Atlassian to shed 5 per cent of workers
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
Something about leaders eating last comes to mind...
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...
I know a lot of people moving away from Atlassian because of performance issue. Not sure how this will reverse the trend.
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.
hope they give these employees a good exit, it's the leaderships own fault.
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.
sadface
"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
So much that you could build a totally new product around it :P
If I would be a CTO, their products would be on the list.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
how is it possible for most companies to overhire? where did all those hires come from? maybe facebook doubled by poaching non-faang people, but where did the non-faang companies get all these extra hires from?
> a lot of the people who are being laid off never would have had jobs
since tech layoffs mostly affect eng, pm's, hr and a bit of management, it seems strange that these mostly well-trained people were just idling around without a job until a couple of years ago by tens of thousands.
Like C++ Staff engineers, etc.
It seems more like a realignment to shift those jobs to cheaper subsidiaries like India, Pakistan, Mexico, etc.
Where they typically fall down compared to juniors with CS degrees is a couple of years later, when the practice doesn’t make up for less fundamental knowledge. But that can be easily overcome with good management.
They had worked on some serious case studies with real version control, real databases, real bugs and he basically came ready to solve real life problems.
The worst part here is a lot of companies were making real products, that customers really wanted and really paid good money for. But if those customer companies were VC reliant / vaporware, then even that strategy won't pan out. Only by predicting that and actively working to skip easy money and find more durable businesses, pivoting quickly, or having extra cash reserves.
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.
Most engineers are not in a business to support the day to day running of an app. They're there to build new things to provide growth and support change. This is why you can do an Elon and fire 75% of the staff without something collapsing immediately. That strategy even works in the long term if you're happy to scale back future ambitions and focus on a single app. It wouldn't work for most companies that are constantly fighting for market share though.
For reference, another company that sells developer tools, JetBrains, has around 2000 employees.
They have a suite of IDEs supporting a multitude of languages, that are almost universally considered best in class. IDEs are not an easy thing to build. They developed and maintain the Kotlin language which has all but become the standard for Android dev. And they have integrated team collaboration tools that range from project management to CI to cloud dev environments.
Atlassian on the other hand lol.
It is to be determined if "doing an Elon" will work out for Twitter in even the short term. Give Twitter 1-2 years of "doing an Elon" before we judge the success of this approach.
The public UI (and performance) of a SaaS business is the one thing that adds value to society and is valued by its customers. Yes, new products development is a really great place to put some people, but how often do you see those large companies develop something good by themselves?
And also ThundeClient a VS Code extension when using VS code.
I like HTTPie and HTTPie/http-prompt, too, although I wish they had more secure storage for cookies.
It'll do more, with richer libraries, and an obvious path towards automation into CI/CD.
Someone has to modify the auth script and have it update for everyone.
I thought this is what the tool is designed for, but it's been a nightmare. Team members have to wipe their environment and start again regularly. I want to think that we've completely mucked up using it but I'm not sure it's us and not the tool.
But it seems to be getting worse not better as they tack on more features and make it more complicated.
It seems like it's been years since they added anything I need and instead it has just gotten harder to use due to extra fluff. And it's buggier than it's ever been.
The Postman UX is not good on it. It's easy to get lost in tabs, they should ditch the tabs and categorize requests under the actual endpoint. There is also no way to easily save like requests and give them better names that is also searchable. It's also built on electron which means its slow and clunky.
There is nothing good in this space. Swagger would do it if they let you save requests to local browser storage and just added a history dropdown to the endpoints. I use swagger and save common requests to a file system and open them in sublime. if its just JSON payloads I am working with it does the job.
I'm no particular JIRA fan and have had the misfortune of having had to administer an on-prem instance of it but the people who complain about it have clearly never used TFS or the bespoke solutions hacked together from off-the-shelf software (Domino, Sharepoint, Notion) that I've been exposed to. JIRA's a solid 6.8/10 and has always been far down the list of things that I'd change at any job I've had that uses it.
I can appreciate preferring customizable tools, but if I were to personally choose for the company I'd prefer a constrained and opinionated one. Not coincidentally, this is analogous to the choice many companies make in their programming languages / linters the team's use.
My guess is you wanted a Kanban board but didn't realize you can change the standard ticket view to a board view? If you're in the Active issue view for your team you can click the boxes icon at the top right (or hit cmd-b) to get a kanban view.
I first opened my personal Linear account in 2020 and the default was no Cycles. I created a new team in that account today and it's the default.
I opened new one somewhat recently (2 months ago) for my company and the default was to have them off too.
The docs for Cycles say that here too: https://linear.app/docs/use-cycles#configure
Maybe you didn't have admin permissions on your team? Not sure.
Linear is essentially a mildly opinionated and hyper fast version of Jira. It will be immediately familiar to anyone coming from Jira, which is a really great thing for adoption.
