alt Hacker NewsAtlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI
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Atlassian is cutting jobs because no new sane company wants to use their products. Confluence was once innovative but now has gone stale. Jira is a nightmare and is most ripe for the AI based replacement. Bitbucket is a neglected product that has lost ground to GitHub and GitLab. The writing has been on the wall for Atlassian for years.
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.
[Edit: grammo and formatting]
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 to driving cars and deliver even more packages?
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.
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.
We use Jira. We're trapped by the processes built around it. Once it's entrenched, it's rather difficult to remove. I eagerly await for something that can replace Jira, but fear that it too will be bastardized to fit the process for however long the process lives.
AI is great !
It is a great excuse for underperforming and incompetent CEOs.
It provides the CEO with a wonderful excuse for sacking people.
I was in Atlassian and one of the impacted. Company spent ridiculous money on acquisitions and marketing and AI is the scapegoat.
I don't get the atlassian backlash on HN
JIRA is just fine, gets the job done. Its not slow like the on-prem. Jira cloud version is fine.
AI exists to put a positive spin on layoffs, which would normally be an indicator of something bad internally or with the economy as a whole.
Well... companies who are laying off people on account of AI are telling markets that their chief value is NOT "innovation", it has been drudgery automation.
A company that prizes actually making customer lives better (i.e. "innovation") will salivate at the prospect of having ten of ten people, each using the Drudgery Automator, being creative using all that drugery-free time to actually touch grass with their customers and ship overnight value (i.e. actually, progressively, make things better for customers) and then improve it at a pace that blows minds (i.e. actually happy customers).
An company who's business is in fact about drudgery automation will kneecap itself by letting go nine of the ten.
Long/Short stocks accordingly.
Seeing this kind of news makes me very uneasy. There's no doubt that AI is more efficient, but what about diversity? If many companies prioritize AI over humans, won't society as a whole become very uniform?
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.
Does Atlassian still have the tech debt that lead to extended outages? https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/scoop-atlassian
You'd think they could just use AI to make Jira not take 5 seconds to create a ticket. Linear does it instantly. Just use AI to create a SPA version.
Yet here they are building a new skyscraper in Sydney:
Where are the most popular alternatives to Jira?
Its weird to hear Atlassian being associated with productivity boosts of any kind considering the zillions of developer hours wasted trying to navigate JIRA.
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.
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.
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?
Is there a site that can be used to track which companies have done layoffs thus far because of AI-adjacent reasons?
This is the logical choice.
I mean, they save money and Jira is already a slow buggy and insecure pile of sloppy code so there is no real downside.
The 1,600 number blew my mind, and then I realized Atlassian employs almost 16,000. Kind of crazy.
Either way, I'd expect that those 1,600 people using AI to solve Atlassian's big problems would be better for the company in the long-run than reducing headcount with the same level of output
Has anyone seen any hints as to the role make up of those 1,600 jobs?
Would be interesting to know if they are majority engineering, or if that's a lot of sales and marketing and support and other roles in there.
In the 90s and oughts everything was insecure by default. It was the golden age of teenage hackers. AI is ushering in a new golden age of insecure by default software.
Ahhh, AI. The perpetual cover for "we over-hired in Covid times and are now correcting for that."
Makes you look innovative.
AI reduces the need for expensive labor, payroll taxes and health insurance premiums, yet the cost of the company's service keeps going up. How does that happen?
Its funny: they’re cutting jobs but the price increases year over year with no discernible new benefits or features.
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.
10% of their workforce roughly.
My reading is they are _announcing_ the job cuts to keep the stock from tumbling.
I don't think any AI productivity gains are involved.
This is fine. I suspect many folks have been trying to get away from JIRA and related apps for a while now. chef's kiss
tickets: Linear over Jira every day
KB: Notion over Confluence no question
Just a couple examples, you could swap a dozen other better vendors in either category.
What does Atlassian have but inertial lock-in to keep them going?
“Pivoting to AI”
No you’re just cutting costs
When I see news like this, I feel very uneasy. It's not about a decrease in employment, but about the decrease in diversity in society. Compared to human diversity, I feel that the diversity of AI is very limited. I worry that everything in society will become uniform.
The Druuge Mauler chugs on.
[flagged]
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.
Ironically you can actually use AI to replace Jira.
The link is wrong. It should be https://www.reuters.com/technology/atlassian-lay-off-about-1...
@dang
TLDR: Dying company with terrible products uses AI as an excuse for sacking people who should have been sacked years ago.
AI is a convenient way to hide their their poor strategy and execution.
[dead]
This is AGI.
Can anyone recommend good alternatives to Jira? Things that keep me defaulting to it:
- 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
Atlassian has 16,000 employees worldwide and reported a net loss of $257 million last year. In fact it has not had a single profitable year since its IPO in 2015. And as expected its stock price is in the dumpster, down to $75 from its peak of $440 in 2021 (-83%).
So, like a lot of the tech industry this is simply a case of overhiring, overspending and general mismanagement. And like every other layoff announcement “AI” is a convenient scapegoat to hide executive dysfunction.