AI should not replace people at Atlassian, says CEO | Hacker News Reader

AI should not replace people at Atlassian, says CEO

heise.de

118 pointslayer854 comments

I've become convinced that "investing in AI" is just the magic incantation CEOs are using to spin layoffs as a positive rather than a negative for the company's reputation among investors

It's PR to cover management failure due to "me too", which reached ridiculous levels in the last 5 years.

I don't see what it has to do with "me too"

Take block:

AFAICT, it was just really badly managed. A long time ago it got about as much share of its main market as it was going to get. They took the cash flow from that and hired a bunch more engineers to try to break into adjacent markets, and failed, and failed and failed.

Now they are just retreating to the steady income from their core business

Pretty sure by putting "me too" in quotes and not saying #MeToo, what they're talking about is really FOMO. The companies are performing layoffs because of the trend

Oh, probably

As previous commenter said “me too” in the (lack of) leadership vein, not the sexual harassment tag.

I don't really see any relevance to "me too". Far more likely it's to cover from insane overhearing in the pandemic era, and no one wants to admit they overdid it.

I would guess the opposite, that anti-woke statements from management is a big red flag correlating with poor company performance

How is this in any way related to me too? How is that what to took from this? I implore you to think critically.

You are being downvoted because of the 'me too', but think you are refering to companies copying other companies (Amazon hires 10k? We hire 10k! Google fires 5k? we fire 5k) and not the 'me too' movement about sexual assault/harrassement.

People are downvoting because they think is "that" me too. What op meant is all the copycat management. "They use roflcopter.js? Then we must. They use AI? Then we must. They hire/fire 9070 people? Then we must."

Yup. I thought this was an interesting take on the Block layoffs, from a former employee:

"I Worked for Block. Its A.I. Job Cuts Aren’t What They Seem."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/opinion/block-jack-dorsey...

also -

"Salesforce CEO says Block's cuts shouldn't fuel worries of mass layoffs: 'That company has its own unique issues'" https://www.aol.com/articles/salesforce-ceo-says-blocks-cuts...

one more :-) -

https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-companies-are-ai-washing...

Jack Dorsey’s 4,000 Job Cuts at Block Arouse Suspicions of AI-Washing - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-01/jack-dors... | https://archive.today/QhUJT - March 1st, 2026

Sam Altman Says Companies Are ‘AI Washing’ Layoffs - https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-companies-are-ai-washing... - February 21st, 2026

HN Search: AI Washing - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

They shove off people forced on them so they could grow faster, but the problem is, they don't have the ideas....

AI isn’t replacing anyone, rather the money previously used to pay those people’s salaries etc is now being spent on AI.

> “We are doing this to self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales while strengthening our financial profile,”

They take in billions every year but still come away with millions in negative income. I have no idea what their problem is but I'm pretty sure the 1,600 people they just fired weren't it. Throwing away people in yet another round of layoffs to further invest in AI is not a good sign.

In my opinion, it is similar to Parkinson's Law [1] about work filling into the time given to it, but replace work with bureaucracy filling the aggregate enterprise revenue on offer. Atlassian's work, one might argue, is "done" but has such cashflow from business customers that they can continue to spend above and beyond what is needed to maintain what has been built to service their customer base. They could be 37signals/Basecamp, but they are enabled beyond that (from the business customer cashflows mentioned), and so these actions occur until an innovator comes along to replace them (and potentially, the cycle repeats due to enterprise sales cycle durations, inertia, etc).

You see this with all manner of large enterprise in my experience, where what they continue to do is "good enough" to allow for these inefficiencies and actions because they are, on some spectrum, "money printers" due to their moat and inertia. Creative destruction is not a forgone conclusion, nor fast. Is the incumbent exploring the problem spaces adjacent to their core business(es) to increase their TAM to increase shareholder value? Are they innovating? Or are they just churning and burning up revenue on meaningless work?