Don't underestimate the speed feature. The effect here has been that people stop using Jira and only use it at a bare minimum as required by management. People end up moving all of their planning and notes to things like Google Sheets, random docs, or just Apple Notes. Linear is so fast and easy to use I found I was back to doing planning and notes live in the tool because it was easier.
Highly recommend you give it a try. My company is unfortunately already heavily entrenched in Jira and I found a vast amount of work to move us all so I had to abandon our move.
Don’t think that ever happened.
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.
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.
I don't know how they have customers honestly.
SEC filing: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000165037223...
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.
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.
Suggesting that 9000 people lose their jobs feels like a needlessly hateful way to express a dissatisfaction with a company's products.
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.
I'd imagine everybody in tech gets told to fuck off pretty rudely if it ever gets to the point of bailouts, so the good news is that your concern is unfounded.
No, it wouldn't have. The ownership might have, but that's ok. Lots of great cars are built in the USA, by American workers, by companies like BMW and Honda and Toyota. If GM had been allowed to die, that would have simply meant more foreign-brand-owned factories in the US.
Why do you care so much about the nationality of the top execs?
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.
How can Atlassian have all that staff and such shit products?
Edit: I know the answer because I've been a company that did all of this. Build new shit and don't focus on the main product, then lay off your staff.
I had to be very very patient and get ready for repeating something if needed.
Bitbucket is just entirely forgetful, I'm not surprised you have. I found it slow and cumbersome to use.
I'll add another highlight to the atlassian experience: their CI product, bamboo. Also very cumbersome to use. To give one example, if you are debugging a pipeline and want to run just some tests, you have to individually navigate to each test's page and settings subpage to click it on or off- so with a healthy number of tests, you'll really start to notice those slow page loads! (I recommend automating this task with selenium).
I personally dislike jira, but as they say: democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Okay, we can quibble about the exact qualification. But I, like many others, am often quite upset about all sorts of stupid inefficiencies of Jira, and, to give a nod to a sibling thread: Bitbucket even more so. Now, you say "fine", I say very mediocre. And the thing with developers and their tooling is that we're often quite spoiled such that this mediocrity just doesn't sit well with us. In a lot of places, there is choice such that we can pick the most efficient, non-mediocre tools for our taste. But Jira is just such a de-facto industry standard, that there's less tolerance for shopping around, and many of us get stuck with it.
If you're in a sluggish enterprise, and you're conditioned to sit on the phone for a change request, or wait a minute and a half for your IT website to load, sure, Jira may be a breath of fresh air. But for a lot of us, Jira is the IBM of project management: no one got ever fired for buying it, but few people are happy with it either.
Thankfully, they told industries like mine to go fuck ourselves when they discontinued the self-hosted options, and thanks in part, to COVID, there has been a lot of competition growing lately for developer tools like these.
whenever i try and use jira to get things done, it is genuinely bad tool.
As an example, low priority issue that blocks high priority issue is not automatically promoted. This single thing makes jira unfit for its primary purpose in my eyes
Jira out of the box doesn't make your company suddenly more productive. Just like Office 365 doesn't magically work. You need good governance, administration / configuration and proper training to make it generate added value.
If you ask "normal" it person to do this, i'd like to see those 5 minutes
Jira automations are installed out of the box. No third party plugins needed.
It's very very basic jira administration, and it's one of the more powerful tools jira has to offer:
Say what you want about bitbucket, but people have been banned from github for pretty fickle reasons, so it's nice that they can still host repositories somewhere else for free.
But it's good to have competition. Can you imagine if there was only one cell phone provider? Even a subpar competitor in the space can prevent people from being held captive. If bitbucket didn't exist, Microsoft might start charging users per repo for all we know
Sure, I get it, they're working on enterprise features that make them (more) money. But then don't have the audacity to present me an NPS survey to see how incredibly happy I am with their product. Ugh.
So you not liking some products isn't just grounds for you not using a product, isn't just grounds for telling other people not to use the product, it's grounds for everyone working at the company that makes that product, related to it or not, to be fired.
That's one hell of a leap from your opinion to ideas about what's best for the world.
But just FYI that complaining about HN going the way of Reddit is very frowned upon here (if not outright against the rules, I don't remember.)
It's also fairly unoriginal - people have been complaining that HN is becoming Reddit since HN was created, more or less. We're talking a good 10+ years of this complaint.
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
I don't think all or even most programmers are in a position to just willy nilly dance out of a job and find one the same or better. When I quit my last job it took months of planning. It took 3-5 round difficult interviews with 10 different companies to find the one I wanted to be at. That took a little over three months total.
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.
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.
Linear (linear.app)
The other teams I oversee use project management tooling too. And I see them. I’m here to tell you there are SOTA companies, led by engineers, that use Gantt charts.
I used to think the anti-Jira, anti-management crowd was inherently right. Now I’m quite a bit more skeptical of those views.
But that all depends on culture. The poster seems to be an engaged manager, pays attention to the data and uses it in a sane way and has hired a group of strong developers.
This is not your average setup…
I would still think jira is a bad tool (in the same way that JNCO jeans are bad pants), but at least using it wouldn't be painful.
