I hate to pile on a thread where you're already taking a lot of flack, but this point is really important to the future of Atlassian:
> In a dream world of course, everything would load in < 1s (everything drawn, everything interactive),
As a contractor, I have more or less walked out of or refused interviews on discovering Atlassian toolset was in use. It's not because I hate your tooling (it is visually nice and very featureful), it's because the culture that delivered this software is antithetical to anything I look for in a software project I want to use or contribute to. How can I possibly do my job to any degree of satisfaction when I'm tracking work in a tool that requires 15 seconds between mouse clicks? That is the reality of Jira, and as a result I refuse to use it, or work for people who find that acceptable, because it's a "broken window" that tells me much more about the target environment than merely something about suboptimal bug trackers.
Your page budget should be 100ms max, given all your tools actually do are track a couple of text fields in a pleasing style. Whoever the architecture astronauts are at Atlassian that created the current mess, flush them out, no seat is too senior -- this is an existential issue for your business.
Hmmm. I mean. I'm a contractor too, and I share your pain, but ... I'm really impressed you walk out of paid work because of the issue tracker your client uses.. It sounds a bit like they dodged a bigger bullet than you did tbh mate.
All these systems suck. You learn to live with them, for me I do this:
Everything goes in OmniFocus, I have a keyboard shortcut to create a task that takes <1sec, hit enter twice and it's stored. Twice a day I go though all the tasks I entered this way, and I either mark them done or assign them to various projects/tags/labels I have setup on OmniFocus.
15 mins before I finish work for the day at a client, I update whatever ticket system they use (mostly Jira, but also sometimes even worse things like servicenow) and also whatever enterprise crapware my agency uses (usually some sap based bollocks).
The last 15 mins suck. But it's part of the deal. I can't imagine how strongly you feel to turn down contractor rates due to a ticket system.. I mean, come on?
Edit: Also - btw -- if you're on a Mac the app-store 'fat-app' version of Jira is about 10x better than using the web interface, I suggest you give it a try.
If you turned up to interview, or even worse, arrive at a client site, and they hand you a mouldy 80386 to work from, and point you to the basement, would you feel comfortable?
Jira is the mouldy 80386, and the client's culture is that basement where such things belong. I can't see how this is even being precious. I can find solid work on good teams with smart people anywhere, there is no reason I need to work in a basement permanently damaging my lungs.
> I'm really impressed you walk out of paid work because of the issue tracker your client uses.. It sounds a bit like they dodged a bigger bullet than you did tbh mate.
> I can't imagine how strongly you feel to turn down contractor rates due to a ticket system.. I mean, come on?
It may be the case that they are in such high demand they have practically free choice of work. That's how I interpreted it, at least.
You’re tooling seems...impressive? Assuming you had 2 projects that paid the same why in the WORLD would you eat 1 to 1.5 hours of that a week? Seems soul crushing and demotivating, but, props to you for not being a fair weather sailor and just getting it done. Actually kinda cool how resourceful your solution is.
> Your page budget should be 100ms max, given all your tools actually do are track a couple of text fields in a pleasing style
Yeah although it doesn't exactly help in figuring out how to resolve, I think this can be a good grounding in what the product fundamentals actually are and figuring out which over-engineering of those fundamentals is translating into speed problems
I often feel that product people view this type of problem in the wrong way - when you're starting at 5-10s, little incremental A/B tested tweaks are not going to get you down to 50-100ms. A 100x diff requires you to rethink from first principles - it's impossible to get there otherwise
Of course this is also why incumbents get disrupted by startups!
> In a dream world of course, everything would load in < 1s (everything drawn, everything interactive),
As a contractor, I have more or less walked out of or refused interviews on discovering Atlassian toolset was in use. It's not because I hate your tooling (it is visually nice and very featureful), it's because the culture that delivered this software is antithetical to anything I look for in a software project I want to use or contribute to. How can I possibly do my job to any degree of satisfaction when I'm tracking work in a tool that requires 15 seconds between mouse clicks? That is the reality of Jira, and as a result I refuse to use it, or work for people who find that acceptable, because it's a "broken window" that tells me much more about the target environment than merely something about suboptimal bug trackers.
Your page budget should be 100ms max, given all your tools actually do are track a couple of text fields in a pleasing style. Whoever the architecture astronauts are at Atlassian that created the current mess, flush them out, no seat is too senior -- this is an existential issue for your business.