From my experience with sales/PM people at google, they refuse to use internal tools and try to get Jira and other shit installed. Regardless of the tool quality, just because that's what they learned already.
This mostly didn't work out for them back in the day but in more recent times as more and more low quality middle level managers and execs get hired they manage to get approvals.
In my org a new VP demanded Jira instance within a month of joining the company and that it be used for technical project reporting.
Of course all the developers said fuck no to that so for a while some managers were trying to do two way sync between Jira and Buganizer. When I left it was mostly abandoned and full of tumbleweed...
Jira's raise to power is one of those things I would never understand. Such a horribly designed tool. Today is much better, yes, but it is so over-engineer and at the same time lacks so many things.
The first time I used it around 2007 I thought it was great. It was basic, but did everything that I wanted ( I’d didn’t care about the project management that maybe didn’t even exist back then I don’t remember ).
I think that it’s been diverted from its original purpose,and is now indeed horribly complicated since it’s supposed to be all in one package.
I’ve also noted that in large companies the quality of the product for end users, as long as it’s not a massive drag on productivity or on recruitment and is not core business, is irrelevant and that other factors are more important ( costs, contracts , easy to install integrate and maintain, quality of support, breadth of use within the company etc ). This makes atlassian a natural superpower.
Unless you were a non-technical person — then it was a confusing mess. I think this is part of why Jira did so well, it was more approachable to non-devs.
PM like it because they can break it until it fits their worldview. I've worked at 3 orgs in a row where the JIRA was a complete fucking broken mess because the process in it didn't match reality but someone thought it did.
This is exactly it - it's "Enterprise" so you can (pretty easily, to be honest) make it fit your workflow.
The problem is that the workflow you officially have and wish you used is almost never the actual workflow, so it becomes horribly confused and insane.
Yeah, my cynical experience with B2B business software is that it becomes shitty and encrusted via special-case customizations (or worse, customizability.)
Even for internal projects, a lot of money is thrown at software because the corporation has decided (rightly or wrongly) that it's easier than changing process, culture, personnel, or internal incentives.
For example, salespeople on commission were closing not-very-profitable deals. The response was to layer in a complicated project feasibility/profitability estimation logic, configuration features for an "approval" org-chart hierarchy between users, and various new triggers to block the workflow at particular steps and e-mail people to come click and approval button... I still feel it would have (should have?) been better to change how the sales commissions worked.
Jira may be over-engineered, but I don't think it lacks anything. You can always get a plugin if something is missing. Our corpo Jira crawled because of a stupendous amount of plugins (close to a thousand). Once we had a Jira clean-up operation done, it became magically fast.
Huh - that seems a very basic missing feature in the cloud version. We use bog-standard self-hosted JIRA and markdown editing is basic working functionality. People also add mermaid diagrams/charts to the issue. As well as custom diagram plugins, excel sheets and a whole gamut of documents.
Replace Jira with Microsoft and this is the same complaint from the 90's/2000's about a business company that delivers features rather than making nerds happy. Nobody likes it, yet everybody uses it.
I think it's fundamentally easy to use once you get it set up, it's just absolutely madness in terms of configuration. But you can easily manage a backlog, sprints, update tickets, etc, plus they have a query language (JQL) that you can use to make widgets that are useful (although many of those should just be defaults). It's got a lot of flexibility in terms of required fields, forms, workflows, etc.
It's very easy to understand, developers just refuse to accept it for undermining their strongly held beliefs regarding success in the software industry.
It's true you need working software, but without sales and operations doing their part, the software will be scraped when the company folds.
Sales and operations get away with everything because they're the beating heart of any successful organization.
Yes, Jira is powerful, flexible and allows tons of stuff to be done. It can really store tons of data, accept workflows, etc.
But that thing is slow as a snail. Even if it's an on-prem installation. I want nimble tools.
I know it's a very unpopular opinion, but I'll take a fast Redmine over a slow Jira all day, every day.
P.S.: Another slow tool like this is OpenStack. Every CLI command, every web UI click means a ping-pong of 20 REST requests. At least, when it works, it works, which is 100% of the time if it's configured correctly.
> From my experience with sales/PM people at google, they refuse to use internal tools and try to get Jira and other shit installed. Regardless of the tool quality, just because that's what they learned already.
That's when you're supposed to pull the smooth-talking people that are usually in those roles and ask them a very simple question:
"Do you want this tool more than you want to be employed?"
