I found a link to Where is Bob? on Reddit, a WTF-style blog about an incompetent IT manager. It is decently written and I was enjoying the latest article. Then I came to this bit:
And that is the long story (the short story is always simply “Bob is an idiot, and here we are”) of how I found myself stuck in a conference room with four Jira sales-people, a small wall clock ticking away the minutes of my life, and a large pot of coffee.
Er… huh? We would send four guys out to a “small university IT shop” to sell a product that costs at most $5k? We even have four sales-people? Sure, in really special cases where there's a lot of money involved (and you’re within half an hour’s drive of San Francisco or Sydney) we might send two guys out for a chat, but for most customers our entire sales process consists of slightly weird automated emails.
Granted, most blogs of this nature have a large fictional component. Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, one assumes she took two stories that on their own wouldn't sustain a full article — “stupid boss wants to replace Bugzilla with commercial issue tracker” and “stupid boss didn't turn up to early morning meeting he scheduled himself” — and melded them together. Still, the artistic license really doesn't help with the suspension of disbelief.
Most likely, he is talking to some 3-rd party consulting company which is doing integration and resells JIRA.
It's possible, I guess, but the events descrived in the story still don't ring true to me.
Uh, guys, I think you're being a little oversensitive... Surely the point of the joke here is that there is hardly a company *less* likely than Atlassian to send four salespeople to a tiny IT shop miles from home.
Sometimes humor works on exaggerating the familiar: try the same joke and substitute "four HP sales-people, 6 pre-sales technical specialists, one regional director, and the regional director's dog", for instance. And sometimes it works on the absurdity of the very opposite of a realistic situation: try it with the name of some company other than your own that famously "sells light" and see if its funny.
If you have to explain the joke...
The really funny part is saying Bugzilla is "easy to use and works so well".
Bugzilla has many fine qualities: it's free. It's, uh... it's free.
The whole article's a joke, it has to be. There's no way someone would willingly enjoy using Bugzilla and fight using anything else.
(I don't have a giant hard-on for Jira, after using it, but it's better than Bugzilla)
I think perhaps the artistic license here was changing the names of the software products to help protect the innocent, not adjusting the numbers of salespeople. I would totally believe BMC sending 4 sales people to sell you Remedy (1 Remedy salesperson, a Remedy sales engineer, a VP of some sort, and a salesperson for one of the other enterprisey BMC things that hooks together with Remedy), and they're much more of a big "enterprisey" kind of solution that'd fit in with the rest of the story.