Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?

It's fascinating that you end up sort of doing the work twice, you build an excel (or jira) model of the work work along with the actual work to be done.

Often this extends to the entire organization, where you have like this parallel dimension of spreadsheets and planning existing on top of everything.

Eats resources like crazy to uphold.

This compounds with each _team_ modeling the work in jira/excel too!

Yes but metrics! How can the CEO look like they know what's happening without understanding anything if they don't have everyone producing numbers?

Jira is already almost like "productivity theater" where engineers chart the work for the benefit of managers, and managers of managers only. Many programmers already really resent having to deal with it. Soon it will be a total farce, as engineers using MCP Jira servers have LLMs chart the "work" and manage the tickets for them, as managers do the same in reverse, instructing LLMs to summarize the work being done in Jira.

It'll be nothing but LLMs talking to other LLMs under the guise of organizational productivity in which the only one deriving any value from this effort is the companies charging for the input and output tokens. Except, they are likely operating at a loss...

Managers (as in PMs, EMs, and C-Suite) don't like JIRA either - there just isn't an alternative.

Customers and investors ask for delivery timelines and amount of resources invested on major features or products, and you need to give an accurate-ish answer, and you as a company will be dealing with hundreds if not thousands of features depending on size.

In that kind of a situation, the only way you can get that visibility is through JIRA (or a JIRA type product), because it acts as a forcing function to get a defensible estimate, and monitor progress.

Furthermore, due to tax laws, we need to track investments into features and initiatives, and JIRA becomes the easiest way to collect that kind of amoratization data.

Once some AI Agent to automate this whole program management/JIRA hygiene process exists, it will make life for everyone so much easier.

This explanation is not incompatible with calling the whole business a "theater".

How is it theater?

When customers give you money, they expect a date.

When investors give you money, they want to see whether or not you are investing in the right initiatives.

When you open a company, the IRS, SEC, and other regulators expect some amount of financial compliance.

Do you want me to come to you and give you an ultimatum to give me an exact date, calculate amortization, and defend existing investments, and if any of those slips you are the fired? And do that with all the hundreds and thousands of initiatives on a daily basis?

That's the alternative.

Welcome to the industry - you're paid to make purchasers happy, not you. Purchasers don't care if you DuckDB or OracleDB - they care if the product they paid for will be delivered on time and meet the needs stipulated in their contract.

If you want to be happy and only deal with engineering problems, you sadly have to deal with the poopshow that JIRA is.

None of this sounds necessary for the human race. Maybe David Graeber was right.

Nothing is necessary to exist besides foraging, yet you are still using an industrially manufactured product (laptop or mobile phone) to reply to someone on a VC-subsidized forum.

So I'm not sure your contention has much merit, unless you wish to return to the woods and stop using HN, otherwise you're just enabling the supposed waste you appear to detest.

Or alternatively, you could hop off the high horse and understand the headaches the people you report to at work deal with, and thus maybe learn some additional context that can help you at your current or future job, and maybe think of a way to remove the drudgery in a process that annoys everyone.

I mean there is an alternative out there for making software that doesn't require profit and can still provide societal value. The alternative isn't to forage in the wilderness, please tell me you are just having a laugh and weren't being serious.

Its not _all_ theater. Sometimes something does make it into the box and out the door.

This is the perfect manifestation of the quote: It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

Capitalism has become as much of a thought-terminating argument as 'the gods'. Most '-ism' words I think.

It's theater because the numbers in JIRA are, for the most part, pulled out of someone's ass, and then multiplied by various coefficients by managers along the chain (based on their pessimism and/or experience). Garbage in, garbage out.

So yes, this is theater, and it only makes someone happy for as long as they aren't aware (or can pretend to not be aware) how the sausage is made.

If you round up great engineering orgs that ship impactful stuff more of them don't use JIRA than do. Linear, Basecamp, Asana, Monday etc.

My experience is by the time an org gets hundreds of priorities and can't effectively delegate to sub orgs they're already fucked and there's no point working there if you want to do anything meaningful.

How do the great engineering orgs that ship impactful stuff organize / run a major project?

"And yet you partake in society. Curious.

I am very smart "

Mostly they are using some home grown solution that does pretty much the same stuff as Jira.

So far none of the imaginary economic systems seem to work as well as capitalism when it comes to raising human living standards. These vague, low-effort criticisms are getting tiresome.