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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

#441

Post by bastardoperator »

rob74 wrote: post #141
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…

> ...and have huge knowledge bases in Confluence. I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery - in the huge datasets you have in mind, finding the page you are looking for is more a matter of luck than anything else. And once you found it, you can never be sure if it's still up to date. > Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around for a while. I…

Agreed. Jira and Confluence search is easily the worst I've ever used and to your point it's more of a box to check for product people versus being useful to end users. It is absolutely where data goes to die.

I've been using https://github.com/just-the-docs/just-the-docs and find it much easier, nicer looking, and people are excited to not use Confluence.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#442

Post by dgb23 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #421
geodel wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are just bureaucrats. So there’s precedence for both.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#443

Post by taylorbuley »

> Atlassian’s legacy Jira product is clunky and has barely evolved in a decade — it’s essentially a ticket-based system which allows developers and product managers to communicate on tasks and is no longer loved by developers

Developers "loving" any ticketing system is a bit of a stretch. To me it's more of a "least worst" preference.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#445

Post by wizofaus »

yellow_lead wrote: post #94
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.

At my old company, they had two annoying jira workflows management wanted to tie in to the dev process 1) When the user wants to merge to master, at least one of the commit messages must reference a valid Jira ticket. 2) A Jira plugin was installed such that when tests were run in CI, a jira ticket was created to record the result (pass/fail). This somehow ticks a SOC compliance box

1) sounds pretty reasonable and standard to me, though a backdoor is usually necessary for PRs that are just to fix a build-blocking issue due a bad merge e.g. Agree 2) is stupid, why would you need a ticket for a passing build? And unless you have a super stable CI system a decent % of failures are transitory and don't need tracking - but if your master branch fails to build on retry an auto created blocker ticket makes sense.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#446

Post by ratww »

BoorishBears wrote: post #419
steveBK123 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My fave thing about Jira is how between the tool & it's plugins, you can roll up all sorts of views for management reporting purposes. Despite this, exactly zero shops I have worked do management believe their managers will understand those views. Therefore at a weekly/monthly/quarterly cadence, "someone" (dev leads) have to spend hours hand updating some horrific excel view of project statuses for big management to…

Absolute worse part of Jira. Twice now I've worked at places that used Jira, and all it takes is one corner of the company to leverage it for some random oddball purpose to make it painfully slow. One place started using it for managing thousands of assets, and eventually they were paying contractors tens of thousands to optimize their JIRA instance and untangle the mess. Same thing is happening at my current company…

Wow. I had erased this from my memory, but: in a company I worked previously, every single string that had to be localised had to go into a JIRA task, after going into an internal localisation tool. Eventually they needed a separate JIRA instance with different logins because there were hundreds of new "strings" being created daily, some of those coming from user content.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#447

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

One of the things I've found really interesting is how little development ecosystem there is around Atlassian's tools. They have a pretty rich API for most of their products, but nobody really uses them. There's some very cool CLI tools just starting to evolve for Jira and Confluence, which can completely transform the complaints people have (automating common concerns, eliminating UI slowness). I think Atlassian should have done more to build a community for people to ramp up on their technology.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#448

Post by jacobr1 »

mayama wrote: post #423
idontpost wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also the low interest environment was unusual. We could have very easily have a booming market with much higher rates. Just look at the 90s.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#449

Post by jacobr1 »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #411
slap_shot wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but otherwise obviously makes no sense, it's antithetic to the very idea of a business. How does it NOT make sense? The purpose of a business like this is not to generate some short term profit. These are winner-take-all markets - they're playing for complete and utter domination of an entire product category. Their Q1 revenue grew 37% YoY - how on earth would you care about profit over what they doing here? They s…

Yep, exactly what UBER is doing and what Tesla has found themselves doing with high spending on their Texas and Berlin Gigafactories. It's a short term pain for domination... expand fast and be the market leader in every country before someone else beats you to it. Then, soak in the profits.

Which works when the unit economics are good. You can take the profit from an operating business, and just inject it back in the business to grow. That sometimes looks like an unprofitable business, but the test is: "if the company freezes growth tomorrow" would it be profitable?

Teslas are profitable, once you pay off the amortized cost of a factory. It isn't clear that uber is profitable. They had 5-10% gross margins pre-IPO, and it has gone negative since.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#450

Post by jacobr1 »

papito wrote: post #311
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…

It's like that scene from Silicon Valley (which is almost always accurate). Seriously, when did it become normal in capitalism that you should not prove that your business can make money? That there a customers willing to pay for your product? That the promise of future maybe profit sells better than actual profit now ? This is insane.

Wild speculation has been a feature in capitalism for _centuries_. There are any number of interesting historical schemes to read about where investors lost their shirts, or, sometime won big! Every new business venture has risk that it will fail, even in "stable" industries. We should celebrate trying new business that might not work. We just need to ensure we don't socialize the losses.
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