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 this is just regular layoffs, but they know if they brand it as "AI" their investors will eat it up.
Welp. Fuck Atlassian. Their resistance towards arbitrary RTO mandates and a people-first culture had me tolerate the weirdness of JIRA and Confluence, but now?
Fuck ‘em. Rolling my own using shelfware, kthxbai.
No, there was a big internal project (which they communicated publicly about - search for the blogs relating to it) to address it that involved roughly a year of effort from a big chunk of the developers.
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.
Should've sent those 1600 people to fix their horrible performance of cloud apps, oh well I guess opening a jira ticket will now take not 5 but 10 seconds.
You have a package delivery business. The business is stable and optimized, serving all houses in your city. Each courier has a route planned out that they follow each day. They take 8 hours to complete the route and deliver to each house along the way.
Now, cars come along. With the new efficiencies, you find that now a courier takes only 6 hours to do their route. The number of buildings in the city has not increased, there's a cap to how much service you need to provide after which there's no longer any additional benefits. So, do you cut everyone's work day to 6 hours, or do you fire 25% of all couriers and re-route the rest so they now do 8 hour days on longer routes using cars?
Your solution assumes that the extra workforce immediately translates into free growth, but the growth of many businesses is constrained by outside factors. Here it would be the population of your served area.
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.
I see. So AI is reducing the number of jobs in the tech sector because fewer people are needed to ship stuff (thanks to AI). And since fewer people are needed across the tech sector then we don't need things like Jira anymore because it can all be done on post-its or Google sheets or something, so there's no need for Atlassian accounts anymore. And Atlassian can now do more with less thanks to AI.
I can't wait for Atlassian physical sticky-notes to take over.
I don’t think anyone believes this is because they are becoming more efficient because of AI. It may be a bit because AI makes their products even less attractive than they already were.
If they are paying them 6-month severances like Block did, this means they are effectively saying 1,600 people for 6-months wouldn't have fixed JIRA's usability and performance, which if they could have done like many have been begging, they'd would probably make more money long-term than this firing would save.
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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 this is just regular layoffs, but they know if they brand it as "AI" their investors will eat it up.
Fuck ‘em. Rolling my own using shelfware, kthxbai.
Possibly a bad LLM edit; maybe they meant to say would save $230 million through reduced headcount and less office space?
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/
- 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 issues transitioned to X status in this time period)
Things that frustrate me:
- Complexity/UI around configuration
- Very poor kanban metrics reporting
I don't think any AI productivity gains are involved.
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 to driving cars and deliver even more packages?
Not unless there were more packages to deliver.
Now, cars come along. With the new efficiencies, you find that now a courier takes only 6 hours to do their route. The number of buildings in the city has not increased, there's a cap to how much service you need to provide after which there's no longer any additional benefits. So, do you cut everyone's work day to 6 hours, or do you fire 25% of all couriers and re-route the rest so they now do 8 hour days on longer routes using cars?
Your solution assumes that the extra workforce immediately translates into free growth, but the growth of many businesses is constrained by outside factors. Here it would be the population of your served area.
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.
It is a great excuse for underperforming and incompetent CEOs.
It provides the CEO with a wonderful excuse for sacking people.
I can't wait for Atlassian physical sticky-notes to take over.
[Edit: grammo and formatting]
AI is a convenient way to hide their their poor strategy and execution.