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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

#51

Post by jkubicek »

tombert wrote: post #31
Sol- wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

There's always bugs that can be fixed, there's always optimizations that can be done, there's always a feature that someone wants to build but hasn't had budget to do. There's always improvements that can be done for deployment. There's always ways of reducing memory. There's always ways of reducing ongoing expenses etc. I have worked for a bunch of companies, and even relatively new and young companies have all thes…

Jira takes a measurable amount of time to make bulk-changes to a single ticket, which is insane. If they’re going to fix anything, fix that.

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

#53

Post by robryan »

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.

Block reportedly handed out a bunch of incentives to the people staying, could be similar to that.

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

#55

Post by tombert »

vips7L wrote: post #41
verelo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To add to the speculation, it's possible that the people refusing to use it are working slower. Even if the code that they write is objectively better by any metric you'd like, humans can't really pump out code as fast as Claude or Codex can.

If you can get something into "good enough" territory in 1/10th the time of someone who can get it into "great" territory, that is often worth it.

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

#56

Post by quicklime »

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 not that their employees are no longer needed, it’s that their product (jira) is no longer needed. When you’ve got AI agents taking bigger and bigger steps, you don’t need to micromanage people through jira as much anymore. Companies will likely switch to something lighter.

Jira regularly makes it to the top of lists of the most hated enterprise software, there’s definitely appetite in the market for a replacement.

Their stock has been taking a huge hit over the last few months because of this: https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/ai-is-eating-softw...

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

#57

Post by lousken »

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…

We've switched to Jetbrains Youtrack, it doesn't have as many features, but turns out nobody was using most of them anyway. It's Jira + Confluence bundled together including SSO.

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

#58

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

alexpotato wrote: post #34

Chartr Daily had this chart [0] back in 2023 and it shows how much the big tech firms grew from 2016 to 2022. Some of the firms, Apple being the exception, doubled or even almost tripled in size. I'm sure AI is partly to blame here but I think a lot of it is over hiring and firms just getting bogged down in bureaucracy and trying to clear things out. 0 - https://www.instagram.com/p/CnxN-Mayo3N/

I don't think AI is even partially to blame. Unless Atlassian is claiming AI can fully replace 1,600 workers, layoffs don't make sense.

You need people driving AI to get the benefits.

Its like a courier service that uses horses firing people once cars are invented because cars are faster than horses. You would switch everyone from horses to cars and deliver more packages.

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

#59

Post by icedchai »

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?

Have you tried looking for a job recently? The job market is cooked and it's not getting better any time soon. The supply of candidates is way up. Salaries are going down. Even mediocre jobs show 100+ applicants on LinkedIn.

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

#60

Post by tombert »

bartread wrote: post #44
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 emplo…

I haven't used BitBucket in awhile but I remember it being "not that bad".

I agree with pretty much everything you said; I don't actually think that it's due to AI is my point. If their products are terrible and they're finally losing business over it, it makes enough sense to fire 10% of the workforce. I just don't think AI has much to do with it.

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