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Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

smartcompany.com.au

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Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#171

Post by nerdponx »

virtualritz wrote: post #153
rob74 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...and have huge knowledge bases in Confluence. I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery - in the huge datasets you have in mind, finding the page you are looking for is more a matter of luck than anything else. And once you found it, you can never be sure if it's still up to date. > Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around for a while. I…

> I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery [...] Spot on from my experience using it in big orgs. The issue IMHO is that organization of knowledge is not following any system and/or no system that could be followed was ever set in place by the organization when they bought into Confluence. It's kinda like ordering an Airbus because they're a reliable plane. Then you sell tickets and everyone is board of course…

I feel like the only benefit of Confluence over any other wiki-like product is the ability to tag users and link to Jira issues.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#172

Post by Aachen »

yobbo wrote: post #84
Aachen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also built pyramids without excavators but that doesn't mean it's not helpful. Just because old systems could be built without specifically using jira, by itself, is not an argument. You could make the same argument that, clearly, we don't need Java or JavaScript because we also got by fine on Fortran and C in the past. Without doing an actual comparison, it's just as silly an argument as the claim that these to…

> They also built pyramids without excavators but that doesn't mean it's not helpful False analogy. The point here is that productivity in old Microsoft was far higher, and that the failing piece in modern development might not be the ticket system.

> The point here is that productivity in old Microsoft was far higher

That sounds virtually impossible to prove between unequal situations, and especially "far" makes it seem like an exaggeration / tall order (productivity between people isn't like wealth or popularity: some things change by multiple orders of magnitude, but how hard you can work doesn't, especially when averaged across thousands of employees), but to be fair I didn't read the whole fourteen thousand word source you added so I suppose I can't say for sure.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#173

Post by bodge5000 »

the_duke wrote: post #54

> users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost That's just plain nonsense. I dislike using Jira as much as anyone, mainly because it's so excruciatingly slow. But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality and provides the same long-term flexibilty. Many companies have built entire workflows (not just development related) around Jira, an…

> Confluence is actually fine

My main problem with confluence is that it doesn't know what kind of text editor it wants to be. Sometimes its markdown (or rather its own undocumented flavour of markdown), sometimes its a rich-text editor, sometimes its just plain text, and you kind of figure out on the fly what to do. Also the codes boxes are absolutely massive and a bit of a pain to work with (which, like all of these problems, could be solved with just normal markdown).

In the grand scheme of things though, its a minor annoyance.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#174

Post by prmoustache »

virtualritz wrote: post #153
rob74 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...and have huge knowledge bases in Confluence. I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery - in the huge datasets you have in mind, finding the page you are looking for is more a matter of luck than anything else. And once you found it, you can never be sure if it's still up to date. > Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around for a while. I…

> I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery [...] Spot on from my experience using it in big orgs. The issue IMHO is that organization of knowledge is not following any system and/or no system that could be followed was ever set in place by the organization when they bought into Confluence. It's kinda like ordering an Airbus because they're a reliable plane. Then you sell tickets and everyone is board of course…

What is their fault is how slow it is.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#175

Post by adwww »

jpalomaki wrote: post #33
gaff33 wrote: post #12

Does anyone actually like using JIRA? Or Confluence? Or any of the Atlassian products?

I like both JIRA and Confluence. I think many bad feelings towards JIRA are actually related to bad configuration. Like customizing the issues to add too many mandatory fields or creating a process that does not really match how people are working in practise. JIRA configuration is pain. Unless you are large enough to afford a dedicated JIRA admin, it would likely make sense to just pay for somebody once in a while t…

> bad configuration

I briefly worked at a company with 1,000+ devs. They all used a single locked down Jira configuration.

It had something like 30 columns - it was almost totally unreadable.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#176

Post by MarkMarine »

jakub_g wrote: post #6

> While it is still used by many tech businesses (including the author’s), it has no real network effect — that is, users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system). Lol. At some companies, Jira workflows literally run the whole company. At my prev job, prod deployments were tightly linked to Jira.

How’s that working when Jira is down for almost a week and there is next to no feedback about the outage

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#177

Post by zac23or »

nickjj wrote: post #134

Somehow I'm not surprised. A few days ago[0] I was writing a Jira ticket after hitting the "Create" button and I wrote the description (the body of the ticket) for ~30 minutes. I switched the ticket type from A to B (no epics involved) and it wiped out the entire description. All I did was select a different item in a select drop down box provided by the form's UI. There was no warning it would clear the description…

I never write anything in any web interface. I write in notepad and copy and paste. I had many bad surprises ... I can't trust web interfaces. And I use the Windows clipboard manager too.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#178

Post by kenan_ »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #118
sien wrote: post #28

So with Slack there is Mattermost and Zulip. What are the equivalents for Jira ? Is there an openish source piece of similar software ? Jira cops a lot of hate on HN, but really to paraphrase Churchill on Democracy - "Jira is the worst issue tracking software, except for all the others". The comparison on Wikipedia has so many of them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_s... Are any of them a…

Anything really. If the issue in your company is tracking software, your company is probably full of anal PMs and a nightmare to work in. We used to use zenhub, nowadays we use github projects

This. Github projects or a tool like linear.app should be more than enough for most teams.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#179

Post by s-lambert »

mr90210 wrote: post #46
mr90210 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a programmer, I actually like Jira. It works.

I've tried YouTrack from JetBrains, and I've found its UX quite bad. I've used Asana, Trello, Microsoft (they had/have a tool for project management), Github Project. None of them seemed to work as well as Jira. (My opinion).

Microsoft's project management tool is Azure Dev Ops (used to be called Visual Studio Team Services), I found it pretty comparable to JIRA for the most part.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#180

Post by rjsw »

ArnoVW wrote: post #64
jakub_g wrote: post #6

> While it is still used by many tech businesses (including the author’s), it has no real network effect — that is, users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system). Lol. At some companies, Jira workflows literally run the whole company. At my prev job, prod deployments were tightly linked to Jira.

While it is true that Jira is "sticky", the statement was that it did not have a network effect. MS Word, Facebook, WhatsApp, Visa, they all have network effects: every user you add makes your product more compelling, thus creating a virtuous circle. You need to buy their product because other people have their product.

Jira can have a network effect.

ISO (the standards body) has started using it, I'm sure in part because large companies who contribute to standards were already using it. The committee that I am a member of switched from Bugzilla to it.

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