A missing letter helped create a tech billionaire
bbc.com
bbc.com
Around 1983 my mom was dating a chef at the restaurant she worked at. One night he was out carousing and got himself killed. Fast forward a year and my mom meets the manager’s brother, thinks he’s an asshole and blows him off. He’s visiting from out of town and gets wasted, mom helps him to the brothers place and the guy turns out to be hilarious and a great story teller. They agree to a date, it escalates to marriage and we move. A year later now step-dad’s employer offers him relocation to either Chicago or a sleepy suburb in another state. Mom convinces him to take the latter on our behalf. Fast forward ten years I ask a cute coworker out to see Earnest Scared Stupid. That escalated to marriage four years later and on to two beautiful kids that are now almost out on their own.
I sometimes wonder if I should tell them that if some guy didn’t die in a crash they would never have been born. When they become billionaires that can be their story.
As an additional irony, the number she called me on was her Google Voice number, so when she actually started using her real number 2 months later I was like "Who the hell is this?"
I did end up starting in January, and on the first day of orientation, 25 hours after arriving there I met one of the handful other people also starting in January, who later became my wife. I hand never really even dated someone else first.
It is all so unlikely. Rare event stacked on rare event.
Who knows what might happened instead!
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife."
JIRA is much better than they are.
Can I ask what your preferred alternative is?
To me, the Azure DevOps way of doing this doesn't work in any logical sense, I can't find the simplest thing in the mess of an UX they have.
> Unable to communicate with server. Saving is not possible at the moment.
How does anyone actually /like/ atlassian products is beyond me. I honestly cannot think of any other software that makes me as frustrated.
IMHO JIRA is more of an platform you use to build your own process. And I believe it is the process that sucks most if the time.
several years ago a very big super-duper-EVP of our BigCo happened to be in our cubicle and noticed how my colleague was agonizing with the JIRA (visible to the EVP slowness plus invisible to him yet scorching our brains utter pointlessness of what the colleague had to complete there). The EVP had a epiphany right there and then - "wouldn't it be a huge improvement in our developers' life if those JIRA issues were to be solved?". At that moment he looked like he was feeling himself pretty much a god who is about to give gift of fire to those dirty mud figurines. It was so hard to not burst into laugh right into his face... Anyway, it happened to be that extremely rare case when a such high EVP did ultimately deliver on his words, even if indirectly - he left the company pretty soon and with him out all that JIRA/Scrum/Agile stuff just totally disappeared almost immediately.
Whenever Atlassian is mentioned on HN, at least 75% of the comments are complaints about the product - it’s crap, it’s slow, buggy, whatever.
But the company behind it has turned into a juggernaut.
Lesson being that - product isn’t nearly as important as distribution and sales strategy - be wary of asking HN for business advice (flashbacks of “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”
There's probably enough talented workers in Australia, just not enough who want to live and work in Sydney.
The Atlassian founders have come out against Australia's draconian refugee policy and are calling out xenophobia in local politics (for which I applaud them on both fronts), so maybe they are engaging in a bit of hyperbole to back these causes?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian
[2] https://www.smh.com.au/business/small-business/mike-cannon-b...
Sydney compensation could use a bump in compensation to justify moving from places like Melbourne and Brisbane. In my limited experience they sometimes don't pay enough to cover the increased cost of living, particularly rent.
Otherwise I'd agree with Scott that Australia needs overseas talent. At Canva, where I work, the strong majority hired are overseas talent. Australia's software industry is too small for these companies' appetites, and its universities aren't producing a large enough supply of talented grads.
Australia’s problem, in general the Australian born devs are very good, Computer Science must be done right here (i’m not Australian). However the quantity of good interesting software jobs isn’t great compared to other countries, when you have easy migration to the US as an AU citizen, and jobs offering more money and more work opportunities it’s hard to overlook. Maybe catch 22, for good devs to stay you need good interesting jobs, for jobs you need devs.
Most of the interesting stuff about how companies grow come down to a relative small period where some key decisions get made (in the tech world at least). Anyhow, this is normal and people love to try and parse the lives of the wealthy to see if any of it can be applied to their life to capture some of that success. There are a lot of things to increase your luck potential, but it still takes grit+luck.
I really don't think so. Case in point - The article describes a 17-year growth path for Atlassian, including many reversals along the way.
What you're describing is the exception. E.g. Minecraft. Most successful tech businesses (like all businesses) are built on a combination of luck and sustained good decision-making and hard work.
I think there is $45bn worth of unexploited value to be had in fixing the problems with Atlassians' UI designs - the productivity to be gained by not using Jira, and instead training ones staff to be better at standard thing - like, you know, sending emails - seems to me to be a huge opportunity.