Remy Porter, editor-in-chief of The Daily WTF, opens the piece with a broader complaint about developer tooling: he claims no build system and no ticket-management tool ever really works well, only "good enough." Among the flawed options he singles out Jira as one of the worst, because its selling point, endless configurability, is also what makes it miserable to use.

Porter argues that Jira forces teams to essentially program their own workflow inside the tool rather than just using it out of the box, and that project managers who overestimate their technical skills keep reshaping views and workflows instead of getting work done. He says he has been on such a team himself.

The piece then turns to a reader submission from someone identified as Klinsten, who joined a new team and tried to figure out how to move a ticket to its next status by consulting the official workflow diagram. Two versions of the diagram are shown, one with transition labels added, and according to Porter neither version clarifies anything. The labels mix Dutch and English, and the sheer number of states and transitions makes the diagram unreadable, defeating its purpose of helping the team sequence their work.