Probably not a good image that Scott[1] and Mike[2] (via their respective trusts) have been quite busy liquidating 1,076,750 shares each into the public at a rate of 8,614 shares per trading day since the beginning of October last year...all the while laying off 5% of their workforce.
Something about leaders eating last comes to mind...
this is actually due to Rule 10b5-1 where execs can have a pre-planned schedule to have transactions get executed. this way they're not doing any insider trading since it's predefined months in advance. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rule-10b5-1.asp
VP Eng, CFO, VP client sales, VP customer success, numerous other Sr Dirs and Sr Mngrs and source is me I work at 300 person-ish company I'm talking about.
The different rules for the leaders are actually stricter. The average worker gets secrecy and they can sell all at once. The leadership needs to set up a public plan and commit to it.
Six months ago they announced plans to grow their headcount in India by 1500 before end-2024.
Their worldwide headcount growth since 2019 [0] does feel, in retrospect at least, untenable - year on year - 3600, 4900, 6400, 8800. Arguably this fits into the same 'correction' category as other big players in recent months.
Reading the potted history [1] of acquisitions / sell-offs is a trip down memory lane. It feels like even their big-name acquisitions are still not terribly well integrated -- and combined with their famous lack of a 'traditional sales team', it does invite some obvious, if churlish questions.
Some of their problems are tied to their severe tech debt, weak leadership, poor vision of the future, lack of understading of the present, all the while relying on 3rd parties to profit instead of them actually making a better product and providing (with 8k headcount) changes with any sort of velocity. oh and they killed off their main competitor in Trello; but sweet now my user is deleted an i have to use atlassian user now. :: sighs :: all this and we still have to pay premium to use it?
hope they give these employees a good exit, it's the leaderships own fault.
Plot twist: the layoffs are managed in Jira and the Jira admins spend so much time fiddling with Jira settings that they never get around to actually firing anyone.
“Boss, I clicked the notification that you changed the layoff list, but now that the notification is gone I have no way of finding it, can you add a space to the bottom so I get another notification?”
I’m playing with GitHub projects and while it’s actually showing crazy potential it has the problem of being an intrinsically developer-focused solution to a business problem.
Project management software isn’t about getting things done quite as much as it is about showing things getting done to the people who control the resources.
Jira is how you get managers to add headcount. That’s the reason managers adopt it. That and the fact that they don’t need to create an ssh key to use it.
Gitlab also has PjM aspirations but their enterprise, Gitlab-all-the-things model means it’s gonna be a non-starter for most teams.
"Ideally, you've used the same notification scheme for all projects and can just go in and find the notification to take yourself out of. If not, you'll have to check every notification scheme."
I see all the people here talking about JIRA or/and Bitbucket server. However Confulence is not mentioned that much.
I think the hardest product to replace is Confluence, especially on-prem, when you need your data inside your firewall.
There are many bad things in Confluence:
1. search is completely broken since several versions
2. the editor is not very good
3. it's just too slow
Hoever, there is 1 very good feature, but badly implemented. The ability to add complex objects, like JIRA ticket lists, Children pages, HTML embeds and other dynamic stuff. This helps a lot with building good dynamic pages fast. All the other tools are only
I've been searching high and low for a replacement and still haven't found one.
Also Atlassian got so greedy that they've removed on-prem cheap plans. I really hope someone builds a better Confluence with dynamic objects inside.
And if someone already did that on-premise I'll be really grateful for a hint.
mate, on-prem is dead. it's not just atlassian, it's most software that can be run as saas. when people run on-prem they get hacked, for failing to patch or doing something equally ignorant, which ironically makes atlassian look bad. plus they would have to maintain 2 versions of the software, the saas version and the on-prem. just not worth it. better in invest in making their cloud better (get FedRAMP, etc)
On prem is definitely not dead. I know a few angry Atlassian customers that are now forced to shelling out 50k a year so they can continue to use jira on prem because it is still cheaper than migrating to an alternative. Not every one can dump their data into some cloud that is located somewhere in the void.
Most of the time these are behind a firewall so bugs are not that dangerous. Also most of the companies that choose on-prem have their own sysadmins and are more capable to protect themselves.
On-prem requirements can be legal, but also it's a bad practice to leave core business processes and data outside of your control. What if the vendor decides to raise the prices (like Atlassian did) or to discontinue the product altogether?
The stability of the company can be hindered by a "management decision" outside of your control. That's why I think on-prem wouldn't be dead, even for smaller companies.
> search is completely broken since several versions
The terrible secret of Confluence search is that it defaults to OR between terms (which I think is a Lucene default that it inherited, even if it doesn't use Lucene anymore).
Once I started remembering to add AND between my search terms my searches became much more relevant. It's silly that I have to, of course, but I'm glad to get better search results.
I find it funny that every layoff announcement has a similar comment at the top, as though this were an isolated incident, rather than a fundamental shake up in the industry. This isn't even the only layoff article on the front page of HN right now.
I think it's fair to say that virtually every company right now has been "a bit over bloated for awhile".
