alt Hacker NewsAtlassian 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.
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Global uncertainty
Tariffs
War in the Middle East
US economy that would likely be in recession if not for massive datacenter spend
Oil at ~$100
But we're laying people off because... AI
Atlassian pretending they can pivot into AI, is the most "Hello fellow kids" corporate moment this year.
Their services are barely usable with extreme bloat and lag. With such strong engineering practices, they are poised to make fools of themselves. Can't wait.
I mean look I don't like literally any of Atlassian's products, but they are not a dying company by any measure. They print cash.
TBF they have made major improvements, IMHO, to Jira and Confluence over the past few years.
I honestly hope someone will read this comment and vibecode an Atlassian 2.0 platform, preferably open source. But really, I will take closed source and paid as well - just give me something that's on par in terms of features and integration but without the terrible UX.
To be clear, I agree with the terrible products part - but currently they are not dying because there is no alternative platform which is flexible, scalable and feature-complete enough. You may find alternatives for niches, like GitHub for software engineering, but the Atlassian stuff allows for knowledge transfer and familiarity across many many domains. I've seen it used anywhere from government burocracy to customer service and construction companies. They nailed the abstraction for flexible issue management, just the implementation is terrible.
95% of these announcements are exactly how you say. There're just too many incentives to layoff and call it AI:
- CEO (under pressure to move in the AI space) comes across as an AI maven
- The shareholders improve margins
I think we're reeling from rate increases. Too much free money for too long.