Years ago my good friend said:
— You work as fast as your internet connection is.
Back at the time, we both have been studying computer science in a university. Optic fiber was only in science fiction, and we built websites modifying php files on remote hosting server directly through ftp. Crazy times, right?!
Every modification took time to be transmitted over network. After it finished, you had to refresh your browser page and see the result. This was defining how fast you move: if the feedback loop was fast, you worked fast. If it took a little bit more time on every hop, you yourself also slow down adjusting to the pace. I suspect the reason is with the delays interrupting the flow state. This is also why you want (fast!) live reload when you build anything that has a UI.
Expanding the concept further: you’re as fast, as your tools are.
Now, working in a company where project management happens in Jira, I feel this pain sharper than ever.
In Linear, for example, everything is fast. The UI reacts instantly: showing you exactly what you clicked on milliseconds later. Modifying ticket properties, writing content, everything is so smooth. No delays, no loading screens, and no layout shifts.
And Jira? Oh, it’s so fucking slow. Every goddamn click makes you wait for at least a second. Loading states, layout shifts, and an impaired content editor, where you can’t even paste content without re-uploading images again.
Moving tickets between teams, or changing a ticket from Task to a Bug is a beast by itself: this simple change looks like there’s a team of engineers manually hot-swapping underlying servers to update that one fucking column in the database. And the UI of this process epically sucks too. Go try it!
And don’t get me even started on Jira notifications! They are so noisy they get lost all the time. To the point people stop paying attention to them altogether.
I wonder how companies using Jira take this as normal. It’s 2026, our hardware is 100x better than it was 20 years ago (both on the server and on the client), our internet connections are lighting fast, the browsers are basically operating systems by themselves, yet I feel this enterprise software is slower than any website I used in 2000s.
The only reason the enterprises keep using it is probably a vast vendor lock-in in their processes and in their people that got used to it. And once your whole organization starts using it, a migration becomes too costly to even consider.
And you? Do you have tools that are slowing you down?