Even as someone that foresaw pretty much what we're seeing now roughly a year ago, I still find it shocking to watch the slow unraveling of our industry.
My company hasn't had layoffs yet, but it's painfully obvious to everyone that they're coming (but just not obvious enough to create maximum anxiety from the uncertainty). Because of this I've put my feelers out to see what other options are out there and... it's bad.
Postman "Labs", a company that produces a glorified cURL UI and some incoherent most likely useless tools around it received $433M investment at valuation of $2B and apparently has hundreds of employees. Current state of tech is not sustainable.
As always you have to remember that the public UI of a SaaS business is rarely telling the whole story about why the headcount is what it is, and without significantly deeper knowledge of everything the business is doing, including future products in development, it's really hard to say if there are too many people or not.
Most engineers are not in a business to support the day to day running of an app. They're there to build new things to provide growth and support change. This is why you can do an Elon and fire 75% of the staff without something collapsing immediately. That strategy even works in the long term if you're happy to scale back future ambitions and focus on a single app. It wouldn't work for most companies that are constantly fighting for market share though.
That's why I mentioned "incoherent and probably useless other tools". Apparently, they launched some sort of no-code tool for stringing APIs together but still not ready with their GraphQL client.
For reference, another company that sells developer tools, JetBrains, has around 2000 employees.
I can't tell where you're driving with the JetBrains comparison. Truthfully, I'm a little surprised they only have 2000 employees.
They have a suite of IDEs supporting a multitude of languages, that are almost universally considered best in class. IDEs are not an easy thing to build. They developed and maintain the Kotlin language which has all but become the standard for Android dev. And they have integrated team collaboration tools that range from project management to CI to cloud dev environments.
I am not surprised. Hire carefully with specific requirements in mind, stay hyper-focused on your product(s), and eschew corporate trends towards bloat, fomo, and "feel good" initiatives.
Margins are still very high for a tech company, so the business can be sustainable even with high R&D costs. What’s happening is the end of a cycle where everyone pulled back on their spending and companies try to keep the same margins by managing their expenses as they cannot attract more revenue.
But JetBrains has a whole suite of tools, supporting many plugins, creating their own jvm lang, with support team who actually respond and verify tickets.
> This is why you can do an Elon and fire 75% of the staff without something collapsing immediately.
It is to be determined if "doing an Elon" will work out for Twitter in even the short term. Give Twitter 1-2 years of "doing an Elon" before we judge the success of this approach.
Oh, man, I guess you are just repeating the point that every company is bloated.
The public UI (and performance) of a SaaS business is the one thing that adds value to society and is valued by its customers. Yes, new products development is a really great place to put some people, but how often do you see those large companies develop something good by themselves?
wow. i usually push back against the mindless "that's too many engineers what are they all doing XDDD" meme. but this is actually insane, i can't believe there's more than a single person working on postman.
They do have other tools with the word API in them but I kinda doubt their usefulness because of gems like "it will move you left on Gartner quadrant" all over Postman "Labs" website. Another reference point - WhatsApp had around 50 engineers when it was sold to Facebook.
I actually find postman quite useful for the work I do (heavily api-related) - if you work in that space, what other tools would you recommend instead?
The Postman UX is not good on it. It's easy to get lost in tabs, they should ditch the tabs and categorize requests under the actual endpoint. There is also no way to easily save like requests and give them better names that is also searchable. It's also built on electron which means its slow and clunky.
There is nothing good in this space. Swagger would do it if they let you save requests to local browser storage and just added a history dropdown to the endpoints. I use swagger and save common requests to a file system and open them in sublime. if its just JSON payloads I am working with it does the job.
The problem I've had with Postman is the sharing between team members. Everyone needs to add new requests, edit (locally) but sometimes sav the edits back to the collection.
Someone has to modify the auth script and have it update for everyone.
I thought this is what the tool is designed for, but it's been a nightmare. Team members have to wipe their environment and start again regularly. I want to think that we've completely mucked up using it but I'm not sure it's us and not the tool.
I use Postman all the time for work and it is definitely useful.
But it seems to be getting worse not better as they tack on more features and make it more complicated.
It seems like it's been years since they added anything I need and instead it has just gotten harder to use due to extra fluff. And it's buggier than it's ever been.
Most companies overhired and would have been punished if they didn't. Now they will be punished if they don't shrink. Public companies have to follow the market or their shareholders will slap them down. The real villain is the Federal Reserve, because their policies created a bubble.
We should also keep in mind that quite a lot of the people who are being laid off never would have had jobs if it wasn't for the massive hiring spree in the past few years.
The industry is not unraveling. It's just reeling from an economic bubble. Despite the layoffs few companies are shrinking back down to the size they were in 2020.
how is it possible for most companies to overhire? where did all those hires come from? maybe facebook doubled by poaching non-faang people, but where did the non-faang companies get all these extra hires from?
