back to article Atlassian to dump 500 – by email – in the name of 'rebalancing'

Atlassian has announced a five percent reduction in its workforce as part of an effort it founders described as a "rebalancing" that will allow the collaboration upstart to focus on its changing priorities. "Today marks a very hard day in our 20-year history," wrote co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquharson. "We …

  1. SnOOpy168

    Another one bites the dust.

    but seriously, how did these headcounts come about and then become bloatware to be dumped in the name of right-sizing?

    Because of ChatGpt ?

  2. Ace2 Silver badge

    I’m fine with it…

    As long as they fire the people responsible for Jira.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I’m fine with it…

      I think you mean "to blame".

      It doesn't appear anyone is actually responsible for Jira these days.

    2. Steve Kerr

      Re: I’m fine with it…

      jira is OK once you get used to it.

      I'm more for the slow, painful and excruciating death of those responsible for "confluence"

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I’m fine with it…

        If you bang your head into a wall every day, you'll eventually get used to that too.

        Doesn't mean it won't hurt every time, or that you'll accomplish anything -- likely the wall won't move much.

        1. Skiver

          Re: I’m fine with it…

          The problem isn't Jira. As a tool, it works well and is useful. But like any tool, how it's used makes a big difference on how it's perceived. Where I work it isn't any kind of impediment.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: I’m fine with it…

            No doubt. Yes, the same could be said about other tech and tools, e.g. cloud.

            In any case, I might add a corollary to your statement: it's not only about the tool, it's also how it is sold to the unwitting users.

            If Atlassian (et al) sell Jira as a panacea, when the tool by itself is no such thing (it's also how you use it), that's a bit shady. Though hardly surprising, cloud and some *aaS vendors use the same sales tactics.

            I am admittedly biased: across a handful of companies and groups I have yet to see Jira used well and actually improve productivity. Rather the reverse, in a couple instances. I have, however, consistently heard wondrous tales of how Jira (and Confluence etc.) will dramatically fix all of the department's woes....

          2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

            Re: I’m fine with it…

            Jira is terrible, the layout is a joke... take the search query box... WHy is it so small you can barely type a word. WHY ?

            HOw can the thousands at Atlassian make so little progress towards improving Jira ?

      2. Shuki26

        Re: I’m fine with it…

        We actually like Confluence, much better than Sharepoint at least.

        1. murrby

          Re: I’m fine with it…

          That's a very low bar. Try just about any decent FOSS Wiki and you'll see how bad Confluence (especially the "improved" SaaS version) really is. These ate the guys who can't even work out how to implement a definition list. Check the features of something like DokuWiki and the plug-ins available.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I’m fine with it…

          I'll grant it's possible to craft some very pretty pages with Confluence, if you work at it a bit -- I've seen some nice ones at last $job. I'm not experienced enough to know if it's as quick & easy to make basic documentation pages vs. e.g. your common wiki tools.

          However, to say it's "better than Sharepoint" seems like comparing somewhat different things. I'm admittedly no sort of expert with Microsoft products, but I thought Sharepoint was more of a revision control system of sorts, and file sharing repository, rather than document creation. No?

          E.g. I recall various project managers and others sending around "sharepoint links" to their spreadsheets and slide decks and whatnot; my assumption is those things were created in the corresponding MS product (presumably excel and powerpoint) rather than in sharepoint itself.

          All that aside, the people responsible for such things at $company announced that Jira + Confluence would be the best new shiny, but there didn't appear to be significant improvements over the popular opensrc equivalent wiki and bug tracking tools. In fact, as time went on, some groups simply didn't bother with atlassian wares and went back to using what they had previously.

          1. david 12 Silver badge

            Re: I’m fine with it…

            Sharepoint also is/was a content management system like WordPress. Like WordPress without addins, it only gives/gave you fairly simple designs for fairly simple content. (I don't know if, like WordPress, there is/was a world of third-party addins).

            Like Google Sheets, you could display data in a spreadsheet format, without it being an Excel spreadsheet or an OpenOffice spreadsheet. At the time I used it, that was very limited. For other stuff, you could use an MS office viewer or OpenOffice to view a file. Now I guess you'd use Office 365 instead of sharepoint.

