How is it theater?

When customers give you money, they expect a date.

When investors give you money, they want to see whether or not you are investing in the right initiatives.

When you open a company, the IRS, SEC, and other regulators expect some amount of financial compliance.

Do you want me to come to you and give you an ultimatum to give me an exact date, calculate amortization, and defend existing investments, and if any of those slips you are the fired? And do that with all the hundreds and thousands of initiatives on a daily basis?

That's the alternative.

Welcome to the industry - you're paid to make purchasers happy, not you. Purchasers don't care if you DuckDB or OracleDB - they care if the product they paid for will be delivered on time and meet the needs stipulated in their contract.

If you want to be happy and only deal with engineering problems, you sadly have to deal with the poopshow that JIRA is.

It's theater because the numbers in JIRA are, for the most part, pulled out of someone's ass, and then multiplied by various coefficients by managers along the chain (based on their pessimism and/or experience). Garbage in, garbage out.

So yes, this is theater, and it only makes someone happy for as long as they aren't aware (or can pretend to not be aware) how the sausage is made.

If you round up great engineering orgs that ship impactful stuff more of them don't use JIRA than do. Linear, Basecamp, Asana, Monday etc.

My experience is by the time an org gets hundreds of priorities and can't effectively delegate to sub orgs they're already fucked and there's no point working there if you want to do anything meaningful.

None of this sounds necessary for the human race. Maybe David Graeber was right.