> a lot of the people who are being laid off never would have had jobs
since tech layoffs mostly affect eng, pm's, hr and a bit of management, it seems strange that these mostly well-trained people were just idling around without a job until a couple of years ago by tens of thousands.
Did you not notice the explosion in bootcamps and online programs? Not to mention the huge expansion of existing CS programs. Tens of thousands joined the industry.
I admit I don't know the industry-wide data for that. I have not encountered a bootcamp person in a professional setting in over 5 years, but maybe im not a part of most companies.
Next week I've got a call with an applicant to an open position in our company. He did one of those bootcamps, too, that's all he got as experience. I'm really curious how that will turn out...
Depends on the boot camp, but in my experience the juniors that come out of them have been considerably better than other applicants when it comes to things like TDD and security. That’s been drilled into them.
Where they typically fall down compared to juniors with CS degrees is a couple of years later, when the practice doesn’t make up for less fundamental knowledge. But that can be easily overcome with good management.
Have recently worked with a bootcamped guy (although I should admit he had an engineer degree first) but my impression of that boot camp program at least is very good:
They had worked on some serious case studies with real version control, real databases, real bugs and he basically came ready to solve real life problems.
Most companies with lots of cash during the inflation years overhired, those workers left smaller or less profitable companies that do not pay as much. The population of engineers did not grow that significantly IMO.
Yes the offers going around in the last few years for developers has been bullshit. It forced a lot of smaller shops to overpay to retain engineers, because of bullshit VC money backed competition. Then the VC money washes away and suddenly the market crashes... This isn't a good way to operate as an industry, and all that money produced what in terms of actual innovation?
This is actually the second half of OPs comment. Fed greases the wheels, distorting the market. Those who can take advantage of it (VC funded companies) do so, which propagates the distortion. Everyone else pays up to find / keep talent, or closes shop. Fed reverses trend, the bubble bursts. Now we watch the market slowly correct.
The worst part here is a lot of companies were making real products, that customers really wanted and really paid good money for. But if those customer companies were VC reliant / vaporware, then even that strategy won't pan out. Only by predicting that and actively working to skip easy money and find more durable businesses, pivoting quickly, or having extra cash reserves.
so you go from perpetually unemployed to engineer at Atlassian for a couple of years, then back to perpetually unemployed? ("never would have had jobs" according to the parent) is that typical, for most companies?
Everyone moved up a pin, and the lowest ranked company got a bootcamp grad. Now everyone moved down a pin, and the bootcamp grad wont get a job. That is roughly how this works, not as clean but the end result isn't far off.
jira is a product that i'd describe as "best of the worst"... i'm totally open to a better ticketing system but they all seem to suck in one way or another...
Linear is unfortunately too opinionated. At my last gig my manager wanted everybody to be using the same task tracker (understandably) and I wanted our team to move to a Kanban process because we evolved into the Infra/DevOps/IT team and ended up doing very little product work. At the time there was no way to operate in this paradigm as Linear forced you to use "Cycles" (a proprietary term for a time box) and it meant that we had to keep doing faux-Scrum.
I'm no particular JIRA fan and have had the misfortune of having had to administer an on-prem instance of it but the people who complain about it have clearly never used TFS or the bespoke solutions hacked together from off-the-shelf software (Domino, Sharepoint, Notion) that I've been exposed to. JIRA's a solid 6.8/10 and has always been far down the list of things that I'd change at any job I've had that uses it.
As a counter point, I've used several and have found them all more or less fine. It's always been the quality of the lead / PM that mattered _far_ more, and I've never seen bike shedding / switching around tracking tools to offer any value. Old (extremely slow) JIRA was the only time I felt the tool was really affecting the team's productivity, but the last several years JIRA cloud has seemed fine too.
I can appreciate preferring customizable tools, but if I were to personally choose for the company I'd prefer a constrained and opinionated one. Not coincidentally, this is analogous to the choice many companies make in their programming languages / linters the team's use.
Linear definitely does not force you to use Cycles. Cycles aren't even enabled by default. You have to specifically go into your team and enable it. It isn't a global setting either. It's a per team. So one team can do it while another doesn't have to.
My guess is you wanted a Kanban board but didn't realize you can change the standard ticket view to a board view? If you're in the Active issue view for your team you can click the boxes icon at the top right (or hit cmd-b) to get a kanban view.
I can be pretty thick sometimes but I _am_ smart enough to be able to change views in task tracking software ;-). If Linear supports disabling cycles then that's a new development... when we tried we had two others plus myself look at it and it simply wasn't an available option. Whether this was due to us not having a feature flag turned on or the wrong tier plan or what I can't say. Their method [1] specifically speaks to being rigid and working in cycles so I'm inclined to believe that this is a semi-recent change.
Haha sorry, I didn't mean to insinuate that. It's a tiny button though and not obvious. Was just taking a guess because it can be easy to miss and some of our users did at first.
I first opened my personal Linear account in 2020 and the default was no Cycles. I created a new team in that account today and it's the default.
I opened new one somewhat recently (2 months ago) for my company and the default was to have them off too.
