Atlassian to shed 5 per cent of workers

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-07/atlassian-cuts-5-per-cent-of-work-force-tech-industry-layoffs/102062078

by rstuart4133 • 3 years ago

189 223 3 years ago

abc.net.au

noloblo• 3 years ago

bitbucket is a solid product on its own but it's no where comparable to the social network and sheer volume of github and usability of github copilot.

RhodesianHunter• 3 years ago

Bitbucket is only the third or fourth most used Atlassian product.

tiredrunner• 3 years ago

True, its ui and ux are way ahead of other vcs, however, it lacks deeper dev ops integrations which are the key selling points for github and gitlab.

systematical7• 3 years ago

way ahead of what? not github/lab

hiyer• 3 years ago

Github actions is also supposedly way more versatile and user-friendly than Bitbucket pipelines.

systematical7• 3 years ago

not supposedly, it is.

Nextgrid2• 3 years ago

What makes it solid compared to Git(Hub|Lab)?

Personally I hate it due to its slowness (is its underlying storage floppy disks?) and general half-assedness typical of any modern Atlassian product (latest example: click on a pipeline from a PR then press the back button - takes you to the pipelines list view instead of back to your PR).

coin2• 3 years ago

solid product on its own

Yet it hijacks command-F to replace it with a crappy search experience

funnymony• 3 years ago

There should special circle of hell for person coming up with these kind of features.

berkanunal• 3 years ago

It's so solid, you don't even get syntax highlighting in pr reviews. Solid single color like I'm reading a legal document.

You want to write suggestions in your pr review? You can only select a single line and you will have to write a regular code block not a suggestion block.

Your comments and discussions over that line? Gone, after a force push bitbucket acts like it saw the blinding light from men in black.

showdeddd• 3 years ago

thexumaker2• 3 years ago

They’ve been a bit over bloated for a while and honestly too many better alternatives out there

sensitivefrost• 3 years ago

They have doubled in size since 2020, but before that they were appropriately sized.

jamesfinlayson3• 3 years ago

Last month I read an article saying they were still hiring big in R&D. I don't know what their financials are like but it still seemed odd for them to bucking the trend.

PheonixPharts• 3 years ago

I find it funny that every layoff announcement has a similar comment at the top, as though this were an isolated incident, rather than a fundamental shake up in the industry. This isn't even the only layoff article on the front page of HN right now.

I think it's fair to say that virtually every company right now has been "a bit over bloated for awhile".

Even as someone that foresaw pretty much what we're seeing now roughly a year ago, I still find it shocking to watch the slow unraveling of our industry.

My company hasn't had layoffs yet, but it's painfully obvious to everyone that they're coming (but just not obvious enough to create maximum anxiety from the uncertainty). Because of this I've put my feelers out to see what other options are out there and... it's bad.

twblalock5• 3 years ago

Most companies overhired and would have been punished if they didn't. Now they will be punished if they don't shrink. Public companies have to follow the market or their shareholders will slap them down. The real villain is the Federal Reserve, because their policies created a bubble.

We should also keep in mind that quite a lot of the people who are being laid off never would have had jobs if it wasn't for the massive hiring spree in the past few years.

The industry is not unraveling. It's just reeling from an economic bubble. Despite the layoffs few companies are shrinking back down to the size they were in 2020.

bydlocoder8• 3 years ago

It will be a blood bath.

Postman "Labs", a company that produces a glorified cURL UI and some incoherent most likely useless tools around it received $433M investment at valuation of $2B and apparently has hundreds of employees. Current state of tech is not sustainable.

chemmail• 3 years ago

What? Name one product better than JIRA.

endgame• 3 years ago

Emacs.

thexumaker2• 3 years ago

Linear

ihatepython• 3 years ago

Edlin

doctor_eval2• 3 years ago

That’s a joke, right? Right?

asjkaehauisa• 3 years ago

You're right. Companies still use and will continue to use jira whether hn's people like it or not

tyingq2• 3 years ago

They did recently kill off their option to run on-prem, so that probably reduces the support burden.

sillybov34564• 3 years ago

It also massively reduces their potential customer base in all the industries that are typically more resilient to recession.

steve19772• 3 years ago

You’re talking about their products now, right?

twblalock5• 3 years ago

They should lay off 100% and go out of business.

