Ask a room full of developers what they think of Jira, and you'll get reactions ranging from eye rolls to full blown rants.
It's not just Jira, either. Any big, enterprise grade project management tool tends to inspire the same visceral response.
Why do developers hate these tools so much?
The Ceremony of It All
Developers want to write code. That's the job. That's what they're good at. That's what they find satisfying.
But tools like Jira wrap the actual work in layers of ceremony:
- Tickets need detailed descriptions (even for trivial changes)
- Every field must be filled out (story points, sprint assignment, epic linkage)
- Workflows have mandatory transitions and approval gates
- Every action generates notifications that interrupt focus
By the time you've properly "prepared" to do the work, you've spent 20 minutes on admin that could have been spent shipping.
Death by Customization
Enterprise PM tools are infinitely customizable. And that's exactly the problem.
Someone in the organization (usually not the developers) decides to add custom fields for tracking compliance, budget codes, stakeholder approvals, risk assessments, and architectural review status.
Now every ticket looks like a tax form. And developers are stuck filling them out.
The tool becomes optimized for reporting up the chain, not for getting work done.
The Jira Swamp
Here's what actually happens: tickets pile up. Old work gets buried under new requests. Things get marked as "in progress" and stay that way for months. Nobody remembers what half the tickets are even about anymore.
The board becomes a junk drawer. A graveyard of good intentions.
And instead of just closing out the cruft and starting fresh, teams spend hours grooming the backlog, re prioritizing, re estimating, trying to make sense of the mess.
You're maintaining the tool instead of shipping the product.
What Developers Actually Want
Developers don't hate project management. They hate fake project management. The kind that's optimized for looking busy instead of being productive.
They want:
- A quick way to see what needs doing
- Minimal friction to claim work and get started
- No mandatory fields that don't matter
- Tools that respect their time and focus
The best teams often end up using the simplest possible tracking: a shared doc, a kanban board with three columns, or even just verbal check ins.
Because when the tool gets out of the way, the work gets done.
If your developers are actively avoiding your PM tool, that's not a people problem. It's a tool problem.
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