But actual minutes to load stuff? That is insane and I can see where the loathing would come from.
It's also a comment from a random internet person who has an axe to grind and no data to back it up. So take it with a grain of salt.
It's amazing how a ten second load time can turn into several minutes when it's software you dislike and you're telling people about it later.
...not saying previous commenter is wrong either. Just a reminder to be sceptical about all such claims when they're presented without data.
Exaggerating it to several minutes is less egregious by an order of magnitude.
Self-hosted JIRA also opened up to lots of customisations and hacks, which often weren't performant.
These complaints seem like they have a couple of potential causes.
One very common load time issue is downloading too much data at once, especially on boards. I understand some work has been done to make this better, but you may get some relief by creating new boards with very limited number of issues on it - you want the board's primary filter to be specific (eg a board just for stuff assigned to you, rather than for everything asssigned to your team).
The weird subviews tend to be configurable, and Atlassian has been moving more and more towards defaults (and locking down those defaults) for these configurations that push a specific persona/way of working. I'm sure they have data that supports those choices, and there is strong selection bias going on here, but almost all the consulting I did was trying to figure out how to work around those defaults (the simple ones you can just change!)
Probably, a lot of those issues could be fixed by your administrator - you may even have permission to fix them yourself, though that process can still be quite cumbersome and labyrinthine.
So many complaints about JIRA come down to complaints about how it's configured. Atlassian knows this, and I think they are trying to make it better, but it's a hard problem. I enjoy the endless customisation available as an admin but it takes time and effort to understand what's possible, more time and effort to design those changes, and the most time and effort to make those changes match what the teams need. It's a hard problem to fix.
Sometimes people, frustrated by this big bohemoth, will pick an opinionated tool that matches their way of working. This works great for as long as that tool keeps focused and the needs of the team don't grow.
If consultants exist for a product, you know up-front that the product is intended as an "enterprise," end-all-be-all product, intended to be bought by high-level people, implemented by middle-level people, and configured to frustrate low-level people. It's not the product; it's the implementation, and it's a misalignment of incentives. Most companies big enough to afford JIRA are going to have the same kind of middle layer that winds up making people complain about JIRA on forums like this.
- Jira isn't well integrated to things like GitHub Enterprise or GitLab Enterprise. Instead it tracks on a regex that mars commit history or messages. It's fundamentally disconnected from the VCS workflow.
- Enterprises want to manage visibility by team, but Jira provides few if any tools for managing multiple projects within a single Project. The data structure doesn't map to how many enterprises need to use Jira in order to do reporting.
- Many enterprises rule over definitions of p0 and p1 for anything. Local context gets rolled over by this and Jira just becomes a kind of table splattered with cards.
- Jiras query system is skin deep at best and doesn't support things like querying all issues of a given epic. Much of this is fueled by their plugin API. Do a GET request on any issue and take a look at all the null fields or objects with just pure nonsense in them.
There's probably more to this list, but the point is that Jiras problem is mostly its own doing. ZenHub does a great job of filling these gaps.
It should be the other way around, because once you have a good mental model, you can get the data you need without it being plated for you. But the presentation fools people into thinking they have insight, so they come to depend on the tools that generate this illusion of insight.
It's not too dissimilar from powerful people being cut off from reality by sycophants and yes-people. Or managers who say 'bring me solutions not problems'. Once you outsource filtering, you lose control.
Pick 100 things you wanted improved about it, limit yourself to just your top 100, Atlassian did absolutely none of those and yet made them all worse. Every year. And I'm sure it makes good business sense. They know who is signing their cheques, that is who they care about. And I'm also sure they're very relaxed about how developers loathe them, discount me totally and look at the rest of the comments or any time it comes up. That's their right. They can laugh at us all the way to the bank. If you had more money than your great-grand children could spend in lifetime of Brewster splurges why would you care that your users hate you? You've got far more important toys to play with.
I work with JIRA cloud for 8 years now and while there are hiccups it just works.
Their dropdown list doesn't show the currently selected item
As a user, it's ok. It wouldn't be my 10th choice, but it's not the worst tracking tool out there.
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.
If Jetbrains Spaces gets some more adoption and maturity it may just kick Atlassian's backside. :)
But yeah, JIRA is far from the worst of these tools IMO.
I don’t mind bitbucket either. We self host both.
I haven't heard 10% as many complaints from project managers as I have from developers.
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.
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.
Or my experiences with Atlassian have just been non-representatively bad.
Or those people work in jobs where the standards are just disappointingly low.
Having read through all the comments, I just don't know anymore.
Now that I have a bunch of personal projects there, there’s no reason to switch. In 10 years the service was only down a couple of times. And I like the Web UI - I don’t think GitHub’s Web UI is any better.
So my experience using Bitbucket hasn’t been like living under the CCP. Maybe if I tried Jira I’d think differently?
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).
Yet it hijacks command-F to replace it with a crappy search experience
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.