Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever • Hacker News Board

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#411

Post by rubzah » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 10:50 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #334

war1025 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying these are standard benefits in Europe? You didn't make it clear in your post, though I think that must be the angle you're coming from.

Except for the 13th month bonus, I’d say it’s pretty basic. You’d get those benefits working at a supermarket. Five weeks vacation is a legal minimum. Most companies I worked for here in Denmark will give you six. It’s technically not five weeks, but 25 days.

Even the '13th month' is standard, too, in Denmark, it is called 'vacation pay' and is accrued as a 12% added pay on top of your salary, but paid into a separate account, to be paid out when you go on vacation.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#412

Post by tsimionescu » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 11:02 AM UTC

smoe wrote: post #328

war1025 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying these are standard benefits in Europe? You didn't make it clear in your post, though I think that must be the angle you're coming from.

Benefits and regulations vary from country to country. I don't know details about eastern Europe, but all those are fairly common to different degrees in large parts of the continent.

It's mostly the same in Eastern Europe (Romania at least), with the exception of paid overtime (though technically legally required, it is often not enforced), and the 13th monthly salary only being common in some industries.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#413

Post by eurosenior » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 11:05 AM UTC

0xy wrote: post #402

dmitriid wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you surrender literally millions of dollars You don't. You spend those "millions" of dollars on ridiculously expensive medical care, on ridiculously expensive education, on car ownership, on... And in return you get worse infrastructure, worse medical care, worse ecology etc.

Education is a choice in our industry. I'm self taught and I'm paid the same as colleagues with PhDs. As for medical care, all half decent tech employers provide comprehensive healthcare coverage. I don't know what you've been reading, but unless healthcare costs $200,000 a year (it doesn't cost 1/10th of that), you're better off in the US. As for "worse infrastructure", you'll have to be specific. There's crumbling…

> I'll remind you that new grads in the US are often paid substantially more than senior level developers in the EU.

Yeah, ain't that right. I've been programming for 20 years, worked as a lead developer/architect and have usually been among the most highly compensated technical people in companies I've worked for. And yet I have never seen anything close to the kind of money fresh grads get at FAANG.

On the other hand, if I landed a job paying 300k-400k USD a year, I'd probably just retire after 4-5 years.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#414

Post by tsimionescu » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 11:17 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #345

james412 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd honestly work for the folk responsible for the BitBucket redesign, or the 6 billion lines of dynamic JS loaded for every Jira page? I'd sooner work the curb while living in a coal bunker

I know bashing on Jira is a popular pastime on HN, but I'm always surprised folks are not more introspective around why it's still so popular in the enterprise. It's because there are a million and one ways that teams like to work, and any one project has lots of different stakeholders with competing needs, and there really isn't any other tool that can scale out to this many use cases. I've certainly pulled my hair…

I was amazed at how rigid Jira is when I started using it (we used a heavily in-house customized version of Sabrina before, and Rally as well). Sure, if you have loads of time you can work with an admin to write custom code for it, but at the level of what one of many teams can do with it directly, it offers virtually no options.

You want to split stories and leave sub-tasks behind? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.

You want to Subtask estimates to accrue to the Story estimate? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.

You want to customize the sprint report based on custom labels? Nope, probably not Agile.

You want to plan the capacity of your team to see how much work you should take into an iteration taking into account vacations and partial availability? Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.

And on and on, with very basic needs...

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#415

Post by errantspark » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 11:39 AM UTC

momokoko wrote: post #282

errantspark wrote: post #46

The first thing that went through my head when I saw this headline was: "Huh, maybe I should send them a resume." I'm hype if this trend continues.

Hope you like working India(Bengaluru) timezone and working for India wages. Like most that are higher percentage remote, the vast majority of development is done outside of higher wage countries and due to government currency policies are out of reach for those in country with a higher cost of living. I’m shocked how naive people seem to be in these threads about remote work. There is tons of remote work. There alre…

You say that like it's a bad thing! Async work is a solvable problem. I want a fairer world.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#416

Post by anpago » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 11:42 AM UTC

quaffapint wrote: post #47

I'm noticing we're about 40/60 with more wanting to go back to the office at my midsize company. I'm happily with the 40, but the company is just using this time to spruce up the office just waiting for our return. I find communication and the work being better now then when we're in the office. All the cliques and hallway talk is more online, so I have a better clue what's going on. I wish it would stay that way.