An entire generation of devs has suffered with Atlassian's broken, unscalable tooling. In my entire career I've never met someone who actually likes their products.

guywithahat• 3 years ago

I like how bitbucket's pull request/issues system works more than github, and they have really good integration with jira, although to your credit I've never encountered a system I really love

bzhang255• 3 years ago

They should lay off 100% and go out of business.

Suggesting that 9000 people lose their jobs feels like a needlessly hateful way to express a dissatisfaction with a company's products.

midoridensha2• 3 years ago

Maybe they should work someplace better. It's like people saying the American automakers should have been bailed out just to save all the jobs: if those companies had been left to die, other automakers would have taken over their marketshare and expanded operations, hiring the unemployed workers and probably buying up a lot of factories, support companies, etc.

Keeping a shitty company alive with bad management in place just for the workers isn't good for the market in general.

Disclaimer: I'm just arguing the general principle here. I don't have any strong opinions on Atlassian.

twblalock5• 3 years ago

9000 people who make products that suck should do something else with their lives.

Does that mean they will lose their jobs? Yes.

It's still the best outcome for the world and those people will get other jobs, hopefully making better products.

Xeamek2• 3 years ago

Oh stop with the virtue signaling.

We are in IT business for God sake. We make crap ton of money, we can work from pretty much anywhere in the world and the market is still undersaturated by a lot. Obviously loosing job always sucks, but this social movement of caring about workers who were let go was meant to be about poor, low skill laborers with no viable alternative in sight, not heckin programmers lmao

nullspace3• 3 years ago

Developer here. I quite like Jira, I've never seen anything as fleshed out or complete as it is. At a previous startup, I used clubhouse.io, but I seriously missed Jira after a few months.

I generally think Atlassian is a really solid company building good products and I really don't get the hatred. I'm also open to acceptable alternatives to Jira and Trello.

Edit: ooh, just saw that they also own statuspage. And everyone uses/likes statuspage.

harry82• 3 years ago

... I really don't get the hatred.

The hatred pretty much comes directly from the fact that as developers we are not the customer, just the user.

What do developers want? Not to wait for flipping ever on every damn mouse click. To be as fast and minimal as possible. Stay out of the way so I can get work done.

What does the customer (the person who selects the product and signs away company $ for it) To "manage" developers with more of the latest utter bullcrap management cult incantations that are fundamentally useless while being time expensive to developers who have just a little bit of talent. Kanban. What the actual f&^k? Seriously. Does it cost develeoper time? How much? Is it worth that time?

So yeah, bits of jira as a bug tracker were designed ok, then made worse and worse and worse and slower to run and worse I have to do what now? and slower and worse and what else is there non-atlassian like literally anything else is worth a shot.

Years ago in a fit of "do something about the misery" I looked at the atlassian website, saw "contact the founders" and thought I'd let them know how much worse this crap was getting and how much I didn't like putting up with it as a user. Some flunky created a goddamn jira ticket, then closed it! Never seen by the founders. Being an angry idiot I sent another one filing a bug that "contact the founders" is not seen by the founders so is wholly dishonest. You can guess how that changed everything.

They don't and didn't care. They hate me and my kind is the only reasonable inference I can make. What am I meant to do? Turn the other cheek so they can make more money kicking me in the shins? Yeah so there's one place the hate comes from. We are forced to use a product made by a company who hates us.

Hopefully that clears it up one perspective for you. Others may see things differently of course.

coin2• 3 years ago

as fleshed out or complete as it is

Their dropdown list doesn't show the currently selected item

csomar• 3 years ago

Trello is not really their product. They acquired that company.

jemmyw2• 3 years ago

As someone who has worked on integrations with Jira for many years, it's the length of time bugs stay open. Our customers use Jira and they have to put up with its buggy behaviour that takes a very long time to get fixed or is just marked won't fix without explanation. Every product has bugs of course, but their attitude to them is quite bad. For example, there was a bug to do with epics and webhooks for years. Then they finally fixed it, then Jira "next gen" broke it again. Couple of years later it was fixed again. I understand from some ex employees that the Jira product is quite hard to work on, which makes sense given it's lifespan.

As a user, it's ok. It wouldn't be my 10th choice, but it's not the worst tracking tool out there.

DrBazza• 3 years ago

As someone who never watched Gavin+Stacey, and cannot be held accountable for James Corden, I did, on the other hand recommend to my Megabank employer, way back in the 00s that we purchase Jira. I know we spent $$$$$ on it, and therefore helped Atlassian grow into what it is today.

