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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Recent ex-Atlassian employee here. No part of this article matches with my experience. It's one of the better companies I've worked for. I usually took 3-4 weeks of PTO a year, it wasn't a big deal. We didn't even have to register our time off in a payroll system or anything like that. Yeah you couldn't take 6 months off and expect to keep your job, but I felt like 3-5 weeks of PTO was the norm there. I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave. It wasn't a big deal. This article complains about being at a job for 2 years without a promotion. That's the mark of an entitled person. P4 is still a great position with solid pay.

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Another recent ex-Atlassian here (I left 4 months ago after working there for 5 years), and I'll +1 this. Was a really solid company. I took multiple 3+ week vacations over my 5 years, and one 3 month vacation. In addition it felt like the company actually cared about me. I had the best work life balance of any company I've worked for at Atlassian.

Some other things about this article stood out to me though. The author brings up: "Interesting fact 1: Atlassian is the only company that has words "shit" and "fuck" in their core values." without the context here. These values are "Don't fuck the customer" and "Open company, no bullshit". It seems strange the author is calling out the language of values I actually feel were pretty decent. If anything this is just a reflection of word choices of Australian vs American cultures. It feels like the author is just trying to pull every gotchya out there due to a bad experience with a manager.

> These values are "Don't fuck the customer" and "Open company, no bullshit".

Huh. As a customer, this is surprising.

Using those words in their official core values just seems a bit juvenile and unprofessional. Not a red flag, but maybe a yellow one.

I agree it feels unprofessional. It would be like adding a hashtag.

its very Australian.

Those are quite commonly used words at Aussie companies. I guess it's just a cultural difference.

While others have said it's an Australian thing, to give an example a popular Sydney based pub-brewery down the street from me has the rule "No Dicks!" on their wall and it really works. Always a friendly place to be, the people genuine and a sense of community.

Swearing, when used properly, punctuates an otherwise boring corporate message.

You're making their point more beautifully than you could ever imagine...

Some workplaces really are trying to be the chill pub all the way down to the beer on tap.

But you can have an environment that's "a friendly place to be where people are genuine and there's a sense of community" without that crap

I swear more than the next person but I don't want my workplace codifying it. We can leave that kind of tech-bro bs back in the 2010s.

> But you can have an environment that's "a friendly place to be where people are genuine and there's a sense of community" without that crap

Yes, and you can also have the environment with "that crap".

Why is one approach superior to the other, beyond the fact that it appeals to you?

Work for an Australian company, have those words in our core values.

It's normal.

For non-Australian companies, yes. But for Australian companies, it's the standard. It'd be like saying, "My employees in Spain are falling asleep in the middle of the day! It's so juvenile and unprofessional!" despite a seista being a cultural aspect of the country.

It's likely your viewpoint of professionalism doesn't match that of Atlassian's here. As an Australian, it seems perfectly fine to me.

> These values are "Don't fuck the customer"

Not really living up to that one lads, considering your software is an absolute raging dumpster-fire

Engineers are not the customer, the executives of companies willing to sign off on the license fees are, they're the only ones they need to keep happy.

In fairness to Atlassian I work for a charity and we get to use their products for next to nothing and I've found Jira to be a valuable project management tool.

My experience is that dev's have...mixed feelings about it because it can get in the way of "actual work" but only a few of those dev's are as good and organised as they think they are. The rest it's like herding cats and without Jira or an equivalent they'd be churning out dogshit.

It’s interesting that as a dev my feeling about PM’s is more or less the same. Transforming the garbage in Jira tickets into something resembling a product is a challenge.

Are those people happy waiting 10s for a page to load? Seems like wasting their time is most expensive of all for the company.

I've worked with some large Jira installations and I don't remember ever running into 10s page loads without a broken VPN/internet connection. This sounds like a very very broken setup.

Ours doesn't take that long usually, but it sure can be slow.

My company uses Confluence (NOT self hosted) and it regularly takes 10s or more to load a page on a 400Mbit connection. Text content only, no diagrams. Confluence is a joke

Their assistant might not be but what does the exec know?

>If anything this is just a reflection of word choices of Australian vs American cultures.

Too right, cunt.

> If anything this is just a reflection of word choices of Australian vs American cultures.

