I was in Atlassian and one of the impacted. Company spent ridiculous money on acquisitions and marketing and AI is the scapegoat.
Do you still love Python?
Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
291–300 of 320 posts
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#292Atlassian 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?
It went cloud-only and Atlassian discontinued the self-hosted version of Bitbucket. Not strictly neglect, likely just a business decision, but even still the cloud version of bitbucket remains a subpar UX.
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No one actually used that as a red flag except the OP themselves facetiously so that’s a bad example.
The AI version of what they wrote would be more like:
People have the wrong idea about who is getting fired. It’s not John Ive. It’s Jan ordering coffee.Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#294Layoffs 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…
Because they are now self-driving cats and continue to need less and less monitoring and intervention.
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#295Atlassian 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.
It seems like Jira is the worst issue wrangling nightmare, except for all the others. What can replace it today?
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#296Earlier 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.
Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re not. But if you’re right i think it’s more “investor wishcasting” than developers. It really doesn’t matter what us devs think. Investors and industry leaders have decided that AI development is the way forward and we’re going to be managing teams of agents from now on. So we’re not going back to fine-grained task management in jira - what used to live in jira will now live markdown f…
If I was controlling a swarm of 1000 agents who do all the dev work on my extremely complex enterprise SaaS product with tightly defined business logic I feel like I’d definitely want something like Jira to manage what they’re working on.
They could also pivot to developing something for that exact use case if it’s a bad fit and if there’s such clear demand.
But truly they’re just cost cutting here and AI is really neither here nor there.
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#297I 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 haven't looked at it recently but always felt that tools like Jira encourage poor management. Effective teams are small teams, and small teams should be communicating and working together across issues freely and frequently. It's generally harmful to have a manager assigning tasks outside of the actual day-to-day discussion without having to speak to someone directly or preferably in an open chat or thread where people can see the discussion.
And ideally the user facing chats and threads are directly linked in to the development chats or at least with channel notifications somewhere.
Task assignment tooling encourages managers to stress developers out with low priority tasks that often start off with incorrect requirements that the structure makes it hard to correct because it is then directly a disagreement with your boss and there is inherently not a discussion it. Whereas a chat at least has the concept of an informational response to a nonsensical task as being fairly standard.
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Redmine comes to mind? Or if you use jira for helpdesk then Request tracker
Also possibly OpenProject, which is an "open core" fork of Redmine
Too late to edit the above, but for anyone curious, here's a year old exchange about a Jira -> OpenProject migration tool:
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Rovo dev cli is pretty good though. Though that may just be because it talks to claude or openai in the backend.
I used it for a while a year or so ago when it was in beta and gave 20M free tokens daily
Re: Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point, but what if you were previously chaining horse carriage rides and now a car can cover the same distance as 10 of them with a single driver?
You can now deliver 10x the packages and make 10x money. What healthy business aims to stagnate in the face of a revolutionary technology?
I don't know, maximum package turnover might be bounded and most likely you were previously not constrained by lack of drivers already... Sure you might try and expand but why would that work better than before? Especially assuming all other providers now also have cars.