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Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

smartcompany.com.au

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Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#381

Post by dangerboysteve »

theturtletalks wrote: post #371
dalbasal wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that growth is better than profits was in-built into Atlassian's proposition to shareholders, ultimately. The slow and steady mentality is fine, but we see over and over that it isn't what the market wants. A private company or a high risk growth company, those are the two options for a software company. Either that or they'll be taken over. They're revenue now is just a $2bn, so that "grow grow" mindset fro…

Fundamentally, why would someone buy a stock of a company that doesn’t eventually make a profit or offer some sort of dividend? Seems like Atlassian traded profit for staying power, but can they leverage that staying power to bring value to their investors?

Amazon comes to mind.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#382

Post by ASalazarMX »

dalbasal wrote: post #284
ryanackley wrote: post #107

Worked there from 2008-2013. So early-ish employee here. I still have a chunk of shares from the original ESOP program. Saying that for full disclosure because I'm biased and this feels like a hit piece to me. When I worked there, they disclosed all financials in our internal Confluence site. There was a policy of full transparency with the employees. The owners (Mike and Scott) had impressive business discipline. Th…

The idea that growth is better than profits was in-built into Atlassian's proposition to shareholders, ultimately. The slow and steady mentality is fine, but we see over and over that it isn't what the market wants. A private company or a high risk growth company, those are the two options for a software company. Either that or they'll be taken over. They're revenue now is just a $2bn, so that "grow grow" mindset fro…

What's wrong with having a small or medium company? Why must a company sell its soul for the chance of becoming a money-printing behemoth in the future?

I understand that being small leaves you vulnerable to the predatory tactics of big players, but I see that as a consequence of lax regulation. There are too many mono/duopolies already, and the bigger they get, the harder it will be to split them apart.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#383

Post by ratww »

marcosdumay wrote: post #363
ratww wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked (as in actively worked) in a couple restructuring efforts, and it went fine, but it wasn't on tech, it was on education. It went massively well. The universities were financially healthier afterwards, and all the remaining employees had safer (union!) jobs. The trick for this being successful is most of the time by challenging the processes themselves, rather than the employees. Employees aren't useless,…

> because it requires introspection, egolessness and actual work, the sorta stuff that is rare in upper management It also may reduce the need for middle and upper management. In fact, if you give people some confidence that they won't be fire and instead you will use their work on some more valuable action, ICs will line up on your door with ideas on how to cut their processes. But management won't.

Exactly. In the two restructurings I worked there were lots of people that everyone knew were fundamental to the workings of the institutions. Those people were confident they would stay, and ended up getting amazing raises afterwards so they could continue. Most of the complaints were from teachers who were there for years but were still working only 4-8 hours week, or people that had purely bureaucratic functions.

Amusingly, the best "firing" in one of those was the Dean of the University that had a seven-figure salary. The board replaced him with an administrator and with someone else from the faculty, and both were more qualified, but costed 1/10 of the price (still a huge raise for them).

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#384

Post by dangerface »

ejb999 wrote: post #103
the_duke wrote: post #54

> users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost That's just plain nonsense. I dislike using Jira as much as anyone, mainly because it's so excruciatingly slow. But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality and provides the same long-term flexibilty. Many companies have built entire workflows (not just development related) around Jira, an…

>>But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality. But not everyone needs 'comparable' functionality - an awful lot of people use just some features and not others - because of the awful UI and terrible user experience, these people are ripe to be picked off by a competitor (existing or future). I agree, if a mega-corp is completely in bed with JIRA, its harder to switch, but for a comp…

Lockin is still an issue at smaller businesses. The boss doesn't care if it works well just as long as it work well enough. Trying to make arguments for better software based on ui/ux goes no where the higher ups just don't feel the pain of us plebs that have to use it.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#385

Post by mistrial9 »

dalbasal wrote: post #284
ryanackley wrote: post #107

Worked there from 2008-2013. So early-ish employee here. I still have a chunk of shares from the original ESOP program. Saying that for full disclosure because I'm biased and this feels like a hit piece to me. When I worked there, they disclosed all financials in our internal Confluence site. There was a policy of full transparency with the employees. The owners (Mike and Scott) had impressive business discipline. Th…

The idea that growth is better than profits was in-built into Atlassian's proposition to shareholders, ultimately. The slow and steady mentality is fine, but we see over and over that it isn't what the market wants. A private company or a high risk growth company, those are the two options for a software company. Either that or they'll be taken over. They're revenue now is just a $2bn, so that "grow grow" mindset fro…

> revenue now is just a $2bn

"only" $2bn ? this is bizarre to see discussed without question

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#386

Post by Philadelphia »

mr90210 wrote: post #252
crucialfelix wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The official VSCode Jira extension is much faster than the web UI. Fast to search, see your own issues, create, jql, integrated git. Highly recommend

Wow, I didn't know that there was such extension. Thx.

I’ve never been at a company where users could get the right permissions to use it, unfortunately

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#387

Post by tacitusarc »

new_here wrote: post #325
sien wrote: post #28

So with Slack there is Mattermost and Zulip. What are the equivalents for Jira ? Is there an openish source piece of similar software ? Jira cops a lot of hate on HN, but really to paraphrase Churchill on Democracy - "Jira is the worst issue tracking software, except for all the others". The comparison on Wikipedia has so many of them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_s... Are any of them a…

Linear.app is awesome. We switched from Jira and our team's participation on issues went through the roof. It's fast, clean, has keyboard shortcuts and replaces agile terminology with simpler, familiar paradigms. We activated Slack, Sentry and GitLab integrations too. It's a beautiful piece of software to use and part of the reason we chose it was to inspire ourselves to try build something of similar quality in our…

I hate how the elegant simplicity behind the agile development principles was so thoroughly co-opted by scrum, so now when people think “agile” they actually mean scrum but have no idea that’s what’s happening.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#388

Post by [deleted] »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #314
carlsborg wrote: post #303

I suspect the following is built into valuations of many software companies with subscription revenue models: they can reduce headcount dramatically and keep a relatively tiny headcount of staff around to sustain the existing recurring revenue and be highly profitable even in a slowing economy. For example how many people would MongoDB, with close to a billion dollars of annual revenue, need to keep the lights on, as…

I think this is not as straightforward as you make it sound. 1. Often the way companies are structured requires specific teams and processes to exist and unwinding that is not easy. 2. It can be very hard to identify which people are actually critical. If you get it wrong it’s a big problem. 3. Additionally, firing a large percentage of employees will create a very negative feeling in the remainder so they might leav…

[deleted]

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#389

Post by tacitusarc »

exyi wrote: post #329
zeckalpha wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trello is also an Atlassian product.

I know, but it was usable when I last used it. (and it was not designed by Atlassian AFAIK... and even if it would, I don't have anything against Atlassian except that they make really terrible software which I was quazi-forced to use)

Trello was founded by Joel Spolsky, the guy who made stackoverflow, and was sold to atlassian

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#390

Post by adrr »

RHSeeger wrote: post #209
the_duke wrote: post #54

> users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost That's just plain nonsense. I dislike using Jira as much as anyone, mainly because it's so excruciatingly slow. But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality and provides the same long-term flexibilty. Many companies have built entire workflows (not just development related) around Jira, an…

> Confluence is actually fine Confluence is the single, worst Atlassian product, in my opinion. I describe it as a wiki written by someone who has never used a wiki. It seems like everything about it is wrong in some way, and it's painful to use.

Have you used sharepoint?
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