Kanban, by design, was a tool used in production control. It's one of the ways Toyota made their JIT production function.

I worked on the line (Toyoda Iron Works) and used a real-life Kanban implemented by the plant engineers. It was used for quality control, to broadcast quality control and station output, and was checked regularly against their internal estimates and baselines and used also as a gauge for employee output.

Control is what it's designed to do. The very fact that Kanban is the tool of choice should support at least some of OP's points, objectively.

[sjtindell]

Agreed. This is a problem of scale in my opinion. When we have 10 engineers, it is easy to check in with everyone and know what they are working on and get a status update. When we have 500 engineers, making sure all their tasks are aligning (organizations are one big race condition) is not just hard but impossible without some sort of tracking system. We all want to grow big. To do so, your processes need to change as you add more people. The exceptions (Valve, Netflix, etc.) that can handle being flat or semi-flat are very unique.

[biomcgary]

Are they unique because their problem domain allows it or because the leadership is uniquely ideologically driven (and competent) to implement efficient, flat systems?

[mistrial9]

I was told by a lifetime manager turned successful consultant, that roughly fifty percent of engineering firms govern their engineers basically using fear.

[ornornor]

> using fear

Could you elaborate? What kind of fear? “You’re fired”? I wonder how effective it actually is because of the current job market and also because I (and others) react very poorly to this kind of tactics: “you want me to fear getting fired? Joke’s on you, please DO fire me, I dare you”

[malermeister]

> ensure the agreed upon process is followed for quality or consistency.

Isn't that just a more corporate way of phrasing "control"?

[robertlagrant]

Not in a negative way. You want to trust engineers to always have changes built and tested before they go to production, but when something egregious happens you need to go back and see what went wrong. You can choose to interpret that as control, but really the only alternative (often cited) is "Well that shouldn't ever happen, so you don't need tooling to support that situation".

And that is not a useful way of thinking when you have real engineers writing software that people depend on.