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Comment by throwawayian | Hacker News Reader

Seeing this happen at an originally Australian unicorn after the technical co-founder stepped down and new CTO swapped out all of their engineering leadership with Indian hires from Microsoft.

Previously saw it at a lesser degree to older unicorns and places like Oracle, IBM, etc.

Although it’s normalised in the latter ones.

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This is unfortunately a widespread practice even in less tech heavy companies. It starts with a very aggressive C suit or manager responding to everything 24/7, supported by “cheap” labor who say yes to everything and promise the World, usually extra complicated. Fast forward a couple years and the company/project is a expensive hell-hole of disfunction and suffering. CEOs and the board also are to blame for this, they are aware, they just don’t care as they like people who say yes and don’t give them any bad news.

Which explains why its market value is hovering at $160 while its former worth, when it was properly managed, was $3-400. Am I spot on?

The problem is that every Fortune 500’s internal systems are hooked up to it.

Atlassian? As a user, I haven't noticed any decline in quality; it's just as painful to use now as it was a decade ago.

It’s also probably 5x more expensive than a decade ago. As you said, still painful to use.

Maybe cheaper labour brings hidden expenses.

You can ask Boeing ;)

Joking, I do not think it is the case, BUT I do know that cheap is often more expensive

You can’t notice decline in quality when the quality is already so bad that any change feels like an improvement while still being bad.

> You can’t notice decline in quality when the quality is already so bad that any change feels like an improvement while still being bad.

In this case we don't have a decline in quality.

A decade ago, you could self-host though.

Nobody (important) wanted that, though. It was done only because the cloud wasn't available, the moment it became available every big company migrated.

Not true. I‘ve been at several companies that self host Jira. With the amount of critical data and processes in Jira, it can be comforting to have it on-prem with no one else being able to access the server.

Are you sure they're not just "preparing for the migration" and plan to stay on premise? I also worked at many places that had it on premise - all of them planned to migrate ASAP (where asap is sometimes years).

The rise of self-hosted GitLab and GHES suggests that's not true.

Migrated from self hosted Atlassian to cloud Atlassian.

Rise? I don't see anything other than migration to cloud.

I’ve never seen or worked with a company using the cloud version of any of their products. I worked at a place with one of the largest bitbucket installs in the world, so they weren’t little shops.

Self-hosting JIRA and Confluence was a double edged sword:

Done badly it meant you suffocated the application server with too little resources giving dreaded "super slow JIRA" effect.

Done well it meant you didn't have to deal with Atlassian underprovisioning resources in the cloud or having rigid maintenance times that didn't fit with your company needs.

This. Every single Atlassian product I have used has always been painfully slow garbage; and I have been forced to use them at various jobs over a decade.

I don't think it was ever a magically good Australian product that Indian hires from Microsoft suddenly ruined.

I've been at a number of companies that had a significant Indian workforce, often hired through the likes of Infosys and the like. I don't believe that's down to nepotism or whatever though, but simple market forces: "you need two dozen SAP experts and can't find them locally? We have them".

That said, there's frequently islands of Indian and "the other" developers, in part that'll be cultural, but in part it's down to simply having a different job, expertise, department, etc.

…are we complaining about people living in India, or American/Australian citizens that have Indian national heritage? The former seems more like an outsourcing issue than an Indian issue. The latter… didn’t we learn in the 90s not to stereotype people?

If I posted a comment complaining about how black Americans are criminals, I think I’d rightfully be called out for oversimplifying in a hurtful way. What am I missing here?

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