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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

#481

Post by ZephyrBlu »

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…

The keyboard shortcuts and navigation are super fun and very useful.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#482

Post by astrange »

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.

Academics have let themselves get managed by a gigantic administrative class, and unlike engineers, they barely even get paid for it.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#483

Post by dinvlad »

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…

Tbh, most of big enterprise software UI just plain sucks. I see this as a natural consequence of being too packed with features, to target the widest audience possible.

Best software UX is made by smaller teams that dedicate themselves to solving one problem for a very specific niche. And once they grow, it all inevitably turns to sh*t. C'est la vie..

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#484

Post by JB_Denton »

I notice that the share price started to plummet just after the announcement that they would be dropping support for On-Prem customers. That's basically saying goodbye to most Australian Federal Government departments. I know we used tons of on-prem Atlassian stuff at my client and we ended up transitioning everything to ServiceNow.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#485

Post by lmm »

zeckalpha wrote: post #247
exyi wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how you define "better". I'd say that anything else I used (github/gitlab issues, asana, trello, even a spreadsheet) works better *for me* - i.e. it is faster and easier to find things in a small team. I only add things or focus on one issue and then remove it. I still don't understand why mid managers love it, but I guess they have different use cases than me...

Trello is also an Atlassian product.

Its been getting slower and more cumbersome since they bought it.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#486

Post by caspar »

wartijn_ wrote: post #270
zac23or wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never write anything in any web interface. I write in notepad and copy and paste. I had many bad surprises ... I can't trust web interfaces. And I use the Windows clipboard manager too.

I also prefer to write my stuff offline and than paste it to a web interface. That works great, until you write markdown and paste in into Confluence. Instead of just accepting markdown and formatting it in the same way it does when you type markdown, Confluence puts it between code tags.. Jira does this better, but is still weird with their text formatting. There are two different kinds of input fields, one of them…

> That works great, until you write markdown and paste in into Confluence. Instead of just accepting markdown and formatting it in the same way it does when you type markdown, Confluence puts it between code tags..

If you are in the new editor for Confluence Cloud (i.e. the editor based on ProseMirror rather than TinyMCE), you can sometimes get it to do "the right thing" of converting pasted markdown to formatted text by copying from a different text editor. For example, for me copying from windows notepad always does the right thing, but copying from vscode doesn't.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#487

Post by Aeolun »

acdha wrote: post #344
Aeolun wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough, if your team is small enough that it doesn’t need a dedicated PM, you generally have no issues with Jira either. It’s almost as if the PM is the problem instead of the solution.

You have fewer problems with Jira. You’re still paying more for a slower application with a clumsy UI. I also wouldn’t be so quick to condemn the PM. I’ve seen plenty of developers insist on complex workflows and custom fields because they think they can automate everything, only later to realize they’ve created a second job. The problem is basically the lack of a functioning feedback mechanism to ask “do we need thi…

> it’s certainly more common to see business people underestimate the complexity of what they’re asking for

I think this is a factor of their days being filled with busywork (from my perspective), so naturally the dev should have time enough to do all that during the day as well. The people asking you to fill out all those fields are not the ones actually doing so (or their entire job is filling them out).

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#488

Post by faeriechangling »

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.

Take a look at o365. Planner is an identical product to Trello. They're buying GitHub which competes with Bitbucket. Sharepoint & MSoffice are alternatives to Confluence. There might not be an equivalent to Jira but the Microsoft machine is increasingly muscling into their turf.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#489

Post by TeeMassive »

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…

> One thing that stood out was that he said, it's actually bad to be profitable when you're growing.

The only conclusion to this statement is "When we will stagnate we will then start making profits"

This doesn't sound like a great strategy to me. This is why I'm not investing in "no-profit but growth" except for the stock price increasing in the short term.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#490

Post by cavisne »

> 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).

Hilarious.

Ticketing systems are very sticky, they are basically the original "no code" system, with years of business processes hacked into them, and users who are accustomed to every pixel of the UI.

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