[mac-mc]

JIRA is so dysfunctional in many places that people do a good chunk of intra-team planning in spreadsheets and docs instead, and use JIRA sparingly to make everyone faster.

I saw this effect live at my previous big tech after they moved to JIRA. JIRA got used way less than Phabricator because of all the friction it introduced and a lot more informal google docs + slack bot usage increased instead.

I remember to this day asking a report to plan more stuff in JIRA and seeing a beautiful task tree in Phabricator they did in the past. I asked why, and he shrugged and said it was just easier. That's when it really clicked for me. Linear can't come soon enough and burn JIRA to the ground.

[tripletpeaks]

I think the core error is marrying a communication tool for the people doing the work, to a reporting tool for people who aren’t doing the work.

Managers are all about that kind of automatic hyper-legibility (I’m skeptical about that being worth anything like the investment most companies put into it to begin with, but that’s another topic) but all it does is shove important communication into side-channels and make the ticket-tracker an extra chore, not a work aid.

Like if you’re often having to hound developers to update tickets (a thing in every single place I’ve worked) they clearly aren’t finding them a useful tool for themselves. You’ve wrecked that supposed use-case, it’s ruined.

It’s also the case that trying to serve both purposes, and in fact strongly favoring the PM + management use case, tends to make the UI for these things terrible for developers, contributing to their avoidance of them—the people who, ideally, would collectively be spending far more time in the tools than anyone else, are second-class citizens as far as those tools’ features and UX.

[jama211]

As a side note, as a developer I’ve never understood why other devs find updating tasks so hard. It’s super easy and makes you look good, and if I’d worked hard and not updated the ticket I can imagine that from my managers perspective it looks like I haven’t done much, that’s bad for me and I would get anxious and not want that. Should be simple, right?

[mac-mc]

I was the manager in this case, and I also hated JIRA with a passion. It's often the managers doing the alternative spreadsheets too and only using JIRA as necessary. I found you didn't need to "hound" developers with Phabricator and part of the hounding was me being hounded further up about it. Tools matter! Developers love automated organization!

[jama211]

It depends strongly on how it’s used. If you just use it for specific things it’s fine, trying to do everything in JIRA sounds like a terrible idea so why would anyone do that