Never been clear to me why they need so many staff, and where all their efforts are going.
In Australia, its basically cliche for engineers to leave for Atlassian. Atlassian seems to hoover up all the devs.
Just not clear why, for what is basically a to-do list app, that as far as I can recall over the last 5 years, hasn't meaningfully changed, makes very slow progress fixing bugs, and frequently has reliability problems.
Would be genuinely interested to hear from Atlassian devs what they do over there except collect larger paychecks than normal.
Never underestimate scaling challenges. And as someone pointed out, their products are highly configurable which adds complexity. Throw multi tenancy on top along with long lived obscure features still in use by some large enterprise customers.
That’s how you open yourself up to a world of pain. Everything takes 5x long because you’re forced to maintain backwards compatibility for an ever increasing list of features, that Sales keeps baking into contracts to win and retain customers. Also, they easily have over a dozen or more products now.
It’s interesting how every company I’ve worked at in the last 15 years was a JIRA customer. That level of consistency is only matched by one other product: Slack.
Atlassian products are very complex. Jira alone has sophisticated low-code automation, extremely thorough templating for projects, a rich API, extensive support for i8n, meta-projects (Jira Plans), an add-on marketplace, and so on. Confluence is pretty amazing too when you really understand what it can do.
Edit: Jira’s tight integration with GitHub and ability to drive/be driven by GitHub actions is also a big deal.
Well I suppose if one wasn't looking to bad faith rage vent to take one's mind off other problems in one's life, it's possible one could surmise they're really resource inefficient.
I'm not the only dev who says this, but I've never heard the same criticism leveled at say Google.
If you work for a company that pays a bonus over the financial year then that payout usually happens in August/September. This is probably what they are referring to.
I used to work their, albeit many years ago now. I found it a bit cult like/cliquey, a lot of people living/breathing Atlassian thinking they are saving the world "we put a rover on mars", "we're a hundred year company" etc. I think that's like most large tech companies though.
My team was labeled a "high performing" team. I had positive 360 reviews, bonuses, my direct manager said "you are obviously the star of the team, we wouldn't of delivered this without you" on a large project.
The business had a change of direction on the tech stack. What my manager was previously advocating for and encouraging was now a big no as his manager and some others didn't like how we did things. I think the new CTO at the time was trying to stamp their mark. We now had to use what was set out on the new tech radar. From an advocate, strongly encouraging our now old tech stack, my manager changed to actively discouraging and stamping out any mention of specific tools/languages.
My team wasn't happy, strongly disagreed with the changes being forced upon us. We where forced to re-write one project using the new blessed tools on the tech stack. It turned out worse/buggy, we where unhappy in retrospectives, "Manager: what can we do better", "Team: use the previous version we wrote", but our manager pushed back trying to force false positivity. That was the worst retro I've been in. The entire team silent, heads on desks as anything we said was rebuked. We knew what was wrong, how to fix it, our answers where not the answers our manager was looking for, it wasn't going anywhere, round in circles so we eventually ended sat silent with any enthusiasm beaten out of us.
The team then got systematically broken up to weaken the strong bias and bring in people elsewhere who advocated the change in direction and moving the people disagreeing to other teams/projects where they would be a minority.
A colleague unfairly got put on PIP due to the new dev lead brought in as an advocate for the new tech stack having fundamental differences of opinions on how things should be done. My colleague ultimately handed in his resignation.
On his last day, the end of the afternoon on a Friday I got called in to HR. Some HipChat messages was used against me talking about the now banned tech stack (generally nerd HipChat/Slack chat, nothing out the ordinary). A twitter tweet was shown on the screen of me self venting about being told a free deli bar at lunch and free soft drinks "so take one for the team" isn't compensation to be forced on call disrupting personal life with compensation below minimum wage while not being able to be active in personal time. I named no companies in the tweet, my other tweets unrelated and my profiled had no information where i worked.
They walked me out on gardening leave with enough time for some stock to vest, for "disclosing internal financial information", the less than minimum wage part. My feed had about 10 followers so going through HipChat and putting my name in to google and finding my twitter feed, my manager who was a few weeks before praising me and encouraging more use of specific tech was now searching for something to get rid of me.
Fully accept self venting on twitter wasn't my best move but at that point my manager must of been looking for reasons to get rid of me and PIP would be next like my colleague so it would of been something else if it wasn't that.
Was a good lesson. No matter how good your work is, how positive the feedback, if the company changes direction, you either disagree and get on with it with a smile and collect your pay check no matter if you believe it's the wrong choice or leads to lower quality work, or leave there and then. Everyone is expendable no matter of past performance as recent layoffs has shown.
To summarize, i'd say it's probably like most large companies. It's nice if you play the game and get a good manager/team. There's ambitious people trying to make their mark and will be ruthless to do so. It's nothing extraordinary and certainly not changing the world. For Australians, it's probably their best option for a good paycheck and probably does give the most interesting work in Australia being limited on tech companies in Australia.
Strongly disagree that Atlassian gives the most interested work in Australia. Atlassian is not an engineering driven company. The work at Atlassian is super, super dull.
The reality is the original story touches on issues that effect all knowledge workers. Since you have to use your brain that can be distracted by trauma and pain (though apparently the effect isn't universal, or "even"), experiencing tragedies in life also typically means career problems too, which are also traumatic (unless you're "immune").
I've seen this play out in a number of situations over the years. Myself included. Due to the high pay that comes with "senior", I'm now facing my second in a row job I will probably be pushed out of, due to having a disability.
You hear of it all the time with divorces. Deaths that you respond poorly to. I think most places give you 0.5-2 years, which I think they did. It's an issue that's still going unaddressed.
One of the coolest things I ever saw in my career was a whole data processing pipeline built around jira. Incredibly interesting & surprisingly sensible way of running data processing pipelines. Very observable & clear to everyone what was happening.
Data would go stage by stage by stage. Cancel & retry options everywhere. Gates for human intervention/approval. Incredibly clear foundation for a data warehousing company. So glad I saw that. Typically data systems are there own thing, but using a more general tracking system like jira powerfully de-specialed what was happening & made great re-use of more human-first progress pipeline software.
I can definitely imagine HR software built from jira or something like.
We are now using a self-hosted Gitlab-CE instance to manage issues. It does not have so many configurable features like Jira. But the performance is much better than the Jira. We are all happy about moving away from the stupid Atlassian family bucket.
I get the feeling that you know nothing about Atlassian and haven't checked any statements at all. Atlassian have been profitable since their first year.
In Australia, its basically cliche for engineers to leave for Atlassian. Atlassian seems to hoover up all the devs.
Just not clear why, for what is basically a to-do list app, that as far as I can recall over the last 5 years, hasn't meaningfully changed, makes very slow progress fixing bugs, and frequently has reliability problems.
Would be genuinely interested to hear from Atlassian devs what they do over there except collect larger paychecks than normal.
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