Correct - I can think of, for example, a national ASX listed ISP (Aussie Broadband) with the word bullshit in their core values - "No Bullshit": https://www.aussiebroadband.com.au/forms/investors/statement...

I think, about 20 years ago, one of the street vendors at Badaling section near Great Wall of China had written their rules for employee on their back wall. One of them was

- Do not hit or scold customers.

Keep in mind managers often make or break your experience. The article could be about OP’s manager as much as it could be Atlassian.

Companies that don’t provide any training and structure with how managers handle engineers end up with employees having wildly different experiences. So, I would find Atlassian at fault here

Atlassian provides very thorough and structured training before anyone is allowed on the management ladder

Oh, you again.

Atlassian is ultimately responsible for the experience of all employees.

That said, this employee seems to have long running grievances with his or her managers that predate the cancer diagnosis. Somewhere in there was a team switch (see the complaint about new techs / can't go back to the previous team.) So this spanned multiple managers.

As near as I can infer: the central complaint is Atlassian didn't offer longterm paid leave to deal with the cancer treatment, this employee didn't want to use unpaid leave, and Atlassian expected him or her to either work or go on unpaid leave. It's hard to tell.

This post and many of the details about it leaves me suspecting the relevant managers at Atlassian would tell a very different story.

Agree, direct managers, make or break all the difference.

Ex Atlassian. Worked on a good team. We were told we were seen as "high performance". I had positive reviews, was told I was, without doubt, the star/person who made the team, received a performance bonus when issued etc.

I had a great two years, and then the business wanted to change some stuff, new CTO making his mark, ban some languages we had been using for two years that enabled us to be high performance and instead work more like the CTO's ex company, Gumtree which while large are non-descript. The team wasn't happy. The team was systematically watered down/broken up/moved elsewhere/members were replaced to align with the CTO's opinions.

My manager, who had been good for the past two years, an evangelist for what we were doing and encouraging it, did a complete 360. What he was previously evangelizing for, he was actively hunting out, trying to crush and punish. Chat messages were being watched and then used against people in one and ones for criticizing specific code, nothing that looks out the ordinary on a dev chat room. A colleague and I talked outside work and later found we were being played against each other in a he said / she said. The same colleague got put on performance management for writing to many Lambdas in Java as we cannot be seen to be using the word Function anymore. My colleague resigned. On his last day, I was pulled into an office with some historic tweets on Twitter. Someone had actively searched me out on the internet, found some stuff to use against me, and I had my resignation on the table ready to sign. It gave me a bit of gardening leave just enough for some stock to vest as a severance package i guess.

The manager who only a few months earlier who had nothing but praise and actively encouraging my/my teams work had now gone online, typed my name into Google to see what they could find. They found some messages, admittedly silly for me to post but nothing terrible, and used them against me to get rid of me for doing what he was an advocate for before the new CTO tried to make his mark.

Worst sprint-review I'd ever been in, a team of 5-6 people, calling out issues with a pr, heads on desks because the manager says we have to merge a rewrite by another team. All devs were silent as they had already said everything, and the manager just pressed merge and said: "done".

The specific manager was very career-driven, and the best thing for his career was to follow CTO direction. Rather than bat for his team, he systematically rebuilt it and turned on people to move them on.

Glassdoor reviews around the time I left by other people where not great either.

It's very culty, you are either in the cult or not.

"a complete 360" 180*

Why did they call it the Xbox 360? Because when you see it, you turn 360 degrees and walk away.

If you turn 360 degrees, you end up facing the same direction you were in before the turn. A U-turn is a 180, not a 360. That is why in great grandparent, "did a complete 360," does not mean what the writer thinks it means.

>> I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave.

That's super poor, wtf. What do you even do after these first 4 months then? Give the baby to a babysitter? I know US law about this is weak, but wow.

A lot of people lean on grandparents or spouses for kids. But to be honest, we all worked from home so it wasn't a big deal. It was common to see kids or babies in Zoom calls.

> we all worked from home so it wasn't a big deal

As a parent of an infant myself (well she's one now), I cannot imagine trying to work while also caring for a child. Like I've done it, and it's incredibly, incredibly difficult.

But yeah, if both parents are working you need childcare, and that's expensive if you don't have (much) family support.

