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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

#281

Post by prpl »

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.

Waterfall came out when hardware and software had to be developed together, and appealed to traditional Engineering practitioners. You are right though, when the hardware constraints went away, software (more code) was cheaper and easier to ship in increments and iterate. But feature-rich products were still difficult to ship - and you had to pick and choose what things to spend your time on.

The SaaS-pocalypse is occurring versus investors don’t believe that to be true anymore.

I think they will still be wrong because ultimately people want people (particularly experts) to be held accountable for things - shipping high stakes software, running company ERPs/CRMs, and more.

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

#282

Post by vips7L »

ShinTakuya wrote: post #272
orangecoffee wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, the time for work is going down drastically, about a third of before. Are you not facing it?

If you're experiencing this you're either a very junior dev or you're not as senior as your title might suggest...

They’re not facing this. They’re just lying.

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

#283

Post by prpl »

jboy55 wrote: post #200
dragonwriter wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

I don’t think that’s what it would look like at all. The first stages would be cheap - mostly requirements gathering and research, but a bit more focus on that. A bit more time would be spent up front, but then you’d see multiple proposals being built, from that multiple plans being built, and finally multiple implementations to choose from. You might see A/B testing of multiple implementations or even products, and then a decision on which to pursue. You could move in multiple dimensions concurrently.

I’m not sure this is agile. I’m not sure it’s a waterfall.

We’ve got bounds on our infinite typing monkeys, but they increase every day

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

#284

Post by mbesto »

estimator7292 wrote: post #199
mbesto wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

A decision to cut 1600 jobs doesn't happen overnight.

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

#285

Post by happytoexplain »

ddoottddoott wrote: post #150
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 mean probably not. It's not 1,400 hardcore engineers and 200 Jony Ives being let go, it's a mix of everyone including randoms like HR and the person who orders the office coffee. Business is not good. Okay I just wrote an "it's not, it's..." organically, is this the zeitgeist or what.

It's not a zeitgeist, it's a common English sentence structure.

The em-dash observation makes sense. Obviously a minority of people reach for an actual em-dash. The "it's not X, it's Y" complaint is totally bonkers. We might as well call proper spelling a "sign of AI". I.e. yes, AI does it more than humans, but not by so much that it makes sense to be suspicious when you see it.

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

#286

Post by qsera »

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.

>Bitbucket is a neglected product...

Long time user here, Why do you think it is neglected?

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

#287

Post by chrisjj »

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…

> Would a healthy business not switch everyone to driving cars and deliver even more packages?

Not unless there were more packages to deliver.

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

#288

Post by CraigRood »

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.

I don't 'like' Jira, but it gets the job done. It's so easy to onboard users and assign tasks/issues across orgs. Structure is fairly simply and the filters with subscriptions is powerful. Android app that I use on my work phone just works.

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

#290

Post by _bypa »

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.

If Atlassian hasn't fixed Jira's lack of usability by now, they won't in the next six months or six years.
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