Strongly agree with this one. If you can move do it now. It only becomes dramatically harder to move away from Jira as time goes on.
Linear is essentially a mildly opinionated and hyper fast version of Jira. It will be immediately familiar to anyone coming from Jira, which is a really great thing for adoption.
Don't underestimate the speed feature. The effect here has been that people stop using Jira and only use it at a bare minimum as required by management. People end up moving all of their planning and notes to things like Google Sheets, random docs, or just Apple Notes. Linear is so fast and easy to use I found I was back to doing planning and notes live in the tool because it was easier.
Highly recommend you give it a try. My company is unfortunately already heavily entrenched in Jira and I found a vast amount of work to move us all so I had to abandon our move.
Last month I read an article saying they were still hiring big in R&D. I don't know what their financials are like but it still seemed odd for them to bucking the trend.
True, though I know of stodgy places that are staying with Jira despite having to move from on-prem to Saas. The on-prem part is part of why they pick things like Jira. But I think the overly-customizable workflow/customization is a bigger driver.
Based on the shitting on Jira going on in this thread, seems like Atlassian have an opportunity to introduce a (optional) simplified-UI that focuses on solving the most common workflow. Something like IntelliJ's "new" UI that reduces the clutter in the main screen (all the original knobs are still available in the Settings dialog).
They do already own trello! I remember rumours from when that buy-out happened that they’d turn trello into a new “view” for Jira projects as like a simplified version of the current Kanban board.
Sometimes I feel like the only person in the world that actually likes confluence. Far from perfect, but better than a lot of the competition.
Then again, my first job out of college they tried to make us shed Confluence for...SharePoint...for our internal docs/knowledge. I still shudder when I think about that.
Especially compared to the whale that is Jira. From a dev perspective I think Trello was pretty much perfect for managing projects, but I think PMs and managers really like the...features...in Jira.
I have just received an email: "Thank you for your interest in Atlassian.
After recently reviewing the role you applied for against business requirements, we have decided not to progress with hiring for the position at this time. "
I applied 9-10 months ago. They haven't bothered to auto-respond until now.
An entire generation of devs has suffered with Atlassian's broken, unscalable tooling. In my entire career I've never met someone who actually likes their products.
Developer here. I quite like Jira, I've never seen anything as fleshed out or complete as it is. At a previous startup, I used clubhouse.io, but I seriously missed Jira after a few months.
I generally think Atlassian is a really solid company building good products and I really don't get the hatred. I'm also open to acceptable alternatives to Jira and Trello.
Edit: ooh, just saw that they also own statuspage. And everyone uses/likes statuspage.
The hatred pretty much comes directly from the fact that as developers we are not the customer, just the user.
What do developers want? Not to wait for flipping ever on every damn mouse click. To be as fast and minimal as possible. Stay out of the way so I can get work done.
What does the customer (the person who selects the product and signs away company $ for it) To "manage" developers with more of the latest utter bullcrap management cult incantations that are fundamentally useless while being time expensive to developers who have just a little bit of talent. Kanban. What the actual f&^k? Seriously. Does it cost develeoper time? How much? Is it worth that time?
So yeah, bits of jira as a bug tracker were designed ok, then made worse and worse and worse and slower to run and worse I have to do what now? and slower and worse and what else is there non-atlassian like literally anything else is worth a shot.
Years ago in a fit of "do something about the misery" I looked at the atlassian website, saw "contact the founders" and thought I'd let them know how much worse this crap was getting and how much I didn't like putting up with it as a user. Some flunky created a goddamn jira ticket, then closed it! Never seen by the founders. Being an angry idiot I sent another one filing a bug that "contact the founders" is not seen by the founders so is wholly dishonest. You can guess how that changed everything.
They don't and didn't care. They hate me and my kind is the only reasonable inference I can make. What am I meant to do? Turn the other cheek so they can make more money kicking me in the shins? Yeah so there's one place the hate comes from. We are forced to use a product made by a company who hates us.
Hopefully that clears it up one perspective for you. Others may see things differently of course.
I oversee multiple teams and have one R&D team that I built. Hired every person. They are all far better coders than I. But I’m the outward face negotiating for resources. And my team using Jira helps me get them resources. I use Jira with them. I’m also pulling tasks across the board. The brutal reality is it’s my reputation that brings in money and resources. I need to effectively estimate what we can do. And Jira really helps with that.
The other teams I oversee use project management tooling too. And I see them. I’m here to tell you there are SOTA companies, led by engineers, that use Gantt charts.
I used to think the anti-Jira, anti-management crowd was inherently right. Now I’m quite a bit more skeptical of those views.
As someone who is fervently anti-jira, it wouldn't be that hard to make it tolerable. Just make it so that I can't measure page loads with a wall-clock (I've clocked multi-minute loads before) that need 3-7 clicks to get where I need to be. Don't have an abundance of weird subviews that hide half the editable fields I use for another half that I don't. Make the currently active filters clear. So on and so forth, just make it usable.
