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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

#211

Post by bhadass »

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 agree that their products are quite stale, but a lot of that is cuz they're so deeply entrenched in enterprise workflows in a way that's incredibly hard to displace. switching costs for jira alone across a large org are brutal.

could an AI native competitor eventually eat their lunch? sure. but "no new sane company wants to use their products" is a stretch when their customer count is literally still growing double digits.

i would not say "writing on the wall" at all.

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

#212

Post by FireBeyond »

stavarotti wrote: post #163

We use Jira. We're trapped by the processes built around it. Once it's entrenched, it's rather difficult to remove. I eagerly await for something that can replace Jira, but fear that it too will be bastardized to fit the process for however long the process lives.

Linear has a very different vibe to it, but that's not inherently a bad thing. Have used Jira plenty, and even ServiceNow Agile Development (FML, makes Jira look like a paragon of software experience), but Linear is quite refreshing.

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

#213

Post by kstrauser »

laughing_man wrote: post #103
bastardoperator wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve written on this. Jira is a code smell. The only people I’ve ever known who liked it were the people I don’t want to deal with. It’s a dream tool for someone who wants to make a career out of looking busy and inventing process, and a nightmare to everyone else. Its presence in an org tells me, in italic capitals, that this is going to hurt.

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

#214

Post by NoPicklez »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #201
NoPicklez wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then you are not laying off because of cars. You are laying off because there is no market for what you are selling and you are not able to find new customers. In other words, the business is not doing well

I'm not saying Atlassian is or isn't doing well, but your market isn't going to infinitely expand, nor expand at the rate you need to keep up with your costs.

If you build cars and you replace people with robots, you might fire those people because those robots allow you to keep up with demand with less people. Your business is doing fine and well but you just need less people to do the same output. Better yet those robots might even produce more than what your demand is and therefore even if demand increases your ability to supply with less people still exists.

Businesses will always look to do the same output or more with less cost irrespective of whether the company is doing well or not. This is why we have also seen "AI layoffs" across companies that have had very good financial positions or even record sales.

The proof is in the pudding if AI actually improves productivity of those left over to justify it. But sometimes simple analogies can be rebutted by other simple analogies.

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

#215

Post by opo »

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.

It is amazing how that bit of corporate PR is still being quoted over 100 years later. In reality, Ford had huge turnover problems with his workers - one estimate is over 370% annual turnover. One way to help prevent turnover is to pay more, and it solved the problem. (Even so, the base pay was still actually $2.30 and to get the extra $2.70 you had to abstain from alcohol, keep your home clean, etc.)

https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/henry-ford-implements-5...

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

#216

Post by conception »

llama052 wrote: post #109
Rapzid wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Confluence supports markdown natively. Even its MCP uses markdown.

I don’t know exactly what the other issue is referring to.

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

#217

Post by pokstad »

bhadass wrote: post #211
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 agree that their products are quite stale, but a lot of that is cuz they're so deeply entrenched in enterprise workflows in a way that's incredibly hard to displace. switching costs for jira alone across a large org are brutal. could an AI native competitor eventually eat their lunch? sure. but "no new sane company wants to use their products" is a stretch when their customer count is literally still growing double…

You just described the typical innovators dilemma for SaaS software.

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

#218

Post by hiyer »

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.

They have enough enterprise customers to pay the bills for years though.

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

#220

Post by conception »

sally_glance wrote: post #100
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 honestly hope someone will read this comment and vibecode an Atlassian 2.0 platform, preferably open source. But really, I will take closed source and paid as well - just give me something that's on par in terms of features and integration but without the terrible UX. To be clear, I agree with the terrible products part - but currently they are not dying because there is no alternative platform which is flexible, s…

I vibe coded a native client for Jira that’s speedy for creating tickets. At this level, you could write something native and just use their API and have it be as quick as you’d like.
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