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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

#301

Post by neal_jones »

mekael wrote: post #196
neal_jones wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know about established companies pivoting but new operations/projects don’t seem to default to Jira like they did previously. In my very non-scientific sample size, I’ve noticed a shift in the last 3-6 months

What is everyone shifting to, and at what scale? I can see moving to breaking down tasks in separate markdown docs for a small(ish) startup, but working at a company of more then say 1k or so requires a bit more infrastructure to deal with the cross cutting concerns (compliance/legal, pm's, leadership, etc). I'm at a reasonably sized F500 and Jira is the default, despite how much all of us despise it, mainly because…

Yea, I’m just consulting with small projects. A year ago Jira felt like the default, last month I learned about Linear.

I’ve just been surprised lately at how often it isn’t the first thing mentioned. I came from a Fortune 500 and Jira was mostly hated there as well. I still think its foothold is so big that it’ll be a long time before anyone goes through the effort to migrate. I’d personally rather live with it than try to replace it.

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

#302

Post by mvdtnz »

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 “…

> In fact it has not had a single profitable year since its IPO in 2015.

What's frustrating is that the company was profitable from its second year, and a really good little money maker too. I was working there at the time and I was proud to be working at one of the few tech companies actually turning a profit. Then IPO came, then literally overnight we switched gears and "reinvested every dollar into growth" and decided we'd just be another dumb money losing tech company.

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

#303

Post by mvdtnz »

ilaksh wrote: post #297
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 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 pe…

Jira is not a task assignment machine. Jira is, in fact, designed to facilitate exactly what you claim effective teams need to do.

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

#304

Post by tavavex »

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…

You have a package delivery business. The business is stable and optimized, serving all houses in your city. Each courier has a route planned out that they follow each day. They take 8 hours to complete the route and deliver to each house along the way.

Now, cars come along. With the new efficiencies, you find that now a courier takes only 6 hours to do their route. The number of buildings in the city has not increased, there's a cap to how much service you need to provide after which there's no longer any additional benefits. So, do you cut everyone's work day to 6 hours, or do you fire 25% of all couriers and re-route the rest so they now do 8 hour days on longer routes using cars?

Your solution assumes that the extra workforce immediately translates into free growth, but the growth of many businesses is constrained by outside factors. Here it would be the population of your served area.

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

#305

Post by tech_tuna »

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 just started using Linear, it is AI native/friendly and a million effing times less bloated than Jira. So long Jira. And I say that as an old shit who migrated from Bugzilla to Jira a long time ago and I remember how refreshing Jira felt at the time.

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

#306

Post by tech_tuna »

dozerly wrote: post #118
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 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.

The first step in fixing something is being aware that it needs to be fixed.

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

#307

Post by tech_tuna »

FireBeyond wrote: post #212
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.

Linear is what Jira was back around 2008-2009. I just started using it, it's a breath of fresh air.

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

#308

Post by ptak_dev »

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…

[flagged]

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

#309

Post by intexpress »

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 “…

Atlassian was famously bootstrapped and profitable since inception. They were one of the only profitable tech companies at a time when everyone else was busy making bigger and bigger losses.

If they have really been unprofitable for the last decade that is very sad.

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

#310

Post by disqard »

luckymate wrote: post #256
disqard wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does your comment pass that bar?
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