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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

#251

Post by ItsBob »

nunez wrote: post #182
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…

Glad you mentioned Google Sheets. I moved my personal task tracking from Trello to Notion to Sheets. Sheets has been the best for me. Infinite customizability, fast, lean.

I'm curious how you use Sheets as a Trello-like replacement. I use Trello from time to time but my most recent project is using actual Post-It notes stuck to my monitor, wall etc.

If Sheets works (I love simplicity) then I'll give it a go but I checked and I can't find any templates for Kanban or such.

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

#252

Post by nikau »

nemomarx wrote: post #12
tombert wrote: post #7

Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse... I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors. Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude. Unless th…

If everyone else is downsizing and using AI as an excuse, it's both a pretty good cover for any firing you might have wanted to do for a while, and you can reasonably assume you can hire back in the future because everyone else is firing too. Maybe you can even depress their wages a little?

Except you burn a tonne of cash on redundancy payouts

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

#253

Post by jiggawatts »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #156
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.

> They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that. which may actually be the problem. I suspect that there is actually some ideal ratio that could be calculated of Input Fields / Dev, LoC / Devs, or maybe Unique Pages / Dev, or some mix of all of the above. Some of the metrics I hear out of places like airbnb absolutely blow my mind (>5000 engineers! wtaf are they all doing?!?). I can sort of see the #s…

There was an interview with a lead tech at Uber about this some years ago, with the conversation starting with "why is the app so bloated!?" (in terms of megabytes) and his answer also answers your question:

The smooth and simple interface of the Uber app is the tip of the iceberg. His example was that their users don't (and won't) reinstall the app because they travel overseas. If anything, the time when you've just stepped out of an airport is precisely when you want the app to work smoothly!

The hiccup is that many countries have their own payment systems, Byzantine tax codes where this may or may not be displayed up front to the user (in various currencies and formats), there may be local laws around taxi-like services, etc... Some of those laws apply to areas smaller than a city, or may apply only to airport pickups, or the CBD area during congestion, so on and so forth.

The "core" app might be a simple thing that you can bang out over a weekend with an AI and a decent UI framework, but then you need to "draw the rest of the owl". Don't forget that there must be a matching app for the drivers! Different categories of drivers offering services that may be local to a region and totally absent elsewhere: rikshaws, tuk-tuks, taxi boats in Venice, and who knows what else!

AirBnB is very similar to Uber in this respect. They have to deal with about a hundred countries worth of law, often down to the state level. There's fraud detection. Customer support. Integration with travel agencies. Government-mandated reporting. Etc, etc...

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

#254

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

ccosky wrote: post #193
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.

I tried to pin my comment. It turned out after we migrated to the cloud version, this option disappeared and the ticket is flooded with commit messages making it essentially useless for humans. Rovo obviously faked a solution:

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-questions/How-to...

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

#255

Post by taurath »

ccosky wrote: post #193
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.

Atlassian Rovo is considered utterly dangerous on my team (as we are still encouraged to use it…), the first time I did it erased a whole page - it couldn’t get the most basic instruction correct, would leave out 80% of what I input, respond to corrections with the same problem. It’s just a liability.

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

#256

Post by luckymate »

disqard wrote: post #238
paxys wrote: 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.

this sounds like generic AI comment without any input into conversation

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

#257

Post by preisschild »

returnInfinity wrote: post #219

I don't get the atlassian backlash on HN JIRA is just fine, gets the job done. Its not slow like the on-prem. Jira cloud version is fine.

Have used both and personally find project tracking thats integrated into the git forge a lot better.

Have used Gitlab+Jira in the past and now only use Gitlab and like it a lot more.

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

#258

Post by Maxious »

Loxicon wrote: post #227
bhadass wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> is a stretch when their customer count is literally still growing double digits. source?

> Customers with over $10,000 in Cloud ARR increased 13% year-over-year, reaching 53,017.

https://www.xtb.com/int/market-analysis/news-and-research/at...

Wow, so impressive... wait cloud ARR? So if you discontinued your on premise products those customers would then become cloud ARR...

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

#259

Post by Maxious »

simonw wrote: post #115

Has anyone seen any hints as to the role make up of those 1,600 jobs? Would be interesting to know if they are majority engineering, or if that's a lot of sales and marketing and support and other roles in there.

Engineering including CTO. The makeup of Australian staff cannot be immediately decided due to local workplace rights laws requiring genuine consultation.

> The union representing Atlassian workers, Professionals Australia, said impacted employees were told on Thursday, with a consultation process to last until 19 March and final termination expected on 2 April.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/12/atlassian...

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

#260

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

NoPicklez wrote: post #214
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> your market isn't going to infinitely expand, nor expand at the rate you need to keep up with your costs.

The costs don't change. They were already paying those people. They just need to take advantage of the slight bump in productivity LLMs provide, not infinitely expand their market.

> Better yet those robots might even produce more than what your demand is

You are repeating the same idea from your original comment. The problem is that the demand is low. You are making something no one wants to buy.

> Businesses will always look to do the same output or more with less cost

this is not an accurate in general, but especially not in this situation.

There is a magic box that makes all of your employees get 50% more work done. You are an early adopter of the magic box in your industry, though others will likely follow soon.

Do you A) do 50% more work for free and get an early leg up or B) fire staff until you are achieving the same output as before, at a slightly lower cost.

Which seems the more logical option in the long term?

The only reason option B makes sense is if business is not going well and you can't afford to keep paying everyone.

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