Comment by marginalia_nu
2 days ago
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.
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".
13 replies →
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?
This compounds with each _team_ modeling the work in jira/excel too!