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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

#41

Post by vips7L »

verelo wrote: post #11
tombert wrote: post #7

Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse... I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors. Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude. Unless th…

It's likely not all this, but i expect an element is: there is a meaningful number of people essentially refusing to work with AI. Antidotal but I have spoken to friends at Google who are telling me many co-workers say "I tried it didn't work, ill do it myself" when really they just didn't try very hard at all.

Does it matter how someone gets their work done as long as its done on time? Why does using a specific tool matter?

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

#42

Post by esskay »

mjfisher wrote: post #35

Can anyone recommend good alternatives to Jira? Things that keep me defaulting to it: - Scales well from simple configuration and workflows to more complex multiboard views/custom fields/layouts per issue type etc - Good OOTB integration with common CI/CD - see PRs, deploys etc from each ticket - Good (adequate?) integration with their wiki in Confluence - JQL for being able to do custom reporting tooling (get me all…

Notepad.

Seriously, you need a heck of a lot more than a random HN reply to give you Jira alternatives if you've been embedded into its ecosystem for any length of time - and my condolences if you have.

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

#44

Post by bartread »

tombert wrote: post #7

Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse... I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors. Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude. Unless th…

> Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors.

Alternative take: I can't speak for BitBucket because I've never used it, but I've had enough time with JIRA and Confluence to last a lifetime, and these products are so bad - so clunky, so slow, so much friction in the UI - that I can't really see what useful value adding work Atlassian's 16,000 employees have actually been delivering. From that perspective losing 1600 of them seems like it's not likely to make much difference since, from my perspective as a user, they didn't appear to be doing anything useful in the first place.

I'm sorry if that comes across as a particularly savage take but Atlassian have wilfully been churning out absolute garbage for at least 15 years now (there was a time, in around 2006/7, when I thought JIRA was quite good - genuinely) and their products have made me miserable throughout a good chunk of my career, so my sympathy is pretty limited. If they can be bothered to make the products better, faster, more usable, and remove friction ruthlessly at every turn in their workflows, then I might well change my point of view.

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

#45

Post by Avicebron »

Sol- wrote: post #19
tombert wrote: post #7

Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse... I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors. Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude. Unless th…

> there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done I definitely buy this for the software sector or the economy as a whole, but for an individual company? Seems one would be bottlenecked by various factors quickly. Perhaps better to let people go so that they can be productive elsewhere?

> Perhaps better to let people go so that they can be productive elsewhere?

True. Joining thousands of other unemployed developers sending applications into a job posting for a nonexistent role online is very productive. Probably good for the economy too now that I think about it.

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

#47

Post by twoodfin »

bombcar wrote: post #32
heohk wrote: post #16

What does the "incur $230 million in charges" mean? Why would it cost them money to lay people off and have less office space? Possibly a bad LLM edit; maybe they meant to say would save $230 million through reduced headcount and less office space?

Usually layoffs have a one-time charge associated with closures and severance and other such payments (COBRA?). But $230 million over 1,600 is $145k per person.

I’d guess some of that is accounting for taxes on profit they’ll now have to pay that otherwise would have been deductible if spent on salaries for R&D?

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

#48

Post by p0u4a »

mjfisher wrote: post #35

Can anyone recommend good alternatives to Jira? Things that keep me defaulting to it: - Scales well from simple configuration and workflows to more complex multiboard views/custom fields/layouts per issue type etc - Good OOTB integration with common CI/CD - see PRs, deploys etc from each ticket - Good (adequate?) integration with their wiki in Confluence - JQL for being able to do custom reporting tooling (get me all…

Linear

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

#50

Post by icedchai »

heohk wrote: post #16

What does the "incur $230 million in charges" mean? Why would it cost them money to lay people off and have less office space? Possibly a bad LLM edit; maybe they meant to say would save $230 million through reduced headcount and less office space?

"Charges" are severance and related benefits. If they have to close offices, they may have to break leases, etc.
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