I would still think jira is a bad tool (in the same way that JNCO jeans are bad pants), but at least using it wouldn't be painful.
These complaints seem like they have a couple of potential causes.
One very common load time issue is downloading too much data at once, especially on boards. I understand some work has been done to make this better, but you may get some relief by creating new boards with very limited number of issues on it - you want the board's primary filter to be specific (eg a board just for stuff assigned to you, rather than for everything asssigned to your team).
The weird subviews tend to be configurable, and Atlassian has been moving more and more towards defaults (and locking down those defaults) for these configurations that push a specific persona/way of working. I'm sure they have data that supports those choices, and there is strong selection bias going on here, but almost all the consulting I did was trying to figure out how to work around those defaults (the simple ones you can just change!)
Probably, a lot of those issues could be fixed by your administrator - you may even have permission to fix them yourself, though that process can still be quite cumbersome and labyrinthine.
So many complaints about JIRA come down to complaints about how it's configured. Atlassian knows this, and I think they are trying to make it better, but it's a hard problem. I enjoy the endless customisation available as an admin but it takes time and effort to understand what's possible, more time and effort to design those changes, and the most time and effort to make those changes match what the teams need. It's a hard problem to fix.
Sometimes people, frustrated by this big bohemoth, will pick an opinionated tool that matches their way of working. This works great for as long as that tool keeps focused and the needs of the team don't grow.
If consultants exist for a product, you know up-front that the product is intended as an "enterprise," end-all-be-all product, intended to be bought by high-level people, implemented by middle-level people, and configured to frustrate low-level people. It's not the product; it's the implementation, and it's a misalignment of incentives. Most companies big enough to afford JIRA are going to have the same kind of middle layer that winds up making people complain about JIRA on forums like this.
Mate... Jira is ~$8 a user per month. Complain about it all you like but you can't make comments about it's affordability. It's by far the cheapest option out there given it's feature set.
I wonder if self-hosting is the performance difference. I have worked in projects with 15 years of history in Jira. And they were fine. It feels kind of slow but in reality it takes maybe three seconds to load any ticket.
But actual minutes to load stuff? That is insane and I can see where the loathing would come from.
A lot of anecdotes are possibly from some years ago where self-hosting JIRA meant a single server on-premise. You might not get a lot of resources and can be used by the entire organization. The server would be at or over capacity 90% of the time so things could take forever to load.
Self-hosted JIRA also opened up to lots of customisations and hacks, which often weren't performant.
With enough data it's possible - I remember a colleague going to a conference and chatting with some Atlassian people and they said their priority (this was probably 2016 or 2017) was getting Jira to be performant for companies with 500,000+ people. With enough users, labels, releases etc I can see Jira churning on something for minutes.
Small Jira instances usually aren't a problem. It's the ones with thousands of projects or plugins. It's the way enterprises force developers to use Jira so they can have "visibility". The problem with the visibility those corporations think they have is that it's incomplete. That incompleteness is a mixture of things:
- Jira isn't well integrated to things like GitHub Enterprise or GitLab Enterprise. Instead it tracks on a regex that mars commit history or messages. It's fundamentally disconnected from the VCS workflow.
- Enterprises want to manage visibility by team, but Jira provides few if any tools for managing multiple projects within a single Project. The data structure doesn't map to how many enterprises need to use Jira in order to do reporting.
- Many enterprises rule over definitions of p0 and p1 for anything. Local context gets rolled over by this and Jira just becomes a kind of table splattered with cards.
- Jiras query system is skin deep at best and doesn't support things like querying all issues of a given epic. Much of this is fueled by their plugin API. Do a GET request on any issue and take a look at all the null fields or objects with just pure nonsense in them.
There's probably more to this list, but the point is that Jiras problem is mostly its own doing. ZenHub does a great job of filling these gaps.
I think the problem with observability/visibility/monitoring is: you need a good internal model of the domain to have any insight. When people see a aesthetically pleasing dashboard that makes sense to them, they think they have insight.
It should be the other way around, because once you have a good mental model, you can get the data you need without it being plated for you. But the presentation fools people into thinking they have insight, so they come to depend on the tools that generate this illusion of insight.
It's not too dissimilar from powerful people being cut off from reality by sycophants and yes-people. Or managers who say 'bring me solutions not problems'. Once you outsource filtering, you lose control.
If you have good developer providing honest estimates, no data protection concerns and they diligently provide actuals agile tooling like in Jira can provide great results.
But that all depends on culture. The poster seems to be an engaged manager, pays attention to the data and uses it in a sane way and has hired a group of strong developers.
I believe misery for Atlassian products were mostly self inflicted by companies that insisted on having it on-perm and then not giving a damn about upgrades and not giving a damn about resources to maintain it.
I work with JIRA cloud for 8 years now and while there are hiccups it just works.
We use selfhosted Gitlab and I do regularly report bugs in the Qt bugtracker that uses JIRA. GitLab is light years ahead of JIRA for even the basic task like adding a links, images or searching for issues. The UI is slow and cumbersome to work with.