All of these companies doing layoffs to invest in AI is not about AI specifically, it is about reaching for profits and yield in a challenging business landscape and macro post zero interest rate policy ("ZIRP") imho. They are desperate for productivity growth, whether that is doing more with less people, AI, offshoring, whatever because money now has a cost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

This is spot on. I'm always amused when people talk about how much staffing a given product "needs". That's not how headcount works or even system design works.

What actually happens is that company headcount grows based on how much money they make (or how much they raise), this justifies hiring more people. Then, structure is added, both to systems (eg. microservices), and to operations (eg. jira, workday, salesforce, etc) so that communication overhead doesn't grind everything to a halt. Then, once the business stops growing, headcount must shrink. This may take a long time, and it will be couched in all kinds of corporate bullshit to try to preserve morale and investor sentiment, but that is all window-dressing.

Have you looked at the actual expenses and where you think they should cut rather than people? Or are you saying with all those people they should be able to turn their growth story around?

I'd love to see their books to find out how they're burning that much money and then still digging a hole hundreds of millions deep. I suspect that they've got issues higher in the org chart than they're pruning, and I'd put more faith in the people they let go than the chatbots they want to bring in. I just hope they keep them internal because I have to endure both Jira and Confluence and I won't be looking forward to the aggressive nags to use more AI features nobody asked for.

When your customers have less developers you need yourself less developers. And if they are paying by the seat... Your income is directly affected by layoffs... So reduction does make sense.

And as they say any new companies can replace the Atlassian products by bespoke vibe coded alternatives in a few days...

That last sentence holds a lot of truth.

Our company has drastically downsized its dependence on Atlassian in the past month, we will be completely free in a few more. With the help of modern AI tools we've been able to replace their products with internal tools that are better tailored to our needs.

I think any company with some motivated developers and a budget for h/w or cloud could rebuild a good enough JIRA in a month. I don't see how Atlassian survives long term

Jira isn't the product, it's the development platform that builds the product (which is a codified version of all the bad business decisions your company has ever made).

Because you see the IC side of the Atlassian toolkit. The management side is much more expansive and this starts mattering when you are coordinating larger projects.

That said, if you are a smaller company, you absolutely could kill Jira pretty quick.

I hate Jira just as much the next engineer, but this is not at all accurate lol. The reason all ticketing systems are kind of terrible is they have to deal with a lot of complexity. Jira has waaayyyyy more features than you think it does.

Ticketing systems are not dumb CRUD apps, they're systems that build workflow engines. If you've never built a workflow engine, they're annoying but fine. Building an engine that can implement any special snowflake flavor of business workflow in a way that's reasonable with a reasonable UI is difficult.

And yes, you could write it for your special use case, but use cases change a lot and different groups need different use cases and the time you spend dicking around on building ticketing software that already exists is time you're not spending on shipping, and at the end of the day Jira is like $15/seat at sticker price, why are you bothering?

And that's why Jira is both terrible and still popular.

I last used Atlassian stuff about a decade ago.

Did they ever get around to fixing basic bugs like "Jira and Confluence use different markdown dialects"?

They've had a decade to address those sorts of obvious problems that bite 100% of the end users of their stuff, and apparently employed over 1600 people during that decade. That's 160 centuries of person time. I wonder what it was wasted on, if not making their fairly small core product suite usable.

I think we're going to see more and more incumbent companies with big moats and terrible products get replaced with vibe coded solutions over the next year or two.

No, they simplified it by cancelling almost all non-cloud instances and moved to being a direct per-seat SaaS, with (apparently) all the same bugs but fewer features.

Still feels weirdly inefficient.

Why have every company vibe code their own semi-good bespoke tool when instead one company can handcraft the tool with optimisations much better than AI can ever dream of, and then sell that tool for a reasonable enough markup that the value proposition is big enough. Especially if the tool is open source open core, so companies can PR improvements they think will be broadly applicable.

