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

reuters.com

231–240 of 320 posts

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

#231

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.

A lot of problems (I’d say the majority in tech) can be solved faster and better by 100 people than 1600.

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

#233

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 what world does a healthy growing business react to this by laying off couriers "in a pivot to automotive transportation".

Millions of horses got shipped to the glue factory. And many more farriers and stablemasters got laid off.

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

#234
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…

In my last jobs Jira was used, and despised by all except product managers. It just becomes a mess. In my startup (now 20 people), we use Trello. Outsiders look at us funny. I respond that its the same company after all...

The best task management solution is the one you just moved to as it doesn't have years of junk in it.

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

#235
Atlassian has 16,000 employees worldwide and reported a net loss of $257 million last year. In fact it has not had a single profitable year since its IPO in 2015. And as expected its stock price is in the dumpster, down to $75 from its peak of $440 in 2021 (-83%).

So, like a lot of the tech industry this is simply a case of overhiring, overspending and general mismanagement. And like every other layoff announcement “AI” is a convenient scapegoat to hide executive dysfunction.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Confluence used to be built on top of pretty standard plain wiki markup that could be edited without being forced into a bad visual editor, even easy to edit in an external text editor to not have to spend so much time in the web UI at all. I remember having an Emacs mode for it installed.

Looking this up now, Wikipedia says the wiki markup was abandoned already in 2011. Not that I think Confluence was ever a great wiki, but at least having pages that were backed by some resonable plaintext markup was much better than not having that.

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

#237
post #176

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_.

I found this the other day, pretty cool concept of how kanban could work in an AI future. https://www.vibekanban.com/

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

#238
post #235

Atlassian has 16,000 employees worldwide and reported a net loss of $257 million last year. In fact it has not had a single profitable year since its IPO in 2015. And as expected its stock price is in the dumpster, down to $75 from its peak of $440 in 2021 (-83%). So, like a lot of the tech industry this is simply a case of overhiring, overspending and general mismanagement. And like every other layoff announcement “…

Your assessment is spot-on! These entities have been on shaky ground for a while, and AI is a convenient scapegoat for justifying their unavoidable downsizing.

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

#239
post #235

Atlassian has 16,000 employees worldwide and reported a net loss of $257 million last year. In fact it has not had a single profitable year since its IPO in 2015. And as expected its stock price is in the dumpster, down to $75 from its peak of $440 in 2021 (-83%). So, like a lot of the tech industry this is simply a case of overhiring, overspending and general mismanagement. And like every other layoff announcement “…

Profit is just one metric that affects the stock. YoY Revenue growth was historically in 40s and high 30% year on year. But last year was sub 20%. Investors are re-evaluation SaaS company multiples through a new lens of AI. Personally I wonder if Fortune 500 can renegotiate lower margin pricing with the "We could just build this with AI in house" BATNA argument.

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

#240

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 your analogy they aren't laying off the drivers, they laying off the horses.

Iow, humans are the horses in this analogy.

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