Back then, Jira really was good and fast compared to everything else, which was pretty much bugzilla or a roll-your-own corporate ticket system. It was also the first thing we managed to get a bidirectional link from an issue into Subversion commit messages and back again, and it ticked all the boxes for... a development team.

Then came the "let's make it a generic issue tracker" approach, so yes, "as fleshed out or complete as it is" is indeed true. They've chased every niche that they can find that needs an issue tracker but making it so configurable.

It's just a shame it's a complete dumpster fire now. Slow. The search never returns what you're looking for (Confluence is worse if that's possible), and at some point and size, you're going to need a full time member of staff to look after... an issue tracker.

This feels like we're almost at one of those moments where Slack came along and reinvented all the instant messengers, and whatsapp/discord/whatever replaced skype (or arguably MS did that all by themselves). I know the apocryphal story for start ups is 'don't write a TODO list app, or an issue tracker', but there should be a better alternative. Youtrack always feels like it should get more traction, but perhaps Jetbrains are happy with it being an MVP for their own purposes.

nivenkos3• 3 years ago

I preferred Clubhouse to JIRA - why didn't you like it?

But yeah, JIRA is far from the worst of these tools IMO.

flappyeagle• 3 years ago

What did you miss about jira when using clubhouse? From the outside it looks like jira with a different color scheme

gautamdivgi• 3 years ago

I agree. I don’t get the hatred for jira. I mean don’t complicate its usage. It’s a pretty awesome tool. It’s simple. Yeah, there’s some clicking but on the whole that’s on the person owning the project to customize.

I don’t mind bitbucket either. We self host both.

tape_measure• 3 years ago

I like Jira. I'm not a SWE, different kind of engineer.

jojobas• 3 years ago

Jira products are not there to make developers happy, they are to make them work so that project managers are happy.

I haven't heard 10% as many complaints from project managers as I have from developers.

throwswaydollar• 3 years ago

I used to use source tree. It's good

jfoster2• 3 years ago

Believe it or not, about 15 years ago, Atlassian tools were far better than their competitors.

Nextgrid2• 3 years ago

I'm sure they were better. This was before the trend of hiring frontend JS developers and making up busywork to justify their salary and reimplementing worse versions of solved problems.

I remember using Jira in 2017 on a "legacy" project (as opposed to the "next generation project" as they call it). It was fine. I don't mind backend slowness - one second is no big deal in the grand scheme of things. I actually liked Jira (for its features and functionality).

The problem nowadays is that the slowness has been distributed across both the backend and frontend. It's not enough to wait one second for the backend to respond, you now also need to wait for a pile of shit Javascript to load, parse and execute, which has its own subsequent backend requests that themselves take a second to load.

And God forbid you accidentally click anywhere or need to copy text, as now everything is clickable and incurs the same slowness if you need to undo the accidental action.

8n4vidtmkvmk• 3 years ago

I did until they ruined everything. They had good Mercurial hosting, one thing that Github didn't, but then they decided to delete all our repos without a proper export tool either. And they thought we'd just migrate over to Git and stay on their platform? No thanks.

HipChat was good. Then they decided they couldn't compete with Slack so they started rewriting it and then gave up and killed it.

So...they've forcefully booted me off their platform.

switch007• 3 years ago

Using Jira made me miss Azure Devops Boards and that’s saying something

danwee• 3 years ago

Whenever something goes wrong in terms of product management, we can always blame Jira (or the PM). I like that.

6th• 3 years ago

This reminded me about the whole tree part being removed from sourceTREE https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREEWIN-7176

I don't know how they have customers honestly.

yakshaving_jgt• 3 years ago

Plot twist: the layoffs are managed in Jira and the Jira admins spend so much time fiddling with Jira settings that they never get around to actually firing anyone.

steve19772• 3 years ago

They documented the layoffs in Confluence and cannot find them anymore.

graypegg2• 3 years ago

“Boss, I clicked the notification that you changed the layoff list, but now that the notification is gone I have no way of finding it, can you add a space to the bottom so I get another notification?”

oars• 3 years ago

Company announcement: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-team-...

SEC filing: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000165037223...

Jedd• 3 years ago

Six months ago they announced plans to grow their headcount in India by 1500 before end-2024.

Their worldwide headcount growth since 2019 [0] does feel, in retrospect at least, untenable - year on year - 3600, 4900, 6400, 8800. Arguably this fits into the same 'correction' category as other big players in recent months.