Yes, US median is something like 2-5 weeks maternity leave and many require you to exhaust all of your accrued paid sick time and PTO first and many of them also require you to file it as FMLA (the federal red tape/insurance program for long term leave) even if you don't plan to extend past "given" amounts of maternity leave. So yeah, in corporate dystopian America, 3-4 months sure looks generous.

I think you must misunderstand FMLA. FMLA is job protection to take care of medical issues (you or family member). It isn't really any red tape, but it prevents an employer from firing you during those 12 weeks and it prevents them from denying your PTO. So if you have 4 weeks of PTO saved up they cant deny your time off request to take care of your baby for 4 weeks. FMLA leave is unpaid.

I wish it were just me misunderstanding FMLA. It's not intentionally red tape and I was being a bit hyperbolic, but the "optional" certification forms for FMLA in the hands of a lot of corporate HR drones become "required" because HR wants "CYA" despite that not being the intent of the certification forms. Maternity leave doesn't even have a direct "certification form" nor is it supposed to because it should be pretty obvious to an employer (much less the Department of Labor) to "certify" a maternity, but a lot of mothers in the US workforce get burdened by idiots in their HR departments to fill out CYA paperwork sometimes in the hospital with an implied threat that their job is on the line if they don't. Despite that not being how FMLA works or is intended to work. I don't know why so many companies seem to misunderstand some of these basic facts about FMLA, I just know that forums are filled with pregnant people complaining about their HR representatives giving them paper "homework" sometimes in the worst possible moments, just to "prove" their maternity leave "because FMLA requires it". (It doesn't.)

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fmla/forms

I fail to see how this is the company's problem. What if I take on a baby sloth that needs two years of potty training before you can leave it alone. Is my employer somehow morally responsible to make sure that I can stay home for this amount of time? Isn't the responsibly with me who actually chose to get the sloth in the first place?

Surely you're not comparing the critical initial development of a human child to... having a pet, right? I sincerely hope I'm misunderstanding your position.

Baby humans do eventually grow into productive adult humans who pay taxes, and parents who are given generous parental leave do better at their careers in long term. Therefore both are beneficial to a society. Of course a private company won't care for either - that's why in sensible countries you get 12 months of maternity pay, majority of which is paid from the social fund not by the company. After all we all pay taxes for something, no?

> I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave.

Is that supposed to sound like a lot? Not all commenters are from the US! Here in the UK, AIUI, it fairly recently shifted from 12mo maternity (paternity I think was employers' discretion entirely?) leave to 12mo split between parents as they see fit, and not necessarily concurrently or at birth, etc.

In the US, that is decent. My wife's job (non-tech) offers a month at like 75% pay I believe.

I'm not trying to encourage anybody to quit their jobs for a different local job that I suppose will have better benefits - I'm commenting under the assumption that the discussion's a bit more abstract than that.

Oh, I understand and your point is good. I just wanted to add a little context that the benefits vary wildly when it comes to maternity leave.

You can’t compare US benefits to UK benefits. I’m fairly certain Atlassian’s EU offices will have very different parental leave to the US. IIRC, Aus is 6 months

Well I'm comparing to UK (perhaps nee EU?) statutory requirements, of course there's some win-some/lose-some, I just think (even as a right-leaning^ bachelor) that's something worth legislating around.

Especially if you're (I'm not) pro positive-discrimination: the 'time with newborn vs. work/pay/career progression' decision is awful for gender equality, surely? Traditionally it is indeed maternity leave, and if you don't even mandate a good amount of that then the 'better hires' are men (all of us, family size decisions aside), women who won't-have/have-had children, and women who value career more.

(^: I say 'leaning' more because of US/UK political spectrum differences than anything else; feel free to read 'pretty solidly Conservative' in a UK context.)

The topic however is about the claims of "unlimited". The location becomes less relevant.

Why? That grinds my gears. If the company believes in the values and benefits of longer parental leave (and I'm sure they say they do), why not enforce above the minimum in every country they operate in?

3-4 months is a lot for the US. Most states have no legal minimum, at $COMPANY I would get 8 weeks (12 if I moved back to California).

And in california, it's paid, but at 60-70% of wages. And capped at like $1357 a week. Better than nothing, but for most people here, it's not paid at your salary.

I never heard of a company giving less than 6 months. My wife works for a very large financial firm and it was 6 months. All startups I worked at were 6 months.