Lucky you, you've never used it. Slow, difficult to use, packed full of features you'd rather never have heard of that are utterly useless to getting useful things done that also persistently get in your way, slow you down, make the user interface even more difficult and are the pointy end of management idiotic policy wasting your time in the name of efficiency or whatever the hell idiot managers think they're doing with that garbage. (Not every manager is an idiot but all of them are convinced it's not them and they way they do it is just fine, "So we're updating the workflow...") Jira used to have lots of distracting "opportunities to upgrade" to additional parallel product. Do they still? Flashing notifications that when you clicked them interrupting what you were doing because it's got urgent vibes all over it, it was "you should buy this other thing!" Repeatedly. Yes and I hated myself every time while I trained myself in the knowledge that "Jira important notification means ignore" Great lesson for your team w.r.t. a bug tracker, huh?
Pick 100 things you wanted improved about it, limit yourself to just your top 100, Atlassian did absolutely none of those and yet made them all worse. Every year. And I'm sure it makes good business sense. They know who is signing their cheques, that is who they care about. And I'm also sure they're very relaxed about how developers loathe them, discount me totally and look at the rest of the comments or any time it comes up. That's their right. They can laugh at us all the way to the bank. If you had more money than your great-grand children could spend in lifetime of Brewster splurges why would you care that your users hate you? You've got far more important toys to play with.
As someone who has worked on integrations with Jira for many years, it's the length of time bugs stay open. Our customers use Jira and they have to put up with its buggy behaviour that takes a very long time to get fixed or is just marked won't fix without explanation. Every product has bugs of course, but their attitude to them is quite bad. For example, there was a bug to do with epics and webhooks for years. Then they finally fixed it, then Jira "next gen" broke it again. Couple of years later it was fixed again. I understand from some ex employees that the Jira product is quite hard to work on, which makes sense given it's lifespan.
As a user, it's ok. It wouldn't be my 10th choice, but it's not the worst tracking tool out there.
As someone who never watched Gavin+Stacey, and cannot be held accountable for James Corden, I did, on the other hand recommend to my Megabank employer, way back in the 00s that we purchase Jira. I know we spent $$$$$ on it, and therefore helped Atlassian grow into what it is today.
Back then, Jira really was good and fast compared to everything else, which was pretty much bugzilla or a roll-your-own corporate ticket system. It was also the first thing we managed to get a bidirectional link from an issue into Subversion commit messages and back again, and it ticked all the boxes for... a development team.
Then came the "let's make it a generic issue tracker" approach, so yes, "as fleshed out or complete as it is" is indeed true. They've chased every niche that they can find that needs an issue tracker but making it so configurable.
It's just a shame it's a complete dumpster fire now. Slow. The search never returns what you're looking for (Confluence is worse if that's possible), and at some point and size, you're going to need a full time member of staff to look after... an issue tracker.
This feels like we're almost at one of those moments where Slack came along and reinvented all the instant messengers, and whatsapp/discord/whatever replaced skype (or arguably MS did that all by themselves). I know the apocryphal story for start ups is 'don't write a TODO list app, or an issue tracker', but there should be a better alternative. Youtrack always feels like it should get more traction, but perhaps Jetbrains are happy with it being an MVP for their own purposes.
Sure, but they also (likely) have tons of teams maintaining and improving them. It's somewhat (but not exactly) like saying Youtube and Android are not Google's products.
I agree. I don’t get the hatred for jira. I mean don’t complicate its usage. It’s a pretty awesome tool. It’s simple. Yeah, there’s some clicking but on the whole that’s on the person owning the project to customize.
> 9000 people who make products that suck should do something else with their lives.
So you not liking some products isn't just grounds for you not using a product, isn't just grounds for telling other people not to use the product, it's grounds for everyone working at the company that makes that product, related to it or not, to be fired.
That's one hell of a leap from your opinion to ideas about what's best for the world.
I'm not sure if you're referring to my comment or to parents'. (Not a good sign for my comment I guess :|).
But just FYI that complaining about HN going the way of Reddit is very frowned upon here (if not outright against the rules, I don't remember.)
It's also fairly unoriginal - people have been complaining that HN is becoming Reddit since HN was created, more or less. We're talking a good 10+ years of this complaint.
I think you’re confusing your opinion with reality, the truth is Jira (I presume this is your real complaint?) is fine and works well enough for most people they can just get on with it.
I'm actually okay with Jira. I can't understand why they don't address performance, but I can roll with it because its not that abysmal. I honestly haven't seen something much better out there so it is what it is. It's confluence that I absolutely hate, thats where the performance and generally sad state of the UX gets to me. Bitbucket is even worse, but I had forgotten about its existence until recently because the company I now work for uses that clunky POS. There are good alternatives to those products, but somehow companies get roped into that garbage because they are already using Jira.
How can Atlassian have all that staff and such shit products?
Edit: I know the answer because I've been a company that did all of this. Build new shit and don't focus on the main product, then lay off your staff.
