You fire 'em, we'll hire 'em: Atlassian sees tech layoffs as HR heaven Atlassian sees the current round of layoffs and hiring freezes across the tech industry as an opportunity on which it hopes to capitalise – even as its own share price slumps. "There's a lot of incredible people in the market who may only come on the market once a decade and we have an opportunity to pick those staff up now," …
"and customers see the effort to migrate from on-prem product as freeing their people for more productive work."
No. Just like Microsoft insisting we move everything to their cloud. No. We won't (in fact: we cannot, legal reasons etc.). So I am bloody annoyed that many companies leave the on-prem folks alone, no updates, in fact even downgrades. They tell us "yeah, we'll just discontinue this on-prem, if you want it in - like when we have to migrate to new machines with new OS - you cannot get it anymore", or the follow up product "works" with on-prem systems, but all interesting features are limited to the cloud - without technical reasons for that.
I always love the "on-prem is being terminated, when are you moving to our cloud product?" hammering from sales people.
They don't like it when we say "we don't do cloud, we're trying to determine which of your competitors to move to... do you have a suggestion?" and then ask "should we move to competitor X or Y?" 5 or 6 times.
(Not interested in the answer of course, I just want to watch them squirm)
Last I heard Atlassian didn't even have a cloud, they use someone else's, so are dinged for very high costs there. At least Microsoft has a cloud.
Atlassian's UI changes over the past several years have significantly soured my view of their main products jira and confluence at least. I was a very happy customer for many years prior.
I'm merely a consumer of jira and confluence -- don't have to admin the things -- so my exposure is limited to ui and workflow; I'd guess most of us are in the same boat.
At a couple prior jobs, jira was the "request & incident tracking tool" as well as the tool used by devs for agile "user stories" and whatnot. As an IT person I found jira poorly suited for "my widget is broken, please fix or replace" sort of interactions with users. I get why management wanted to use it ("we're already paying atlassian a shed load of money, we're not buying another ticket system besides!"). It felt mostly like clumsy overhead.
The stand up meetings I went to seemed to spend a lot of time talking about how many "points" any given story was worth, but not much else. And after a few of these it seemed like a repetitive drone. I couldn't see how it was benefiting any of the IT folks, let alone their users.
I also discovered, after looking at a few developer jira stories, that they apparently weren't using it for the full jira tracking and workflow and integration with other atlassian tools either. I barely remember what it looked like at this point, but I seem to recall most of the form fields left blank, maybe an assigned engineer, current sprint ID or similar, and probably the other default jira links. Nothing about code or code review or who submitted the software rfe or whatever, nothing about checkins or code at all, really. It was hard to even find status - active, done, wontfix, what-have-you.
Now, maybe this is more of a commentary on agile than jira. Maybe it's even more of a commentary on those companies trying to "do agile" or use jira (in either case, probably doing it wrong).
But I came away feeling like the atlassian tools, jira at least, didn't add anything to the process.
Confluence seemed very pretty, or the resulting pages did, if you knew what you were doing. I'll give them that. Seemed like a higher barrier to entry than your average wiki, but I won't claim any kind of significant skill with either, so ymmv.
I know a number of really excellent people who applied to the big A, only to be rejected. They are all at other places, and with the many headlines that Atlassian has generated, feel they dodged a bullet.
So, with the statement "There's a lot of incredible people in the market who may only come on the market once a decade and we have an opportunity to pick those staff up now," I think it Mr. Farquhar should have said "There's a lot of incredible people in the market who may only come on the market once a decade and we have an opportunity to ignore them, again."
I guess it would be better than working at Facebook or Google, but probably not by much.
Hmm. They hired a young relative of mine a couple of years ago. He was fresh out of university and hoping make a career. They employed him for three months, told him he was doing well then gave him and two other new hires the boot keeping a fourth one. Apparently that's how they like to vet their prospective employees. Pretty sucky in my opinion as it knocked his confidence.
I know a lot of companies that use core* Atlassian products (including us) and not a single one of them actually like the products (including us)
* Core being Jira, Confluence etc... Sourcetree [which they didn't write] was good but that has been made irrelevant by tools built in to VS or Rider and BitBucket is OK but that is slowly losing out to GitHub.
It's not the best analogy, but I think atlassian is a bit like apple.
I.e. to get the most benefit(?) from their tools you mostly have to immerse yourself in their entire ecosystem. Their stuff largely wants to work with (and assumes the presence of?) the other parts of the "suite", and it's sticky to add someone else's stuff ala carte. It can be done, but it can also be sisyphean.
Previous company had a mix of old commercial and home-grown stuff for the dev tools, src, bug tracking, code review, the usual suspects. Powers That Be brought in Atlassian with the idea of finally "integrating" everything (various definitions of what that really meant), and perhaps most ambitiously, finally unifying the development groups with a common tool suite.
Last I heard, all the pre-existing stuff was still there, perhaps even more entrenched, plus the Atlassian stuff, plus more besides; apparently some groups got the idea like "well if they're bringing in Bitbucket and ignoring the old stuff, we'll do the same but with Git, which we like better".
It's admittedly a muddle. And likely not all Atlassian's fault. But one might think that if Atlassian's new shiny had been clearly superior it would have gotten better response than "meh", rather than merely an excuse to stand up even more other stuff.
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