I got 3 months and that’s more than literally everybody I know in real life. Even that was longer than the company gave just a year prior, so long time employees were jealous.

Man, the more I learn about the US the more I hate it.

Yeah, that’s fair. Being in the US is amazing if you’re in the “in group”. But if you leave that narrow path for any reason, your quality of life begins to degrade quite quickly.

10 of these 12 months are on statutory parental leave, which is something like 140£ per week. If you have a decent job, it’s almost equivalent to unpaid leave.

Recently companies started offering enhanced parental leave, usually 5-6 months of full pay, but it’s not even close to being the norm.

Ah. Hadn't appreciated that, thanks. I suppose that's still better than nothing though, so the USA's 3-4 full pay ends up more than 2, but another 10 months' pay however meagre with a job to return to seems better to me. I think (again, with no experience) in that situation I'd be optimising for time off rather than money anyway, once required amounts of each are reached I mean.

Germany: 14 months paid parental leave (“Elterngeld”), with max of 12 used by one parent, at 2/3 of average net from previous year, capped at 1800 EUR/mo, paid via the employment office. Months can be distributed as desired through first three years of child’s life. Outside of paid parental leave, either or both parents can opt to take unpaid leave, or work 15-30 hours/week (pay prorated, of course) until the kid is 3 - all of this is collectively called “Elternzeit”. My husband used his first Elterngeld month right after our kid was born, and is using his second now as I start back to work. It’s excellent, and everyone deserves this.

“Mutterschutz” is why I was put on paid leave six weeks before the due date, and forbidden to return any less than eight weeks after birth - that’s paid at a rate close to previous net and if there is a cap, it’s higher than my nice (by German, not US tech hub, standards) IT salary. Paid out of federal taxes, administered by employers.

Sounds sensible. Makes sense for the state to essentially insuranize this so small businesses with say 5 people aren't in a pickle.

Yes, but how much of that maternal leave is paid for by the company itself? It's easy to be generous when it's someone else's money.

> We didn't even have to register our time off in a payroll system or anything like that.

This tells me that it was entirely up to your manager to be ok with it or not, as it wasn't tracked anywhere else.

That's a double edged sword. If you have an awesome manager, it's great. But if you have a workaholic manager, you'll have a difficult time getting any time off ever.

It's much better overall to have a policy of N days per year (none of the "unlimited" lies) that accumulate clearly on your pacheck, that way there is never doubt or argument as to how many days you have earned and can take.

You might have a skewed or incomplete perception I'm thinking... Neither of the holiday amounts you've quoted here are big in any sense, they're actually quite low.

It actually says in the beginning that he was a P5, which I assume to be over 200k total comp, which is more or less the top few percent of software engineers nationwide. That is a great comp package even for management. So if you are indeed that valuable, any company would want to retain you, and you could ask for a lateral move to a new manager, or just bolt when things get hairy. Everybody wants to retain or hire the top talent.

Edit: that is not to justify the alleged treatment, only placing the situation in relative terms. He wasn't being paid 80k at the only shop in town, with no other possibilities available.

The poster did get a lateral -- see the complaints about the new team and not being able to go back to the old team.

> I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave.

So when you say 'manager' you mean someone like a team lead (line manager) and they kept their teams? At least that is what I would expect when you write 'wasn't a big deal' and judging from the other stories I am not sure that is the case.

How about male managers? Did they take parental leave too?

> I usually took 3-4 weeks of PTO a year

So the legal minimum in most countries?

What does your contract say with regards to unlimited vacation?

If you take it literally how could they fire you if on your first day you leave for PTO and never return. I wonder if this has ever been tested in court

I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave. It wasn't a big deal.

It wasn't a big deal because it's the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...

There implication is it was paid which is NOT the law

"The FMLA allows eligible employees to take up to 12 work weeks of unpaid leave..."

The OP quote about the female manager doesn't really imply whether it was paid or not, one way or the other.

That said, whether FMLA is unpaid or not depends on the state.

I took my 12 weeks of FMLA parent leave (as a father) and I was paid weekly by the state (California). There is a cap to what the state will pay so it was less than my regular salary but it was a paid leave with the state providing the income.

(On top of that my company made up the difference, but that was a benefit they chose to give. But even if the company was stingy and didn't want to pay anything during the leave, the state does provide some income.)

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