And they probably won't use Jira. Or tickets.
Jira helps turn terrible managers into mediocre ones, it at least forces them to write down what needs to be done and let’s me prove I’ve done the work back to them later when they inevitably forget.
Jira might turn terrible managers into mediocre ones, but it also turns good managers into mediocre ones too.
The map is not the territory, etc. etc.
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.
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.
More importantly, there are categorically better ways of understanding what we're working on than trying to break work down into bite-size linear "tasks".