From what I have experienced, "good" software salespeople are the ones telling clients lies to seal the deal, that then fall back on the software engineers to fulfill in unreasonable amounts of time that compromise the entire project. I wouldn't call the ability to lie a rare trait.
* Your sales team passionately championing solutions tailored to my needs
* Them securing the resources and commitments needed to accelerate delivery
* Them inspiring the engineering team to rise to ambitious deadlines, ensuring my project stays on track and delivers real value
Maybe if the devs shared their dedication to meeting my goals head-on, they'd be able to ensure my business objectives would be achieved without having to crunch.
Yes, of course, because all industries need sales and salespeople are extremely valuable to the business.
But in software, like all industries, the best salespeople are also domain experts, and domain experts in software are rare before you add the need to be able to sell.
I think software developer's high pay and relatively consequence free existence have given them a bit of thought leader quality in domains beyond their expertise. But it is not going to be the case for lot of developers soon. So pulling things like
> "Do you want this tool more than you want to be employed?"
will be harmful to wellbeing of developers rather than sales guys.
> I think software developer's high pay and relatively consequence free existence have given them a bit of thought leader quality in domains beyond their expertise.
Just wait until you hear what salespeople get up to and what they make off of it.
Bugzilla is a Mozilla product so you’d hope they’d use it themselves (it’s often referred to as “dogfooding”). But Jira is everywhere so I’m sure some project managers argued that it was needed.
And once you have Jira then the same people push for Confluence too. But MediaWiki was the de facto standard before everyone jumped on proprietary solutions like Confluence and Notion. In fact I seem to recall that very early versions of Confluence was just a 3rd party Wiki that Atlassian bought. Or at least there was a Java-based Wiki in their early portfolio.
You also have to bear in mind that organising docs is an endless and thankless job which nobody wants to do. So these things tend to multiply like vermin once someone starts creating docs on another platform. One startup I worked for somehow managed to have stuff scattered between Confluence, Notion and Google Docs despite only employing 50 people. It was crazy.
Another client I recently worked for had Sharepoint, Notion and Confluence as their official tools for documentation.
As for IRC and Slack, every company I’ve worked at in the last 5 years had two of either MS Teams, Zoom or Slack. Literally every company. And that’s in addition to email. Go back further and there was Skype, WebEx, and so on and so forth too.
It’s almost a meme these days to hear the sentence “how would you prefer to be contacted” because so many solutions are competing against each other with overlapping functionality.
Then you have developer-focused tools like GitHub with their own docs and issue tracking too
At this point in time, it’s easier to just accept that each org is going to end up with multiple overlapping solutions because you’ll get new people join the team and they’ll want to use their preferred tool because that’s what they’re productive in and so the spiral continues.
So if Mozilla managed to keep the options down to just 2 for each product category, then I’d say they were doing better than most other organisations.
Bugzilla isn't so much a Mozilla product as something that was home grown at Netscape because there wasn't much else at the time, and they just kept using due to inertia. Though as a developer I'd still prefer that over Jira, but that's probably because I don't really need any reporting functionality.
I've used (and customized) Bugzilla, used Google Buganizer extensively, used Jira for a year and a half, and also built an internal system consisting of a bugtracker + requirements manager + sprint planner + customer management system + manual test tracking tool + knowledge base.
Bugzilla was fine to hack a few extra fields into, but I wouldn't want to build anything around it. Buganizer was actually pretty nice, but suffered from too many competing tools built around it, most of which were just somebody's 20% project, so they kept getting abandoned. Jira wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so slow and annoying to use; only our TPM can keep track of how everything is set up.
The internal system I built was very specialized to our use-cases; it started out as a simple task list and eventually grew into a huge beast. By far the worst part of the system was the manual-test-management system, but that was just a mess due to its very nature. We were able to be very efficient with some of the custom functionality we made.
I find this amusing. I have my own preferences too, but I wouldn't dare even suggest an alternative at a trillion dollar/100k+ employee company. Perhaps because I'm fully aware of what a colossal nightmare that would be. There's enormous value in just sticking with what everyone is already using, even if it's objectively worse. There is a breaking point of course, but the more people that are involved.. that other thing better provide tremendous value and you better be prepared to do a lot of convincing.
This mostly didn't work out for them back in the day but in more recent times as more and more low quality middle level managers and execs get hired they manage to get approvals.
In my org a new VP demanded Jira instance within a month of joining the company and that it be used for technical project reporting.
Of course all the developers said fuck no to that so for a while some managers were trying to do two way sync between Jira and Buganizer. When I left it was mostly abandoned and full of tumbleweed...