Posted on 2024-08-06
The one thing I've always been sure of in my working life is that I never want to be a manager. Specifically, I never want to be responsible for people or workloads in general. I just want to be a code monkey who fixes problems and finds efficiency saves.
There is a problem with this, however. When you're at the bottom of the chain, you find yourself with no real say in how to manage your workload. I'm in the fortunate position of being allowed to prioritize my own work, which is much better than I'm used to, but I still find myself having to really bully people into raising work to me in a sensible way.
We have too many tools and people are very fixed on using their favourite tool for the job. Some people like the structure of Jira, others prefer Asana, some still find it easier to just use the stream-of-consciousness approach of raising all queries in Slack. As I've written about extensively before, Slack is not a serious tool for work [1] and should never be used to manage complex workloads. But Slack has been doling out Kool-Aid for so long now that every company has become somewhat resistant to the poison, and they think that I should be too.
As much as I despise Jira (and Asana and Plane and Basecamp and their like), I would at least tolerate it if it were my only place of work because it can be used like a kind of ersatz email. I can interact with tickets using my email client, and the ticket-based approach is comparable to email threads (though much more limiting). It's tolerable, but ultimately a poor replacement for companies just using an NNTP interface on email [2].
If/when I ever start a business of my own (which I've been pondering with a friend recently), I will be pushing hard to just use Sourcehut as our place of work. Email-based workflows with hosted IRC for synchronous comms is ideal. Plus, you can load any page on Sourcehut in less than 5 seconds even on a throttled connection (not something you can boast of Jira or its kin). There's no reason to use anything else.