> one company can handcraft the tool with optimisations much better than AI can ever dream of

You have never used an Atlassian product

I was talking to people I know about this topic and looking for obvious big success stories of vibecoding replacing enterprise tools like Atlassian I found they are very hard to find. At this stage I have no doubt that there are IT departments trying to displace SaaS products and re-engineer legacy systems, but it's probably too early to measure results.

And you're not likely to see any either, frankly, because you buy SaaS when you don't want to DIY.

It's easy to think of DIY software as "free" because you don't pay seat licenses, but DIY is expensive like a free yacht is expensive. It's a bottomless pit of money and time and upkeep.

Even if it's simple to implement, you still have to support it, update it, get people to use it, be on call if it tips over, teach people to use it, be forced to take it over when the person who wrote it leaves, etc, etc, etc

IT is a cost center and isn't staffed at the level of your revenue generator eng teams. You don't buy SaaS because you don't have other options, you buy SaaS to throw money at a vendor to take care of a problem for you, so your IT people can do the work you actually want them to do and not dick around rebuilding software that you already have.

If a thrown-together-quickly-with-left-foot tool is more or less as good as Atlassian's products, I wonder why they have been used in first place. Surely it can't be quality of the products. Nor price, as there are existing (even open source) alternatives that do the job well enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343156 Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI (reuters.com)

~yesterday, 273+ comments

Also:

An important update on our team https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342835 - Yesterday, 18 comments

steering wheel manufacturer lays off thousands in anticipation of self-driving cars

I really like this analogy, and I tend to think most analogies are contrived. This is spot on.

In this case, it is a little more than anticipation. Software dev job losses have already happened and continue to happen.

But have we seen any that are plausibly caused by AI, rather than just using AI as a cover for more boring, typical business reasons?

> But have we seen any that are plausibly caused by AI..

Does it matter if Atlassian is losing seat licenses because devs are being let go?

If that could be proven, then it would be a plausible cause. But without that detail, this is circular reasoning. Those people were let go for the same reason Atlassian let people go -- not AI, just a cover for more mundane business reasons.

0) Adopt AI; 1) Fire people; 2) People got no money; 3) People won't buy things, signup for services; 4) Enterprises feel pressure to optimize expenditure even more; 5) Enterprises invest into more AI; 6) Fire more people; 7) GOTO 0;

What do people use Atlassian for these days?

Back in the day we used Jira a lot. But we also had GitHub accounts. The integration of the two wasn't great so we switched to GitHub issues and kicked Jira to the curb. This saved money and also a lot of hassle in trying to keep the two in sync. I am wondering if many others went a similar route.

We did use Confluence and I do miss it. I would love to find an opensource replacement for it that stores files in markdown format. Like Obsidian, but for teams.

I feel bad for all the employees that were affected. Atlassian years ago started as an innovative company, look at their original mission statement. "Open company, no bullshit" and Don't F&%# the customer. They truly had great products that complemented each other. The problem now, is alot of the tools are not need, or can be made with some vibe coding.

Literally couldn't figure out the anti-pattern for rejecting all of the cookies so I moved on.

Firefox reader mode worked for me, but I agree it was terrible.

My plan with anti-patterns is to just turn away and move on to something else. People need to vote with their attention. If the content and information is important it will make its way to me eventually through a better channel. Yeah, it's selfish, but it's the only way I have to fight enshittification of the web.

Browsers can often delete/reject cookies, might be a better option than relying on websites to be ethical.

My only goal was to read the content that was linked and they put up a large full screen block.

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343156

I think it is a matter of a year or two where companies will be able to vibe-clone services like Atlassian provides easily.

> Cannon-Brookes emphasized in his blog post that Atlassian does not follow the philosophy of replacing people with AI. At the same time, he also stated, “It would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.”

Passive voice. It's not the situation, it's the executive's charted course of action in response to it. They are trying so hard to avoid any hint of culpability for the decision they are making. Laughable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com