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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

#41

Post by maccard »

taurath wrote: post #8
throwaway4good wrote: post #7

I didn't realize that they were unprofitable; not good. I don't think they should be valued as a pre-profit/pre-revenue growth stock - as the article says - the product doesn't really have network effects or strong lock-in.

JIRA has huge feature creep lockin along the likes of sales force. It costs huge amounts of money on consultants to move off of it. Any new company probably wouldn’t use it though, it’s just overkill.

> JIRA has huge feature creep lockin along the likes of sales force.

Sure Jira has lockin, but so does any tool with any features. Git has lockin, but you don't hear of people avoiding branches in case they need to move to perforce.

> Any new company probably wouldn’t use it though, it’s just overkill.

So what should they use instead? The thing about jira is it does the basics well, far better than any of the competitors we evaluated. Sure it's not perfect, but no tool is.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#42

Post by ed_blackburn »

yardstick wrote: post #11
encryptluks2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Massive pile of garbage is more like it. As a developer, the only thing slowing me down from getting work done was waiting on JIRA and being told to use the crap they call Confluence to document things.

What do you recommend instead? JIRA & Confluence seem to be the best of a bad bunch. I do miss the self-hosted option.

Treat it like a software problem, start with the simplest thing that'll work and then introduce more complexity or features when you need them. Chances are you'll start with GH issues or a shared doc in a productivity suite and where ever you land, it won't be JIRA.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#43

Post by threeseed »

zeusk wrote: post #25
zelos wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - JIRA is almost a textbook example of lock in. Moving a large company's workflow would mean months of disruption.

I helped a prior employer move to github and asana through JIRA's own APIs. It's actually not that hard and the entire engineering group was very cheerful of the change.

Be curious what the size of the engineering team and company was.

Asana is great for SMBs but for larger developer teams it lacks a lot of features and integrations.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#44

Post by Majestic121 »

gaff33 wrote: post #12

Does anyone actually like using JIRA? Or Confluence? Or any of the Atlassian products?

I don't know anybody that likes using JIRA, but to be fair I don't know anybody that likes to use Asana either.

I might be wrong, but I think those tools are dedicated to something people don't like to do by default (planning, going through bureaucratic processes), so they don't like the tool either.

But for some reason, they convince themselves that they don't like to go through Bureaucratic Processes because of JIRA/Asana/etc... and that if only the tool was better it would be a breeze, when in my experience the process is the real issue, rarely the tooling (even though it surely can be improved)

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#45

Post by yobbo »

> Combined with employing more than 8000 people, this means that Atlassian is unprofitable

In 1991, Microsoft had 8000 employees. It was producing DOS, Windows 3*, Office, OS/2, tools and compilers. Windows NT was in development.

They did not use Jira.

I think the main feature of these tools is to make people, who would otherwise be unproductive, feel and look productive. Maybe those people are managers that should never have managed software development. Idk.

(https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/microsoft_company....)

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#46

Post by mr90210 »

mr90210 wrote: post #38
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…

As a programmer, I actually like Jira. It works.

I've tried YouTrack from JetBrains, and I've found its UX quite bad. I've used Asana, Trello, Microsoft (they had/have a tool for project management), Github Project. None of them seemed to work as well as Jira. (My opinion).

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#47

Post by Juliate »

threeseed wrote: post #22
jakub_g wrote: post #6

> While it is still used by many tech businesses (including the author’s), it has no real network effect — that is, users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system). Lol. At some companies, Jira workflows literally run the whole company. At my prev job, prod deployments were tightly linked to Jira.

The thought of running a 10,000+ development team using Basecamp is hilarious in its insanity. Because that is where Jira primarily plays. In enterprise companies where it's rolled out across the organisation with tentacles firmly embedded into almost every process and system. And whilst people continue to criticise Jira it continues to grow because in reality it competes with products like Rally not Asana. And there…

Indeed Jira scales a lot (although being slow) and is well customisable and flexible. Its plugin system is also great (although a better documentation of how to develop/maintain one, and of their APIs would grealy help).

But in the meantime, it requires increasing discipline and regular revampings of internal processes across dev, product, market teams, and that's a lot of energy to burn to make it "work" across an org.

Even more when you have people that are for very strict and precise adherence to processes.

Whereas a less flexible, good enough system could help funnel the same energy towards something more productive than just internal compliance for the sake of it.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#48

Post by aniforprez »

jpalomaki wrote: post #33
gaff33 wrote: post #12

Does anyone actually like using JIRA? Or Confluence? Or any of the Atlassian products?

I like both JIRA and Confluence. I think many bad feelings towards JIRA are actually related to bad configuration. Like customizing the issues to add too many mandatory fields or creating a process that does not really match how people are working in practise. JIRA configuration is pain. Unless you are large enough to afford a dedicated JIRA admin, it would likely make sense to just pay for somebody once in a while t…

All my bad feelings are almost completely related to the horrible search, terrible UI and the hilariously bad performance of the app. The web app has two completely different markdown adjacent formats that are not compatible with each other so you get text rendered one way when you create a ticket and another when you edit it later. Search is almost never helpful beyond finding recent tickets. Multiple pages take so long to load abs the new UI is so laggy and busted

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#49

Post by gabrielgio »

gaff33 wrote: post #12

Does anyone actually like using JIRA? Or Confluence? Or any of the Atlassian products?

I tolerate Jira (even though it is too slow and clunky to me). But I despise everything else from Atlassian. I don't understand how people can stand using Confluence or Bitbucket.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#50

Post by zelos »

zeusk wrote: post #25
zelos wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - JIRA is almost a textbook example of lock in. Moving a large company's workflow would mean months of disruption.

I helped a prior employer move to github and asana through JIRA's own APIs. It's actually not that hard and the entire engineering group was very cheerful of the change.

Really? Was it easy enough to define mappings between all the various fields/ticket types etc? I guess you could do it per-team across an organisation.

It always seems hard enough to get information out of JIRA using JIRA when I watch our PO in planning meetings.

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