  3. that one in the corner Silver badge

    We continue to expect operating expense growth to decelerate in H2

    Ok, I'm lost - too early in the morning; are we being asked to celebrate a reduction in the second or in the third order differential of their expenses plot?

    1. ChoHag Silver badge

      Re: We continue to expect operating expense growth to decelerate in H2

      People who have more money to spare than most people will ever see might get more for themselves in some vaguely distant future, and at the "expense" of a mere 500 of the people who have worked to turn their obscenely lage pile of cash into a comically huge pile of cash.

      What's not to like? You just celebrate, OK?

    2. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: We continue to expect operating expense growth to decelerate in H2

      It's the second order differential*, but I doubt they're celebrating it. Although they appear to expect that they'll continue making a profit and it's going to be more than last quarter, it won't be as much more than last quarter than last quarter was to the one before that. Investors always seem very surprised when that happens and they freak out quickly.

      * I'm guessing what you consider the original function to be. If the original one was the graph of their profit over time, then the first derivative is whether or not it's growing (yes) and the second is how fast it's growing relative to history, which is where their problem lies. If your original graph was something else, the answer could be different.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "... saying goodbye to around 500 Atlassians"

    Bit of a cheek branding them with your name, when you're about to traumatise (to varying degrees) 500 people with only 15 mins warning.

    1. IGotOut Silver badge

      Re: "... saying goodbye to around 500 Atlassians"

      Nope not people, accounting losses.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: "... saying goodbye to around 500 Atlassians"

        accounting savings

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "... saying goodbye to around 500 Atlassians"

          depreciating assets

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: "... saying goodbye to around 500 Atlassians"

            Deprecated assets, by the sound of it?

            Poor people. (Corporatespeak is utterly evil, sometimes.)

      2. Mark 65

        Re: "... saying goodbye to around 500 Atlassians"

        AccountLossians?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "... saying goodbye to around 500 Atlassians"

      They also seem to be claiming it's about skills... which seems a bit dubious to me. Surly a lot of people could be retrained if that was really an issue, unless they're lying of course....

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "... saying goodbye to around 500 Atlassians"

      "Resources". We stopped being "people" in the 80s when "Personnel" became "HR", and it's been downhill since.

  5. Ayemooth

    "The post explains that the round of redundancies is not needed on financial grounds and is not aimed at reducing costs."

    Yes it is.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      It's actually probably a true statement.

      "Not needed on financial grounds" - probably true. They make money, right?

      "Not aimed at reducing costs" - also probably true. Someone, somewhere, thinks making these people redundant will eventually make them a shit-ton of money.

  6. This post has been deleted by its author

  7. chivo243 Silver badge
    Windows

    firing or layoff?

    I was always under the impression that getting fired was the result of fscking up badly, yes, I've been fired once, under flimsy circumstances, so the guy who voluntarily left and, I replaced could return when his new job wasn't all peaches and cream. I was also laid off with timely notice when a construction job was winding down, with 26 weeks of unemployment payments from the gov't.

    1. anothercynic Silver badge

      Re: firing or layoff?

      They're being laid off. Made redundant. The terms are generous by UK standards (just under 4 months' salary plus a week for each year you've been with Atlassian). You're usually lucky if you get more than a month + statutory...

      1. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

        Re: firing or layoff?

        True. It does suck, but there's a degree of not-shittiness about 4 months salary, and you get to keep the laptop - which you can use to apply for the next job. It's not much, but it's a nice gesture, at least.

      2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

        Re: firing or layoff?

        No they arent being generous, they are trying to let the fired staff to finish whatever they were dooing and maybe "teach" the new people their knowledge. Real people know thats not how it works, but leaders dont know jack and have been watching too much bulldust shows.

      3. Roland6 Silver badge

        Re: firing or layoff?

        The terms are only generous once you know the qualifying criteria.

        Would not be surprised if we see an interesting, but not wholly unexpected demographic to the 5%…

  8. veti Silver badge

    How about... not hiring so many newbies?

    TFA mentions that Atlassian hired almost 1000 people last quarter. And that's not an isolated thing. Their workforce has more than doubled since the start of the pandemic.

    So, basically they've just grown the workforce too fast.

    Why they don't just stop hiring for a few months, rather than laying off existing staff, is left as an exercise for the cynic.

