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Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI

reuters.com

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Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI

#11

Post by verelo »

tombert wrote: post #7

Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse... I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors. Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude. Unless th…

It's likely not all this, but i expect an element is: there is a meaningful number of people essentially refusing to work with AI.

Antidotal but I have spoken to friends at Google who are telling me many co-workers say "I tried it didn't work, ill do it myself" when really they just didn't try very hard at all.

Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI

#12

Post by nemomarx »

tombert wrote: post #7

Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse... I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors. Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude. Unless th…

If everyone else is downsizing and using AI as an excuse, it's both a pretty good cover for any firing you might have wanted to do for a while, and you can reasonably assume you can hire back in the future because everyone else is firing too. Maybe you can even depress their wages a little?

Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI

#13

Post by siva7 »

tombert wrote: post #7

Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse... I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors. Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude. Unless th…

It's regular layoffs because of AI

Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI

#14

Post by alexpotato »

tombert wrote: post #7

Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse... I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors. Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude. Unless th…

> there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done

I distinctly remember a discussion where someone says "Man, I wish JIRA would add this feature/fix this bug"

Someone else pipes in: "I bet there is already a ticket on the JIRA bugtracker/feature board for this, it's not done and it's from 9 years ago" and lo and behold there was.

Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI

#17

Post by piker »

verelo wrote: post #11
tombert wrote: post #7

Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse... I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors. Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude. Unless th…

It's likely not all this, but i expect an element is: there is a meaningful number of people essentially refusing to work with AI. Antidotal but I have spoken to friends at Google who are telling me many co-workers say "I tried it didn't work, ill do it myself" when really they just didn't try very hard at all.

That would be a stupid reason to fire someone when the jury is still out on the net productivity benefits of using AI to code at scale.

Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI

#18

Post by bombcar »

tombert wrote: post #7

Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse... I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors. Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude. Unless th…

It is just regular layoffs, and doing so admits they don't know what to do with the 1,600 people anyway, and probably didn't know what to do with them for years.

AI isn't going to help, but it bandaids over the issue so the investors aren't spooked.

Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI

#19

Post by Sol- »

tombert wrote: post #7

Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse... I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors. Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude. Unless th…

> there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done

I definitely buy this for the software sector or the economy as a whole, but for an individual company? Seems one would be bottlenecked by various factors quickly.

Perhaps better to let people go so that they can be productive elsewhere?

Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI

#20

Post by piker »

heohk wrote: post #16

What does the "incur $230 million in charges" mean? Why would it cost them money to lay people off and have less office space? Possibly a bad LLM edit; maybe they meant to say would save $230 million through reduced headcount and less office space?

A charitable take would be that some of that is attributable to benefits packages to help the people transition to new work?
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