Reading the potted history [1] of acquisitions / sell-offs is a trip down memory lane. It feels like even their big-name acquisitions are still not terribly well integrated -- and combined with their famous lack of a 'traditional sales team', it does invite some obvious, if churlish questions.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1276817/atlassian-number...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian#Acquisitions_and_pro...

908B64B197• 3 years ago

Six months ago they announced plans to grow their headcount in India by 1500 before end-2024.

I know a lot of people moving away from Atlassian because of performance issue. Not sure how this will reverse the trend.

Vespasian• 3 years ago

For us at least their "forced" switch to Jira cloud was a massive increase in cost (which was the intention I guess).

Their developer offering at bitbucket is also more expensive and lacks critical features which are supported by the competition.

The market is bound to react somehow.

On the other hand vendor lock in is a powerful tool for atlassian.

subpixel2• 3 years ago

I’m playing with GitHub projects and while it’s actually showing crazy potential it has the problem of being an intrinsically developer-focused solution to a business problem.

Project management software isn’t about getting things done quite as much as it is about showing things getting done to the people who control the resources.

Jira is how you get managers to add headcount. That’s the reason managers adopt it. That and the fact that they don’t need to create an ssh key to use it.

Gitlab also has PjM aspirations but their enterprise, Gitlab-all-the-things model means it’s gonna be a non-starter for most teams.

paulryanrogers• 3 years ago

Classic or V2? Because the latter feels half baked to me.

subpixel2• 3 years ago

V2 is what I think shows a lot of promise but it is not ready to come out of the oven yet.

smcleod4• 3 years ago

If only the world could shed 95% of Atlassian products

giancarlostoro• 3 years ago

Which one would you keep?

smcleod4• 3 years ago

Yeah good point.

avtolik• 3 years ago

Trello is fine, I think Atlassian acquired it some time ago.

orthoxerox• 3 years ago

Bitbucket Server. It sucks, but sucks less than its competitors.

pjmlp4• 3 years ago

Based on what I have seen in the last 30 years, the competition is even worse.

If I would be a CTO, their products would be on the list.

smcleod4• 3 years ago

Lightweight Kanban / issues hybrids like GitLab issues are good.

metaphor• 3 years ago

Probably not a good image that Scott[1] and Mike[2] (via their respective trusts) have been quite busy liquidating 1,076,750 shares each into the public at a rate of 8,614 shares per trading day since the beginning of October last year...all the while laying off 5% of their workforce.

Something about leaders eating last comes to mind...

[1] https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=0001666121

[2] https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=0001666120

cjrp• 3 years ago

About $1.5m/trading day, at current prices.

yunohn• 3 years ago

How is this legal? Why are there always different rules for the managerial/ruling class…

newaccount2021• 3 years ago

why would it be illegal?

throwayyy479087• 3 years ago

This is the opposite of what you think - look into 10b-5.

xhkkffbf• 3 years ago

The different rules for the leaders are actually stricter. The average worker gets secrecy and they can sell all at once. The leadership needs to set up a public plan and commit to it.

mailinator-195• 3 years ago

this is actually due to Rule 10b5-1 where execs can have a pre-planned schedule to have transactions get executed. this way they're not doing any insider trading since it's predefined months in advance. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rule-10b5-1.asp

haskellandchill2• 3 years ago

a chunk of our executive team is resigning, that's how it should be done

umeshunni2• 3 years ago

which chunk? source?

BeFlatXIII• 3 years ago

Yet another company mindlessly follows industry trends. Yawn.

nix232• 3 years ago

Making overblown slow software? They are one of the inventors of it.

devhead2• 3 years ago

salesforce should raise their hand here

jefc11112• 3 years ago

Oh no, probably even less chance now that this 22 year old ticket will be attended to. https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-1001

sadface

thr7172722• 3 years ago

Or even just an option to turn of the default "spam everyone who ever touched this page whenever anyone touches it".

jefc11112• 3 years ago

Yeah. I think it can be done. But you've got to jump through hoops sometimes for sure. This kind of crap https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Need-help-...

"Ideally, you've used the same notification scheme for all projects and can just go in and find the notification to take yourself out of. If not, you'll have to check every notification scheme."

shivers with fear

eecc2• 3 years ago

My pet let-down is https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-1330 this feature alone would make Jira orders of magnitude more versatile.

