In the 90s and oughts everything was insecure by default. It was the golden age of teenage hackers. AI is ushering in a new golden age of insecure by default software.
Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
151–160 of 320 posts
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#152Is there a site that can be used to track which companies have done layoffs thus far because of AI-adjacent reasons?
... all of them at this point? ;-)
Be interesting to see the numbers graphed over time.
Funny thing about AI layoffs is the cloud cover it provides to do it. Which I know is not a fresh insight. :-)
In HR speak, if you 'reduce headcount' because you over hired or needed to cut costs, then that's a bad signal to the markets.
If you do it because of AI efficiencies, you are an innovative industry leader and your stock goes up.
Atlassian stock up 2% on the news :-/
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBF they have made major improvements, IMHO, to Jira and Confluence over the past few years.
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.
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#154If they are paying them 6-month severances like Block did, this means they are effectively saying 1,600 people for 6-months wouldn't have fixed JIRA's usability and performance, which if they could have done like many have been begging, they'd would probably make more money long-term than this firing would save.
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Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#155Please 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…
This is a tacit acceptance that AI maybe isn't as great as they make it out to be.
And since the fact that claude code is an electron app and not AI generated optimized binary per platform, it's abundantly clear that perhaps AI is not all they hype it up to be.
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#156If they are paying them 6-month severances like Block did, this means they are effectively saying 1,600 people for 6-months wouldn't have fixed JIRA's usability and performance, which if they could have done like many have been begging, they'd would probably make more money long-term than this firing would save.
I wholeheartedly believe that they could not have fixed it with 9,600 people months of work. They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that.
> They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that.
which may actually be the problem. I suspect that there is actually some ideal ratio that could be calculated of Input Fields / Dev, LoC / Devs, or maybe Unique Pages / Dev, or some mix of all of the above. Some of the metrics I hear out of places like airbnb absolutely blow my mind (>5000 engineers! wtaf are they all doing?!?). I can sort of see the #s at google, MS making sense given the breadth of the problems they are solving, but other places, not so much.
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#157AI reduces the need for expensive labor, payroll taxes and health insurance premiums, yet the cost of the company's service keeps going up. How does that happen?
Because you presumably did the same and now have more money to spend!
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#158Where are the most popular alternatives to Jira?
I'm interested in OSS alternatives, even if not as popular.
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#159Layoffs because of AI make no sense to me. Imagine you own a company that is paid to deliver packages. You use horses and differentiate by delivering quicker than everyone else. Then cars are invented and everyone starts delivering packages faster. In what world does a healthy growing business react to this by laying off couriers "in a pivot to automotive transportation". Would a healthy business not switch everyone…
They just announced GA of agentic assignees. It suggests a year or more of maturation. Rovo Dev has already been a thing. The Java products are almost EOL. They have already been assigning JAC tickets to Rovo and $TEAM is down. What else should be done with the surplus headcount?
Can someone fix the damn Slack plugin so it stops asking me to turn it on every time someone posts a Jira link? I have dozens of messages from the plugin saying "Got it! Will not ask you again."
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#160Atlassian is cutting jobs because no new sane company wants to use their products. Confluence was once innovative but now has gone stale. Jira is a nightmare and is most ripe for the AI based replacement. Bitbucket is a neglected product that has lost ground to GitHub and GitLab. The writing has been on the wall for Atlassian for years.