Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 320 posts

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

#191

Post by NoPicklez »

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…

In a world where you don't need 10 horses to do the job of 5 cars, because your business doesn't have a market for 10 cars.

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

#192

Post by NoPicklez »

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.

Well you might not, if your accessible market is 10 horses and 5 cars can fill that market need, then you're left with 5 people who aren't needed because your products don't meet the needs of 10 cars worth.

If your postal service services a population of a million people and it takes 1000 horses to do that easily, but it takes 500 cars, you don't have a need for those 500 extra people.

You can't deliver more packages if the packages aren't there to be delivered. Your product demand doesn't just magically scale up once supply meets it.

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

#193

Post by ccosky »

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.

I tested out Atlassian Rovo last year. I tried to get it to list all of the Confluence articles I had written in 2025 so I could use that information for my performance review. It found three, regardless of how I queried it. I had actually written over sixty. I tried, but never did found a good use case for it. Too unreliable.

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

#194

Post by dragonwriter »

prpl wrote: post #178
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.

> Agile itself is predicated on software being difficult to ship/expensive.

No, the opposite; it is predicated on software being cheap and easy to ship, but hard to correctly anticipate the needs for.

> It might not make sense to continue (waterfall might be better actually)

Waterfall, not agile, is predicated on software being difficult to ship/expensive.

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

#195

Post by achenatx »

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…

when agile was fairly new I worked with remote developers that had 3 locations.

My specialty is software requirements and my team was brought in to do the product management. The developers had read somewhere if you were using a database to do requirements then you were doing agile wrong.

They wanted me to write post it notes in triplicate, then fedex them to all their offices.

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

#196

Post by mekael »

neal_jones wrote: post #71
mvdtnz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is developer wishcasting, to be frank. AI has not obviated the need for Jira and the idea that companies are moving to "something lighter" (what are they moving to?) has no basis in reality.

I don’t know about established companies pivoting but new operations/projects don’t seem to default to Jira like they did previously. In my very non-scientific sample size, I’ve noticed a shift in the last 3-6 months

What is everyone shifting to, and at what scale? I can see moving to breaking down tasks in separate markdown docs for a small(ish) startup, but working at a company of more then say 1k or so requires a bit more infrastructure to deal with the cross cutting concerns (compliance/legal, pm's, leadership, etc). I'm at a reasonably sized F500 and Jira is the default, despite how much all of us despise it, mainly because it ticks all of the boxes for aforementioned areas.

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

#197

Post by linkjuice4all »

ShinTakuya wrote: post #180
dozerly wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe in the past companies wouldn’t take the extra time for performance enhancements - but they’re apparently saying that AI is sooo good and speeds up work that they don’t need all of these extra people. So if their product was sped up it would enable their customers to work faster and lay off all of their extra employees (or just keep everyone and just do more stuff faster).

So are they doing this to make the product better or, as others have mentioned, they can’t innovate further and can’t grow their market so they need to cut costs.

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

#198

Post by heavyset_go »

SoftTalker wrote: post #175
Refreeze5224 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Read Citigroup's plutonomy paper: https://www.sourcewatch.org/images/b/bc/CITIGROUP-MARCH-5-20...

The strategy for institutional investors is to invest in servicing the needs of the already rich, at the expense of investing in companies that serve working people. The former is much more profitable than the latter, and the latter is becoming less profitable over time.

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

#199

Post by estimator7292 »

mbesto wrote: post #186
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…

> Layoffs because of AI make no sense to me. That's because these layoffs aren't about AI. They're about firms that overhired and Wall St is (finally) having a sobering moment of their (profit) growth potential.

This line has been repeated ad nauseum for years at this point.

How long does a "sobering moment" last? Two years? Five? Ten?

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

#200

Post by jboy55 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #194
prpl wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Agile itself is predicated on software being difficult to ship/expensive. No, the opposite; it is predicated on software being cheap and easy to ship, but hard to correctly anticipate the needs for. > It might not make sense to continue (waterfall might be better actually) Waterfall, not agile, is predicated on software being difficult to ship/expensive.

Imagine doing AI development in waterfall. You spend weeks writing your prompt, when you think you have it perfect, only then do you submit it to the AI. Then you wait a week or so, and see what it produced, expecting it to be exactly what you wrote.

Or, do you tell it the basic functionality you want, test it out, then add feature after feature that you want, sometimes dropping them and sometimes adding new ones that you thought of as your worked.

Post reply on HN