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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

#71

Post by neal_jones »

mvdtnz wrote: post #65
quicklime wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 replaceme…

This is developer wishcasting, to be frank. AI has not obviated the need for Jira and the idea that companies are moving to "something lighter" (what are they moving to?) has no basis in reality.

I don’t know about established companies pivoting but new operations/projects don’t seem to default to Jira like they did previously. In my very non-scientific sample size, I’ve noticed a shift in the last 3-6 months

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

#72

Post by elzbardico »

Atlassian is cutting another 1600 jobs because it needs to cut more jobs as it is a dying company with terrible products.

But let's try to spin it up as if we were some kind of AI mavens who are reaping humongous increases in productivity due to our thought leadership in AI.

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

#73

Post by elzbardico »

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?

Also, please note that maybe not all employees on this layoff are US-based.

In several countries, laying off people come with legal requirements for mandatory minimal severance, health insurance extensions, legal taxes and government fees and all kind of compensatory one-time payments for the fired employeer.

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

#74

Post by falcor84 »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #63

Layoffs because of AI make no sense to me. Imagine you own a company that is paid to deliver packages. You use horses and differentiate by delivering quicker than everyone else. Then cars are invented and everyone starts delivering packages faster. In what world does a healthy growing business react to this by laying off couriers "in a pivot to automotive transportation". Would a healthy business not switch everyone…

You need a very different skill set and culture for driving and maintaining cars than for driving and maintaining horses. I honestly think that for big changes like this (if you are willing to accept that AI is such), looking at it from the portfolio management angle, it makes more sense to just nuke the current operation and start a greenfield one.

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

#75

Post by falcor84 »

TutleCpt wrote: post #5

Where are the most popular alternatives to Jira?

I like Clickup's way of allowing arbitrarily nested subtasks and easily promoting/demoting a task across levels, without having this hard distinction that Jira has between levels. I understand that some coporate managers like the rigidity, but in practice, it's just very hard to know the scope of a story early on, and I found this flexibility really valuable.

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

#78

Post by itomato »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #63

Layoffs because of AI make no sense to me. Imagine you own a company that is paid to deliver packages. You use horses and differentiate by delivering quicker than everyone else. Then cars are invented and everyone starts delivering packages faster. In what world does a healthy growing business react to this by laying off couriers "in a pivot to automotive transportation". Would a healthy business not switch everyone…

They just announced GA of agentic assignees. It suggests a year or more of maturation. Rovo Dev has already been a thing.

The Java products are almost EOL.

They have already been assigning JAC tickets to Rovo and $TEAM is down.

What else should be done with the surplus headcount?

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

#80

Post by jemmyw »

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…

I don't think it can get worse. In fact, it'd probably be better if Atlassian just stopped touching it.
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