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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

#101

Post by jonathrg »

tombert wrote: post #60
bartread wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors. Alternative take: I can't speak for BitBucket because I've never used it, but I've had enough time with JIRA and Confluence to last a lifetime, and these products are so bad - so clunky, so slow, so much friction in the UI - that I can't really see what useful value adding work Atlassian's 16,000 emplo…

I haven't used BitBucket in awhile but I remember it being "not that bad". I agree with pretty much everything you said; I don't actually think that it's due to AI is my point. If their products are terrible and they're finally losing business over it, it makes enough sense to fire 10% of the workforce. I just don't think AI has much to do with it.

Bitbucket is okay to use, the main problem like with every Atlassian product is that it is dog slow.

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

#102

Post by dbbk »

elzbardico wrote: post #72

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.

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.

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

#103

Post by laughing_man »

bastardoperator wrote: post #54
eek2121 wrote: post #2

This is fine. I suspect many folks have been trying to get away from JIRA and related apps for a while now. chef's kiss

If a shop tells me they use Atlassian/Jira I see that as a big negative.

I'm retired now, but if I were looking for a job I'd try to find a company not using Atlassian products. In theory you're not supposed to use them as a (micro-) management tool, but companies like to do just that.

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

#104

Post by sally_glance »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #58
alexpotato wrote: post #34

Chartr Daily had this chart [0] back in 2023 and it shows how much the big tech firms grew from 2016 to 2022. Some of the firms, Apple being the exception, doubled or even almost tripled in size. I'm sure AI is partly to blame here but I think a lot of it is over hiring and firms just getting bogged down in bureaucracy and trying to clear things out. 0 - https://www.instagram.com/p/CnxN-Mayo3N/

I don't think AI is even partially to blame. Unless Atlassian is claiming AI can fully replace 1,600 workers, layoffs don't make sense. You need people driving AI to get the benefits. Its like a courier service that uses horses firing people once cars are invented because cars are faster than horses. You would switch everyone from horses to cars and deliver more packages.

Good point, but what if you were previously chaining horse carriage rides and now a car can cover the same distance as 10 of them with a single driver?

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

#107

Post by falcor84 »

mempko wrote: post #87
falcor84 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a very different skill set and culture for driving and maintaining cars than for driving and maintaining horses. I honestly think that for big changes like this (if you are willing to accept that AI is such), looking at it from the portfolio management angle, it makes more sense to just nuke the current operation and start a greenfield one.

Senior engineers have been 'vibe coding' for over a decade before AI. Think what they do, they look at PRs all day and comment. Magically the code change reflecting their comments. It's the same thing now but machines are doing it, not humans. The issue is that junior engineers have no experience working like senior engineers. The reality is that it's not that hard to work in this way. There is no excuse for software…

That's a very nice analogy. I agree and thinking about my previous comment, I suppose I just lashed out because I really dislike Jira the product and don't think that it can be salvaged, but I don't have anything against the engineers working there, and agree that they can be mentored and reassigned to a product where they'd be able to create something good.

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

#108

Post by mhitza »

elzbardico wrote: post #72

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.

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.

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

#109

Post by llama052 »

Rapzid wrote: post #95
elzbardico wrote: post #72

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.

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

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.

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

#110

Post by kgeist »

lousken wrote: post #57
mjfisher wrote: post #35

Can anyone recommend good alternatives to Jira? Things that keep me defaulting to it: - Scales well from simple configuration and workflows to more complex multiboard views/custom fields/layouts per issue type etc - Good OOTB integration with common CI/CD - see PRs, deploys etc from each ticket - Good (adequate?) integration with their wiki in Confluence - JQL for being able to do custom reporting tooling (get me all…

We've switched to Jetbrains Youtrack, it doesn't have as many features, but turns out nobody was using most of them anyway. It's Jira + Confluence bundled together including SSO.

We (~200 devs) migrated from Jira to Youtrack 10 years ago, and its functionality has been more than enough. Honestly, I don't remember anyone ever seriously complaining about it, aside from maybe a few nitpicks. A very solid product.
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