This is going to be the issue those in groups or made relationships with those often in person are at present fine with. But those who haven't or as new teams and personnel come on board they will possibly not make that same real bond.

I think in 6, 12 or 24 months possibly longer for some. Many will regret when they look back they didn't realise what was really going on with the company. They just heard from their contacts and also heard what people wanted them to. They got stuck in a silio.

The new section of the office where a team was parachuted in which somehow has an impact.

How do people expect to form casual but often extremely useful contacts with the people who really know what's going on in other teams, department, divisions or other locations?

You won't hear the gossip from your workmate who works early or late, the postroom, the security guard or receptionist about that out of hours meeting the management team had or whatever.

How will you really know of you haven't been offered a poisoned promotion?

To a degree your rely on being told the full picture by those with the overview. Which is likely to be the management. Which no doubt may happen in many places the majority of times until the one time it really affected you or your team.

For example a group of us headed in to the Riverside sub office on the outskirts of London by the Thames yesterday. For aircon offices and a r oriverside pint at lunchtime as the UK had its hottest August day in 17 years.

Straight away those who caught on a group of us had met up in the office started to wonder why? With a number of messages and calls wondering what we were up to.

While we bonded and had a change of scenery. Some of those at home, for no reason got paranoid.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#417

Post by b3kart » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 11:42 AM UTC

onetimemanytime wrote: post #347

ryanSrich wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is hilarious to me as someone that has hired devs from Europe for a while now. Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k when you can pay an experienced developer from Europe $100k? I honestly never understood it.

>> Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k when you can pay an experienced developer from Europe $100k? I honestly never understood it. Because $300K vs $100K makes very little difference to them when they're printing money. One idea from a top dev can make the whole thing pay itself and then some, for years.

Surely you’re not implying devs in Europe are somehow inferior to devs in the US?

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#418

Post by mschuster91 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 11:45 AM UTC

0xy wrote: post #354

michaelcampbell wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he's the guy that can turn that around.

Atlassian undoubtedly has very smart people working there, but the absolute cluster mess of JIRA and their other flagships indicates deep management incompetence that favors shiny new feature over cleaning up the mountains of jQuery debt.

Atlassian has the Google problem: buying and half-ass integrating a competitor, shipping new features, that gives promotions to the people involved, but "menial maintenance" is not seen as necessary anywhere...

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#419

Post by user5994461 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 11:59 AM UTC

zhte415 wrote: post #410

strictfp wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so sure about that. I know plenty offices in Stockholm with free food, drinks and entertainment for employees.

Visited the Bloomberg office in London. If you rent a Bloomberg terminal they gave free training on multiple features. Encouraged to visit the cafeteria, all free for staff and clients with visitor pass. Good stuff. Salads, fruit, cakes, sandwiches. Looked around. No chairs. This was in vast contrast to my employer at the time where lunch was a practical siesta. Ok.. "so you take this back to desk?" I asked someone.…

That was the most shocking thing for me too.

Join a company in London. They have no seats. I'm not talking about free food or a company restaurant. Just having a place to sit with a table.

Re: Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever

#420

Post by sild » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 12:14 PM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #404

noir_lord wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company forced me back into a windowless massive open office back in June, I handed in my notice yesterday to take a better paid 100% remote position with a company that has been 100% remote for years before this crisis. That it also comes with a substantial pay rise, zero travel and the opportunity to work on stuff I actually find interesting is just a gigantic cherry on the cake. It was by far the largest factor…

Windowless is the worse! Good on ya. We are human dammit.

I once worked in an office with fake windows---just some blinds hung over a small recess in the wall.

When our team first arrived in the office, a colleague walked over to them and said something along the lines of `let's get some sunlight in here' before opening them to reveal the deception.