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Comment by errantspark | Hacker News Reader

The first thing that went through my head when I saw this headline was: "Huh, maybe I should send them a resume." I'm hype if this trend continues.

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You'd honestly work for the folk responsible for the BitBucket redesign, or the 6 billion lines of dynamic JS loaded for every Jira page?

I'd sooner work the curb while living in a coal bunker

I didn't say that was my well researched opinion/plan!

You made me laugh because same thought when through my head

Maybe he's the guy that can turn that around.

Lapses on that scale are not an engineering issue, they're likely a culture issue. Atlassian are a successful business that sell to engineering businesses, but that doesn't mean their leadership know or care about engineering. I'd stake a large bet on the reality he could not turn it around. Atlassian are basically the Oracle of ticket trackers

> Atlassian are basically the Oracle of ticket trackers

That's the best way of putting that I've ever heard. Stealing it.

Atlassian undoubtedly has very smart people working there, but the absolute cluster mess of JIRA and their other flagships indicates deep management incompetence that favors shiny new feature over cleaning up the mountains of jQuery debt.

Atlassian has the Google problem: buying and half-ass integrating a competitor, shipping new features, that gives promotions to the people involved, but "menial maintenance" is not seen as necessary anywhere...

Maybe he thinks he can improve it or that things change. I've worked for MS in the past, it's not a dumpster fire like a lot of open source advocates would have you think. It was a fairly neutral experience, but they certainly have a lot of smart people working for them.

Maybe he can close out this 9 year old feature request to add custom domains to cloud apps: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-6999

The lack of this feature is probably intentional

Did you click the link? There's a Group Product Manager explaining that it's a huge amount of work, they want to do it, and can't do it now. After the lead eng on the feature gave a detailed description of the work involved (20 teams were sucked into it).

Every engineering org has things like this – features that they know the customer rightfully wants and should have, and seem to the customer to be simple, but in reality bring your eng org to its knees.

Just seeing that JIRA url gave me PTSD-4242

Ha, I curse Jira daily and I am glad to see I am not alone. So many baffling performance problems or design choices.

I mean, maybe he can help fine tune GPT-4 to dynamically output the dynamic JS every time Jira page is loaded. Probably would have less bugs/more features. Also, depending on how they sample the code it could be a new experience every time you load a page! Exciting!

I know bashing on Jira is a popular pastime on HN, but I'm always surprised folks are not more introspective around why it's still so popular in the enterprise. It's because there are a million and one ways that teams like to work, and any one project has lots of different stakeholders with competing needs, and there really isn't any other tool that can scale out to this many use cases.

I've certainly pulled my hair out a million times with Jira, but TBH I'm extremely impressed with their redesign. They've really scaled back the complexity IMO while still giving my team the customizability we need (we started on Trello and quickly hit roadblocks).

> why it's still so popular in the enterprise.

I was responsible for bring Jira into my team at 'megabank' not long after it launched around 2003/4, because the alternatives were horrific to set up and use. That was pretty much it.

I was amazed at how rigid Jira is when I started using it (we used a heavily in-house customized version of Sabrina before, and Rally as well). Sure, if you have loads of time you can work with an admin to write custom code for it, but at the level of what one of many teams can do with it directly, it offers virtually no options.

You want to split stories and leave sub-tasks behind? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.

You want to Subtask estimates to accrue to the Story estimate? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.

You want to customize the sprint report based on custom labels? Nope, probably not Agile.

You want to plan the capacity of your team to see how much work you should take into an iteration taking into account vacations and partial availability? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.

And on and on, with very basic needs...

Well this is a bleak world view.

Same boat, founders seem level headed and the company seems heading in the right direction. For me a plus is the office locations in Australia. I wonder what the next companies to do this will be?

Make sure you visit Sydney specifically though, it's a bit different from the rest of Australia. It's not everyone's cup of tea, though you may well end up loving it.

Everything I read about the founders makes me think they are great guys, I think they value the same things I do. They are also obviously smart and great business people too because they have very successful business. They also have a habit of acquiring products I like using. I was a user of both source tree and trello when they were acquired.

Having said all that, I really hate Jira and Confluence and would not like being a developer working on them. The front end is such a mess, I hate to think what the back end looks like.

Counterpoint: working on infrastructure teams at Atlassian are significantly more pleasant than the product teams.

Hello to you too, fellow Cloud Foundations team member

Isn't atlassian the most gung ho proponent of doing everything, everything through event streams and Kafka?

Haven’t seen Kafka yet. Source: I work infra eng at Atlassian

He was also here on HN comments telling everyone not to criticise the Australian Government’s COVIDSafe App while not disclosing Atlassian had a contract as part of the app’s development

Really? I'm Australian and that's the first I had heard of it (either the fact that Atlassian had a contract, or that he commented on HN about it).

Here’s the comment:

“Turn the HN angry mob mode off - it’s not helpful. We’re all in this together.”

When asked by non technical people “Should I install this app? Is my data / privacy safe? Is it true it doesn’t track my location?” - say “Yes” and help them understand” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22986426

And here’s an article:

“Australian tech darling Atlassian is among the five private companies that helped the federal government build its COVID-19 contact tracing app.”

https://www.innovationaus.com/atlassian-and-the-covidsafe-te...

The fact that they didn’t wait for Apple and Google’s contract tracking API and instead went for an app that needs the phone turned on and in the foreground for it to work properly is the reason why nobody is using it :headdesk:

Hope you like working India(Bengaluru) timezone and working for India wages. Like most that are higher percentage remote, the vast majority of development is done outside of higher wage countries and due to government currency policies are out of reach for those in country with a higher cost of living.

I’m shocked how naive people seem to be in these threads about remote work. There is tons of remote work. There already has been for decades. It’s called outsourcing. The reason you can’t find remote jobs in high wage countries is because no one would be crazy enough to pay those wages for remote workers when they can find the same level of talent for less than half the price.

My experience working for the last ten years as a remote engineer couldn't be further from the way this is described. Just a single data point, ymmv.

There is a ton of demand for top talent and India is not going to fulfill that. India may have higher number of engineers but the ratio of decent talent at NON-FAANG companies is very low. The reason for this is in India Engineering education is forced by the parents and that's why there are too many engineers but good ones are very few.

You say that like it's a bad thing! Async work is a solvable problem. I want a fairer world.

But is it fairer when a person lives in a country that intentionally has monetary policy that causes them to not be able to work for those lower wages? A person in the US is not legally allowed to move to one of those lower wage countries and cannot afford to house or feed themselves if they worked for those wages. A person in one of those lower wage countries can afford many luxuries on that lower salary due to cost of living differences.

So that person, even if they are highly skilled, will instead have to work at a low skill job for low wages . Not because they have lower skills, but because their government is looking out for the wealthy asset class as opposed to the working class and those other countries(like India) do not legally allow US citizens to live and work in their lower cost of living country.

I know of many companies with outsourced talent, that have a local office in the US where clerical workers and the janitors of the building make higher wages than the overseas outsourced engineers. And those clerical workers and janitors do not make enough income in the US to have decent housing or health care. They are forced, by the laws of the lower cost of living countries, to stay in the US and live poorly.

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