    1. Caoilte

      Re: How about... not hiring so many newbies?

      > So, basically they've just grown the workforce too fast.

      Alternatively, they trained up a load of juniors and have just got rid of a lot of expensive staff engineers.

    2. anothercynic Silver badge

      Re: How about... not hiring so many newbies?

      TFA also mentions that they are changing which areas they are hiring in. So technically, nothing stops them from offering open positions to existing staff now at the risk of redundancy. Whether they will is another question.

    3. Skiver

      Re: How about... not hiring so many newbies?

      The important metric is what were the salaries of the people getting sacked vs. the people they hired. If it's like other corporate sackings, there is a net savings on salaries.

      1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

        Re: How about... not hiring so many newbies?

        Not sure if you are being serious, but replacing experience with new people isnt an equal replacement.

        Anybody can read code, the problem is most code is a total mess, and only time teaches you more and more of the details that are all over the place.

        Its like driving without google maps... if its your home area, you know the place, where this or that shop is, or where the best shortcut is to walk to the park. If you are new you just dont know these things.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: How about... not hiring so many newbies?

          Well of course that exchange is a net loss, any of us who've been in workforce for more than a season or two can see that.

          However, that knowledge and experience is generally extracted and promptly disposed of when joining the management ranks.

          Alternately, they inject a thick layer of willful ignorance and denial skills to the new drone, in order to cover up any uncomfortable use or demonstration of common sense, logic or reason.

          Managers aren't born, they're made. Unfortunately often from the cheapest possible stock, and customized to suit any organizational dysfunction or toxicity as needed.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: How about... not hiring so many newbies?

          Try explaining that to the big wheel executives making the decisions, or the beancounters advising them.

          To some of them, "experienced" merely translates to "old, expensive", and maybe also "smarter than me", which they don't like very much but would never admit out loud.

          To the worst of them, this "code" you're talking about sounds like Charlie Brown's school teacher, and they've heard that the younger generation is really good at it anyway, so you old grey beards and your big salaries can go find something else to do.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Atlassian have watched countless tech companies let go of probably around 100,000 staff. Some have been executed really well, and some have been executed really badly (short of executing the actual staff).

    Why have they watched all this play out and STILL gone with this messaging

    1. TonyJ

      Genuine question - can someone name a few of the companies that have made recent redundancies and actually handled it well? I'm sure there are some but I am struggling to think of any. All I can recall is emails/texts/locked out of company systems with little or no warning.

      1. Korev Silver badge

        I was wondering the same.

        I'd also like to see what they do in countries where the rules don't allow this kind of firing via email.

      2. StewartWhite Bronze badge

        Making people redundant by email is cheap, cowardly and lazy behaviour. If you're going to end somebody's employment at least have the decency to say it to their face.

    2. Pascal Monett Silver badge
      Trollface

      Watching doesn't imply learning

  10. trevorde Silver badge

    The new IBM?

    'rebalancing' is an IBM term aka 'resource action' aka firing. They just have to make it an annual event, give huge executive bonuses and the transformation will be complete. Optional is helicopters for the C-suite.

  11. Potemkine! Silver badge

    Was it impossible to train people to learn them to do new tasks rather than firing them? Or are the given motives another PR BS?

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Tricky, the new task is generally do the old task with fewer people and for lower salary. Senior engineers seem to be really bad at that

  12. Marty McFly Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Severance

    "Those made redundant will be offered 15 weeks of pay, plus an additional week for each year of service. "

    Actually fairly generous as far as layoffs go. Still not an easy pill to swallow, but better than what others have done.

  13. EarthDog

    5 percent

    Just like everyone else it seems +/- 1 percent

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90843280/why-tech-companies-lay-off-6-percent-of-employees

    1. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: 5 percent

      So is this a particular instance of the application of Miller’s “ The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” ?

      Ie. 7% is too high 5% too round, 6% feels considered. Everyone else simply follows…

  14. Bebu

    Phone sanitizers?

    《"Talent Acquisition, Program Management, and Research & Insights" teams will feel the deepest cuts.》

    One might wonder whether the B-Ark is embarking its passengers.

    Of course ultimately the remaining inhabitants of Golgafrincham perished from a disease contracted from infected phones.

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