The Software Industry’s Insane Commitment to Terrible Tools

The software industry has a habit of clinging to outdated, bloated tools long past their expiration date. Let’s talk about one.

Jira is a universal experience in tech. We all use it, and we all hate it. Every year, despite minimal improvements, it gets slower and more expensive. It’s the perfect example of legacy software: entrenched, bloated, and coasting on inertia.

Nobody picks Jira because it’s great. They prefer it because it’s the default. Safe. Unquestioned. The “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” of project management. Sticking with Jira is an active choice to tolerate inefficiency.

Want to create a simple ticket? Wait 45 seconds for the UI to load. Need to customize a workflow? Prepare for a labyrinth of confusing menus and buried settings. Need extra functionality? There’s probably a plugin. Pay up.

Atlassian doesn’t improve Jira because it doesn’t need to. It’s embedded in enough organizations that they can keep ratcheting up the prices, confident that no one will pull the plug. Jira isn’t a product anymore. It’s a sales machine.

Jira isn’t just inefficient; it’s an ecosystem of inefficiency. It’s the kind of tool that demands a dedicated “Jira person” to keep it from collapsing under its weight. The more a tool needs specialized babysitters, the clearer it becomes that the tool itself is the problem.

At some point, the solution to Jira isn’t making it “work better.” It’s not using it at all. We’ve been experimenting with Linear.app, and the difference is staggering.

There is no waiting for the UI to catch up, no endless configuration just to make the tool usable, and no getting locked into an ecosystem that nickels and dimes you for features that should have been there in the first place. It just works. It’s fast, opinionated, and built for teams that want to get things done.

Maybe that’s the real reason Jira is the way it is. It has no opinions. The entire system is built around letting you develop your own system, which sounds nice until you realize that, in practice, it just means constant overhead, management, and frustration.

Jira isn’t a project management tool. It’s a full-time job. And that’s the real problem with legacy software. We use tools that slow us down simply because we’ve always used them.

It’s time to stop.