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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

#421

Post by steveBK123 »

geodel wrote: post #355
steveBK123 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia recessions are uncorrelated with US due to mining and other raw materials exports being a huge share of their economy... especially selling those materials to China. I doubt miners are big Jira users. US tech companies who are cratering right now though...

Ah, thats a big opportunity for some Agile consultants there. I see if few of those end up mines that would be epic for consultants but just another story for miners.

Sometimes I think software engineers are the only people passive enough to allow ourselves to be managed by agile tyrants.

Most other industries you’d probably have the workers unionize or murder the agile coaches, lol.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#422

Post by vogt »

Gigachad wrote: post #114
vogt wrote: post #77

It's tough for me to square with the JIRA hate. I don't mean to simply be contrarian here, I have limited (<6 months) experience. But the alternative horrors I've been forced to use - like Rally or a couple internal tools that were highly neglected - I can't imagine it's really _that_ bad...

I just find most stuff works better via GitHub tickets. Let the managers use whatever tool they want and then put actual work on GitHub.

Yes, that would be great. We use gitlab, but the budgeting is so siloed that for the most part only developers ever get credentials

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#423

Post by mayama »

idontpost wrote: post #396
ryanackley wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few counterpoints: - Your entire theory relies on VCs having some power over decisions being made at Atlassian. That isn't the case. The founders of Atlassian have always been in control. After taking VC money and going public, they still have over 80% of the voting shares [0]. - A downturn of 5+ years would be the longest downturn in the USA in the last 100 years [1]. Anything is possible but it's unlikely to be tha…

I think you're using "downturn" differently. GDP contraction won't last five years. But it will be longer than the GDP contraction before VC money becomes as easy as it was for the last five years.

Easy money being available after five years is also uncertain. With covid shock, then global sanction following Russian invasion, and deglobalization following in the wake of these two events, global economy is faces serious uncertainty in coming years.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#424

Post by atom_arranger »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #336
ratww wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of amusing: I've seen a few times developers rebelling and moving to whatever other random tool (Atlassian's own Trello, Pivotal Tracker, Github's thing, stickers on the wall) as soon as a hardline PO/PM left the job. Only for JIRA to return when another PO/PM that "really really needs the reporting features" (but didn't really use them) was hired.

Why is it always on the Dev team to completely uplift whatever is working for them, and never that the PM/PO/DPO/Scrumwhatever has to do the heavy lifting themselves? Is it because they would actually have to do work instead of just attending meetings, slacking other people for updates, and sending out progress reports? (Sorry to all you good PMs out there, I am talking about the median case) If you are a PM and you…

One of the best PMs I have had used to be a dev. The company we were working with used a terrible Jira like piece of software I don't remember the name of, but he had the devs just use Trello. He would go through and update the other thing for stakeholders. Worked great

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#425

Post by [deleted] »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #382
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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#426

Post by aeturnum »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #382
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…

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.

> I understand that being small leaves you vulnerable to the predatory tactics of big players

This, I think, is the core of why. It's not that being a medium sized publicly traded company is immoral or unprofitable - it's that in a public market your stock is priced on future earnings and choosing to be smaller than possible means your tech can be bought for cheap. If you choose to stay smaller than maybe you could be - you're leaving ROI on the table in a lot of peoples' eyes (even if you're right and you'd lose money trying to get huge). So, as your stock price drops off to reflect the expectation that you're not going to get super impressive earning growth, you start to look appealing as an alternative to developing technology for an industry giant. Why spend $5bn over 10 years to develop competing services when you can borrow $5bn today, buy atlassian, get a tax break on the debt and start making a play for market dominance with the atlassian tech?

If you want a small or medium company, staying private is a more sustainable approach.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#427

Post by dalbasal »

mbesto wrote: post #410
dalbasal wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but it is not unheard of for a software company. In fact, it's expected. Hence the valuations for software vendors compared to manufacturing, retail, etc.

I think we're in agreement here then, the valuations follow the fact that these companies can operationally grow much quicker than others.

Sure, they have. So, they certainly can. The question for Atlassian is how fast.

20-30% doesn't get you to a justification for Atlassian's peak value. It doesn't inspire "the next Microsoft" vibes.

Maybe after 10-15 years of growth at this rate, it would... but the market's not paying these prices for that.

Atlassian becomes an acquisition target if stock prices reflect a 20% rate of growth.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#428

Post by UkrainianJew »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #382
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…

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.

It's not just that. The job of the companies is to make the most money using the legally available means, and the job of the government is to create regulation that makes "good" behavior profitable and imposes heavy penalties for disruptive things.

Except the government got addicted to printing money and throwing it around to boost GDP (and taxes) through bullshit business models and bullshit investments. They literally created framework where being an overstaffed money-bleeding behemoth creates higher returns for the shareholders than being a lean-and-mean niche business.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#429

Post by joegahona »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #323
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 and Asana are far better. I refuse to work on any project using Jira. It’s the first question I ask in interviews.

No ticket numbers in Asana is a deal-breaker. Guessing that's not important to your team?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#430

Post by alxlaz »

guhidalg wrote: post #310
alxlaz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was (a very small, and only part-time) part of a team that did a migration from a Perforce-era VCS to git. It was about 6 weeks of 100% background work -- as in, we prepared cheat sheets, changed or rewrote relevant parts of the CI and deployment chain, while everyone in the company kept using the old VCS. Then it took about 36 hours to move the relevant code bases (a few dozen repositories, some of them 20+ years…

Thank you for sharing your experience. Migrating from software A to B is part of life, Jira does not hold a special technical place. Politically, that's a different conversation...

Oh, yeah, politically that took like four years to happen, if not more.
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