I frankly don't understand how people come to like confluence. It's completely unintuitive to navigate, and the main way of avoiding the need for navigation- search- is completely broken as well. It frequently just does not find articles I know are there- I've habitually searched for the title of a page I needed without realising it's the one I was on, and confluence search told me it didn't exist! It's a pain to work with.
Bitbucket is just entirely forgetful, I'm not surprised you have. I found it slow and cumbersome to use.
I'll add another highlight to the atlassian experience: their CI product, bamboo. Also very cumbersome to use. To give one example, if you are debugging a pipeline and want to run just some tests, you have to individually navigate to each test's page and settings subpage to click it on or off- so with a healthy number of tests, you'll really start to notice those slow page loads! (I recommend automating this task with selenium).
I personally dislike jira, but as they say: democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Okay, we can quibble about the exact qualification. But I, like many others, am often quite upset about all sorts of stupid inefficiencies of Jira, and, to give a nod to a sibling thread: Bitbucket even more so. Now, you say "fine", I say very mediocre. And the thing with developers and their tooling is that we're often quite spoiled such that this mediocrity just doesn't sit well with us. In a lot of places, there is choice such that we can pick the most efficient, non-mediocre tools for our taste. But Jira is just such a de-facto industry standard, that there's less tolerance for shopping around, and many of us get stuck with it.
If you're in a sluggish enterprise, and you're conditioned to sit on the phone for a change request, or wait a minute and a half for your IT website to load, sure, Jira may be a breath of fresh air. But for a lot of us, Jira is the IBM of project management: no one got ever fired for buying it, but few people are happy with it either.
You never had the pleasure of working on Yahoo!’s extremely customised bugzilla install I’m guessing. Once you used that you’d think Jira was pretty great and well optimised!
I have worked at Sluggish Enterprise™, which I was referencing. I had the luxury of moving on. So, I understand that you can always come across worse, but that doesn't absolve Atlassian, now does it :)
Some people are ok with mediocre, and that too is "fine", but you're right, Atlassian products are shite, they persist because of their ubiquity not because anyone I know or have ever worked with wants to use them.
Thankfully, they told industries like mine to go fuck ourselves when they discontinued the self-hosted options, and thanks in part, to COVID, there has been a lot of competition growing lately for developer tools like these.
is there maybe some jiraisactuallynotbad.com place where I could read on how people use jira as a tool and get stuff done? All I see are rage posts and sites that roast jira, bordering on rage hate that systemd was getting.
whenever i try and use jira to get things done, it is genuinely bad tool.
As an example, low priority issue that blocks high priority issue is not automatically promoted. This single thing makes jira unfit for its primary purpose in my eyes
That's perfectly configurable in 5 minutes with an automation.
Jira out of the box doesn't make your company suddenly more productive. Just like Office 365 doesn't magically work. You need good governance, administration / configuration and proper training to make it generate added value.
No it is not. It is perfectly solvable by dedicated specialist that has long time experience maintainig jira, knows how to interact with jira api, has budget to by licenses for third party plugins that implement such basic functionality etc.
If you ask "normal" it person to do this, i'd like to see those 5 minutes
It's really nice to have an alternative to github.
Say what you want about bitbucket, but people have been banned from github for pretty fickle reasons, so it's nice that they can still host repositories somewhere else for free.
I'll say it, it sucks and its slow. The company I started at recently uses it and I hate it so much. Scrolling through a PR, viewing comments in a PR, adding comments in a PR, its all so clunky and GH Actions destroys BB pipelines. It's crap.
But it's good to have competition. Can you imagine if there was only one cell phone provider? Even a subpar competitor in the space can prevent people from being held captive. If bitbucket didn't exist, Microsoft might start charging users per repo for all we know
I have many a times shouted at my computer over the stupidity that is Bitbucket. And I honestly cannot believe or understand that people at Atlassian are using it themselves. I hate the term dogfooding, but how often do these people have to walk into the same walls that I walk into, before they go and improve a thing?
Sure, I get it, they're working on enterprise features that make them (more) money. But then don't have the audacity to present me an NPS survey to see how incredibly happy I am with their product. Ugh.
Do you run GitHub enterprise on prem? I'm curious because I'm always surprised when I see companies that haven't banned Microsoft server GitHub. Seems like a massive risk.
We are in IT business for God sake. We make crap ton of money, we can work from pretty much anywhere in the world and the market is still undersaturated by a lot.
Obviously loosing job always sucks, but this social movement of caring about workers who were let go was meant to be about poor, low skill laborers with no viable alternative in sight, not heckin programmers lmao
> We are in IT business for God sake. We make crap ton of money, we can work from pretty much anywhere in the world and the market is still undersaturated by a lot. Obviously loosing job always sucks, but this social movement of caring about workers who were let go was meant to be about poor, low skill laborers with no viable alternative in sight, not heckin programmers lmao
I don't think all or even most programmers are in a position to just willy nilly dance out of a job and find one the same or better. When I quit my last job it took months of planning. It took 3-5 round difficult interviews with 10 different companies to find the one I wanted to be at. That took a little over three months total.