So much that you could build a totally new product around it :P

noisy_boy• 3 years ago

Based on the shitting on Jira going on in this thread, seems like Atlassian have an opportunity to introduce a (optional) simplified-UI that focuses on solving the most common workflow. Something like IntelliJ's "new" UI that reduces the clutter in the main screen (all the original knobs are still available in the Settings dialog).

graypegg2• 3 years ago

They do already own trello! I remember rumours from when that buy-out happened that they’d turn trello into a new “view” for Jira projects as like a simplified version of the current Kanban board.

Don’t think that ever happened.

ccwilson10• 3 years ago

They have this via Jira Work Management

wlonkly3• 3 years ago

I have bad news for you -- this is Jira's "Team Projects" and it's the worst of both worlds. "What if Trello, but in Jira?"

freefaler2• 3 years ago

I see all the people here talking about JIRA or/and Bitbucket server. However Confulence is not mentioned that much.

I think the hardest product to replace is Confluence, especially on-prem, when you need your data inside your firewall.

There are many bad things in Confluence: 1. search is completely broken since several versions 2. the editor is not very good 3. it's just too slow

Hoever, there is 1 very good feature, but badly implemented. The ability to add complex objects, like JIRA ticket lists, Children pages, HTML embeds and other dynamic stuff. This helps a lot with building good dynamic pages fast. All the other tools are only

I've been searching high and low for a replacement and still haven't found one.

Also Atlassian got so greedy that they've removed on-prem cheap plans. I really hope someone builds a better Confluence with dynamic objects inside.

And if someone already did that on-premise I'll be really grateful for a hint.

cypherg• 3 years ago

mate, on-prem is dead. it's not just atlassian, it's most software that can be run as saas. when people run on-prem they get hacked, for failing to patch or doing something equally ignorant, which ironically makes atlassian look bad. plus they would have to maintain 2 versions of the software, the saas version and the on-prem. just not worth it. better in invest in making their cloud better (get FedRAMP, etc)

sschueller• 3 years ago

On prem is definitely not dead. I know a few angry Atlassian customers that are now forced to shelling out 50k a year so they can continue to use jira on prem because it is still cheaper than migrating to an alternative. Not every one can dump their data into some cloud that is located somewhere in the void.

freefaler2• 3 years ago

Most of the time these are behind a firewall so bugs are not that dangerous. Also most of the companies that choose on-prem have their own sysadmins and are more capable to protect themselves.

On-prem requirements can be legal, but also it's a bad practice to leave core business processes and data outside of your control. What if the vendor decides to raise the prices (like Atlassian did) or to discontinue the product altogether?

The stability of the company can be hindered by a "management decision" outside of your control. That's why I think on-prem wouldn't be dead, even for smaller companies.

wlonkly3• 3 years ago

search is completely broken since several versions

The terrible secret of Confluence search is that it defaults to OR between terms (which I think is a Lucene default that it inherited, even if it doesn't use Lucene anymore).

Once I started remembering to add AND between my search terms my searches became much more relevant. It's silly that I have to, of course, but I'm glad to get better search results.

eecc2• 3 years ago

Wut? It doesn't use Lucene any more? Wow, what else is out there in the Java world that does full text search?

devhead2• 3 years ago

Some of their problems are tied to their severe tech debt, weak leadership, poor vision of the future, lack of understading of the present, all the while relying on 3rd parties to profit instead of them actually making a better product and providing (with 8k headcount) changes with any sort of velocity. oh and they killed off their main competitor in Trello; but sweet now my user is deleted an i have to use atlassian user now. :: sighs :: all this and we still have to pay premium to use it?

hope they give these employees a good exit, it's the leaderships own fault.

dcchambers• 3 years ago

Sometimes I feel like the only person in the world that actually likes confluence. Far from perfect, but better than a lot of the competition.

Then again, my first job out of college they tried to make us shed Confluence for...SharePoint...for our internal docs/knowledge. I still shudder when I think about that.

Especially compared to the whale that is Jira. From a dev perspective I think Trello was pretty much perfect for managing projects, but I think PMs and managers really like the...features...in Jira.

pjmlp4• 3 years ago

You're not alone, I seldom found anything better than Atlassian products on the enterprise space.

They thrive, because the alternatives are even worse.

It is like trying to replace Office with half of the features, it works when one doesn't need more than a typewriter or a plain old table.

ulfw• 3 years ago

I have just received an email: "Thank you for your interest in Atlassian.

After recently reviewing the role you applied for against business requirements, we have decided not to progress with hiring for the position at this time. "

I applied 9-10 months ago. They haven't bothered to auto-respond until now.

Atlassian to shed 5 per cent of workers

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