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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

#171

Post by themafia »

jarjoura wrote: post #165
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #63

Layoffs 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…

It’s not that they believe AI tools are replacing workers, it’s using the new free cash flow allows them to invest in AI. They are betting that their AI business will be profitable, and need to cut costs to invest in it.

> are betting that their AI business will be profitable

It could be. The idea that a business built on this framework won't immediately be picked apart by every competitor under the sun is entirely beyond me.

> and need to cut costs to invest in it.

If I'm right then this is just slashing your own throat so you can be the first to the bottom.

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

#173

Post by behehebd »

sally_glance wrote: post #104
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Good analogy but wrong number. Try 1.17x

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

#174

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

pokstad wrote: post #160

Atlassian 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.

As digital post-it notes, I’m not sure how I would replace Trello with AI. But otherwise I think your going to get mass agreement that Atlassian is running into the ground.

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

#175

Post by SoftTalker »

Refreeze5224 wrote: post #125
dozerly wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption behind this comment is that AI is more productive than Human + AI at this point in time, and I don’t think we’ve seen that be true yet.

No, the assumption is that companies are more interested in cutting labor costs than productivity. Even if you screw up and need to hire back 50% of those you fired, you still cut the labor costs of the 50% still fired. And you can pretend to be a cool, thought-leading, "AI-native" company, which might be enough to juice your share price enough to offset any actual productivity loss. Capital will always be in opposit…

Henry Ford (allegedly a Capitalist) thought he should pay his employees enough that they could afford to buy the cars his company produced.

Businesses ultimately need customers. In a world where AI does all the work, there will be no buyers.

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

#176

Post by mattdm »

pokstad wrote: post #160

Atlassian 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.

Jira is, uh, not my favorite software (ask my manager), but "AI-based replacement Jira" is the worst AI thing I've heard, and that's saying _a lot_.

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

#178

Post by prpl »

karim79 wrote: post #97

I see. So AI is reducing the number of jobs in the tech sector because fewer people are needed to ship stuff (thanks to AI). And since fewer people are needed across the tech sector then we don't need things like Jira anymore because it can all be done on post-its or Google sheets or something, so there's no need for Atlassian accounts anymore. And Atlassian can now do more with less thanks to AI. I can't wait for At…

Agile itself is predicated on software being difficult to ship/expensive. It might not make sense to continue (waterfall might be better actually)

The real problem is that company decisions will never be made as fast as software can be written (and rewritten) now.

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

#180

Post by ShinTakuya »

dozerly wrote: post #118
notfried wrote: post #114

If 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.

You're assuming performance has been the core priority, or even a priority at all, and I think this is a bad assumption to make. I would estimate a much smaller number of people-months of work if I were you.

Dev users assume the only problem a product can solve is performance, when there is a lot more than that in reality.

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