Never said you can just willy nilly dance, but you won't be walking hungry, even if you might need to get out your comfort zone and god forbid work in PHP for a few months.
Compare that to people who work minimum wage, have no education and are barely keeping things together- them loosing a job and You loosing a job is just worlds apart of a difference
Yeah, I still don't agree with this. Skills become irrelevant, worker burnout and churn in tech is high, geocentralization and the requirement to move are also detrimental, the requirement to live in vastly expensive cities with reasonable commutes generally puts a higher risk level on any savings, and lastly, not all tech workers are married to other high income earners, which I feel like these privilege statements are designed to ignore.
Maybe they should work someplace better. It's like people saying the American automakers should have been bailed out just to save all the jobs: if those companies had been left to die, other automakers would have taken over their marketshare and expanded operations, hiring the unemployed workers and probably buying up a lot of factories, support companies, etc.
Keeping a shitty company alive with bad management in place just for the workers isn't good for the market in general.
Disclaimer: I'm just arguing the general principle here. I don't have any strong opinions on Atlassian.
The other point of view is that the industry would have been entirely off shored. I think this is particularly a concern in tech, where US workers are notably spoiled even in comparison to the rest of the US. That wasn't the case with the auto workers to the same extent and so people were more sympathetic.
I'd imagine everybody in tech gets told to fuck off pretty rudely if it ever gets to the point of bailouts, so the good news is that your concern is unfounded.
>The other point of view is that the industry would have been entirely off shored.
No, it wouldn't have. The ownership might have, but that's ok. Lots of great cars are built in the USA, by American workers, by companies like BMW and Honda and Toyota. If GM had been allowed to die, that would have simply meant more foreign-brand-owned factories in the US.
Why do you care so much about the nationality of the top execs?
The better way than to waste everyone's time with comments like this is to start a company that competes. I bet you don't get very far. If you do, good for you, maybe you'll have a company in 20 years that people on hacker news says "Keeping a shitty company alive with bad management in place just for the workers isn't good for the market in general." while you roll in your gold sheets at night.
I like how bitbucket's pull request/issues system works more than github, and they have really good integration with jira, although to your credit I've never encountered a system I really love
I did until they ruined everything. They had good Mercurial hosting, one thing that Github didn't, but then they decided to delete all our repos without a proper export tool either. And they thought we'd just migrate over to Git and stay on their platform? No thanks.
HipChat was good. Then they decided they couldn't compete with Slack so they started rewriting it and then gave up and killed it.
So...they've forcefully booted me off their platform.
I'm sure they were better. This was before the trend of hiring frontend JS developers and making up busywork to justify their salary and reimplementing worse versions of solved problems.
I remember using Jira in 2017 on a "legacy" project (as opposed to the "next generation project" as they call it). It was fine. I don't mind backend slowness - one second is no big deal in the grand scheme of things. I actually liked Jira (for its features and functionality).
The problem nowadays is that the slowness has been distributed across both the backend and frontend. It's not enough to wait one second for the backend to respond, you now also need to wait for a pile of shit Javascript to load, parse and execute, which has its own subsequent backend requests that themselves take a second to load.
And God forbid you accidentally click anywhere or need to copy text, as now everything is clickable and incurs the same slowness if you need to undo the accidental action.
Completely agree. It's incredible that Atlassian haven't fixed it yet, since they will eventually be replaced if they don't. Makes me wonder what it will take for Atlassian to eventually be replaced, since the users affected by it are typically not the purchasers.
Personally I hate it due to its slowness (is its underlying storage floppy disks?) and general half-assedness typical of any modern Atlassian product (latest example: click on a pipeline from a PR then press the back button - takes you to the pipelines list view instead of back to your PR).
It's so solid, you don't even get syntax highlighting in pr reviews. Solid single color like I'm reading a legal document.
You want to write suggestions in your pr review? You can only select a single line and you will have to write a regular code block not a suggestion block.
Your comments and discussions over that line? Gone, after a force push bitbucket acts like it saw the blinding light from men in black.
Yeah... I can't believe some of the people commenting here. When there's an article about China, and there's comments in defense of the CCP, we suspect trolls. But my experiences with every single Atlassian product are so bad that I can't help myself thinking that there's some sort of troll army at work here from the Atlassian Marketing department.
Or my experiences with Atlassian have just been non-representatively bad.
Or those people work in jobs where the standards are just disappointingly low.
Having read through all the comments, I just don't know anymore.
Can’t speak for their other products but Bitbucket had free private repos first.
Now that I have a bunch of personal projects there, there’s no reason to switch. In 10 years the service was only down a couple of times. And I like the Web UI - I don’t think GitHub’s Web UI is any better.
So my experience using Bitbucket hasn’t been like living under the CCP. Maybe if I tried Jira I’d think differently?
Something about leaders eating last comes to mind...
[1] https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=0001666121
[2] https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=0001666120