Hacker News Reader

Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Atlassian is cutting another 1600 jobs because it needs to cut more jobs as it is a dying company with terrible products.

But let's try to spin it up as if we were some kind of AI mavens who are reaping humongous increases in productivity due to our thought leadership in AI.

View on HN

95% of these announcements are exactly how you say. There're just too many incentives to layoff and call it AI:

- CEO (under pressure to move in the AI space) comes across as an AI maven

- The shareholders improve margins

I think we're reeling from rate increases. Too much free money for too long.

Global uncertainty

Tariffs

War in the Middle East

US economy that would likely be in recession if not for massive datacenter spend

Oil at ~$100

But we're laying people off because... AI

Atlassian pretending they can pivot into AI, is the most "Hello fellow kids" corporate moment this year.

Their services are barely usable with extreme bloat and lag. With such strong engineering practices, they are poised to make fools of themselves. Can't wait.

They started nagging every user in Jira to use their AI, now. It’s like straight out of the Microsoft “Dear god please please use our AI product!” playbook.

I’m honestly not sure what you even use AI for in Jira. Maybe there’s a purpose, but 90% of us are just moving tickets across the most expensive kanban board that money can… rent.

Atlassian is very far from "dying"

I mean look I don't like literally any of Atlassian's products, but they are not a dying company by any measure. They print cash.

They're not dying, but they're not healthy either. They've been around for 24 years and still haven't figured out how to turn a profit.

I don't want to just copy and paste my previous comment, but this isn't how companies at this size think about declaring profits. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47347993

Hence the comment you replied to saying "they print cash". You'll find a lot of big companies work this way: high free cashflow, because they earn a lot more than they spend, but then the spare cash is either reinvested or paid out via share buybacks. Declaring a profit isn't advantageous compared to the other options available.

TBF they have made major improvements, IMHO, to Jira and Confluence over the past few years.

Anything in particular? I first used it about 10 years ago, on prem, and am currently using the cloud version. Current edition is clunky, slow, and constantly badgers me with Rovo shit I can't disable. IMHO, it reeks of a product once built by and for technical people that eventually got dumbed down by POs to the point of being painful for the original users. Obviously I'm no longer the target user because I assume someone somewhere appreciates these changes.

The performance, at least on our cloud instance, has greatly improved. There was a period of time where every load was causing the side bar and other components to slowly load with skeletons everywhere.

There are still skeletons but a lot of the page components load instantly(cached) and others load quite quickly.

Tons of UI "jank" has been cleaned up across Jira and Confluence. The UI design, in general, has also finally cleaned up nicely and "settled".

Confluence articles load very fast now. They have also added Live documents which is a very welcome addition.

Is Jira still bloated? Yeah, but that doesn't preclude improvements. It feels less bloated now to me.

YMMV.

I'd argue the opposite. The thing is so bloated and the simplest of things seem to be so hard. Import markdown in confluence? Nope not natively. Add an issue to the board? better go to the one workflow to do it and not in the actual ticket.

Confluence supports markdown natively. Even its MCP uses markdown.

I don’t know exactly what the other issue is referring to.

Confluence used to be built on top of pretty standard plain wiki markup that could be edited without being forced into a bad visual editor, even easy to edit in an external text editor to not have to spend so much time in the web UI at all. I remember having an Emacs mode for it installed.

Looking this up now, Wikipedia says the wiki markup was abandoned already in 2011. Not that I think Confluence was ever a great wiki, but at least having pages that were backed by some resonable plaintext markup was much better than not having that.

You can’t copy and paste markdown, nor can you use it in the native way in confluence. They have third party paid plugins that can do it.

Perhaps I just haven't noticed them, which is unfortunate. I have noticed that I often have to double or triple click to open a ticket on my board. There's no reason for such a core functionality to be that slow.

The only Jira improvement that I can remember from the last 11 years is being able to drag and drop subtasks (maybe it was up and down arrows before that).

Everything else has been UI changes as far as I've seen.

Same! This nightmare seems to have started recently from what I have experienced. I find myself hard refreshing constantly to get the damn tickets to open.

If anyone from atlassian reads this: please, for the love of god resolve this issue.

I honestly hope someone will read this comment and vibecode an Atlassian 2.0 platform, preferably open source. But really, I will take closed source and paid as well - just give me something that's on par in terms of features and integration but without the terrible UX.

To be clear, I agree with the terrible products part - but currently they are not dying because there is no alternative platform which is flexible, scalable and feature-complete enough. You may find alternatives for niches, like GitHub for software engineering, but the Atlassian stuff allows for knowledge transfer and familiarity across many many domains. I've seen it used anywhere from government burocracy to customer service and construction companies. They nailed the abstraction for flexible issue management, just the implementation is terrible.

I vibe coded a native client for Jira that’s speedy for creating tickets. At this level, you could write something native and just use their API and have it be as quick as you’d like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com