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Businesses Software Technology

Atlassian Tells Employees They Can Work From Home Forever (cnbc.com) 43

Software company Atlassian is telling employees that they don't have to return to its offices, unless they want to use them. CNBC reports: "We will seek out amazing, diverse talent unbounded by the physical footprint of our offices," the company said in an internal blog post published on Wednesday. "We will continue to compete for talent in the global hubs, and we will be able to create opportunities for those in places we would have previously not been able to reach." Atlassian's products help software developers and others keep track of code, projects, issues and other work. One of Atlassian's competitors, privately held GitLab, has never had an office despite having grown past 1,000 people.

Atlassian won't be closing its offices, though. All of its locations, including its headquarters in Sydney, Australia, as well as locations in San Francisco, Amsterdam, India, Japan, the Philippines and Turkey, will remain open, and the company expects to adjust them so they can be used efficiently. Employees will be welcome to return to the offices should they want to use them. Some details of Atlassian's plan have yet to be finalized. The company hasn't decided how compensation might change for employees who relocate to other regions, nor has it figured out the right number of people to work in each time zone to ensure a sufficient amount of overlap, the person said. Atlassian will measure outcomes, rather than the number of hours each person spends working, according to the blog post.

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Atlassian Tells Employees They Can Work From Home Forever

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  • But who's Atlassian?
    • by davecb ( 6526 )
      A minor bad guy in Flash Gordon
      • He sounds like a much better employer than Ming the Merciless.

        • Depends on how high in the hierarchy you are. There's a marvelous but in the film where Ming mentors his chief henchman Klytus. Of course since he's suggesting (bit not ordering) execution of a much lower minion, it sucks for that guy...

    • Makers of Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence, Trello, etc. (Some homegrown; some acquired.)
    • Re:Sounds good. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Saturday August 08, 2020 @09:04AM (#60379929) Journal

      Atlassian is a company that makes an array of shitty software that many companies have become locked in to.

      They make Jira, Jira Align, Confluence, and several other dumpster fires of code that they call products.

      • Fisheye wasn't too bad.

        • by hkr03 ( 7119585 )

          Fisheye wasn't too bad.

          Not sure if the hosting environment makes a difference in the experience, but I found fisheye to be unstable and sometimes, it used to not even save states between refreshes. It also had frequent outages, causing delays in code reviews.

        • by _merlin ( 160982 )

          JIRA wasn't too bad either until they decided to cripple it about a decade ago.

      • by chrish ( 4714 )

        I assume the permanent "You can work from home!" is to offset the awfulness of having to work in Java? I mean, it's even worse than that, enterprise apps in Java...

        • I assume the permanent "You can work from home!" is to offset the awfulness of having to work in Java? I mean, it's even worse than that, enterprise apps in Java...

          Yeah, writing an enterprise app in Java is ridiculous, and Confluence will no doubt give me nightmares for the rest of my natural life. I barely use Jira but it's still a wretched blob of drek that sucks the life out of my day.

  • Those employees should also be looking for other jobs. Sorry, Atlassian, but you really suck.
    • by lordlod ( 458156 )

      Sorry, Atlassian, but you really suck.

      It has become the SAP of software development.

      Being the leader is the market means the decision becomes "safe", and adoption accelerates despite significant issues.

      • In what way is Atlassian a leader in anything?
        • by Mattcelt ( 454751 ) on Saturday August 08, 2020 @08:40AM (#60379879)

          Nearly every company I've worked for that does any software development uses Jira.

          Never minding that I've had to spend hundreds of hours re-writing almost the entire UI in CSS just to make the damn thing usable; it's everywhere.

        • In what way is Atlassian a leader in anything?

          In telling their employees to keep working from home. Mind you lots of other tech companies have done that too alongside telling them not to expect any more paychecks after the coming Friday.

        • In what way is Atlassian a leader in anything?

          Most software shops for a LONG time have used Jira. It's fun to call them shitty and yeah, their apps frustrate me, but I suspect the complainers don't have much experience with any alternatives. I haven't seen any pro grade programs that were noticeably better. Lots of shops also use confluence, fisheye, and bitbucket as well.

          Jira can be intimidating, but it's just fine if you know what you're doing. I actually think confluence and bitbucket are great. I've been using Jira and confluence for well o

          • The problem with his isn't that is "too complex", because it isn't.

            The problem with JIRA is that it is missing basic functionality that other bug tracking tools have had, there have been features requests open for literally decades to add these features, and they're marked as "not being considered". For example, the ability for system fields to have default content, such as a template in the Description field that tests should feel in when they report bugs.

            It's obvious they haven't fixed these things becaus

    • by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Saturday August 08, 2020 @08:24AM (#60379855)
      How do you describe a product whose issue tracker has more issues than the product you're tracking issues for? A fucking shit-show. And they're not interested in fixing anything. I've never had a client who was happy with them.
    • by alw53 ( 702722 )
      They removed direct wiki editing about 3 years ago so now if you want to change 100 occurrences of xyz.net to xyz.com, you have to open that link up in the UI 100 times. A total shit storm and people complain about it on their customer boards constantly and they don't care.
  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday August 08, 2020 @07:48AM (#60379807)

    We've noticed it ourselves. It also makes sense when you think about it.

    The cynic in me would say that it keeps the PhBs from keeping your engineers from working, and less distractions sure is one of the key reasons for it, but another one is that people don't have the need to stop working. What happens in office is that at some point you have to go because you get hungry or because you need a break, and since you can't really eat or relax in the office, what happens is that you go home and stay there. If you work from home, you don't just tack on another hours and then go home. Instead, you eat or take a break, only to feel bad for doing that at 4pm, so at 6 you sit down for "just another hour", and get back up around midnight to go to bed.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yet you have many employees who have seen their productivity going down due to MORE distractions at home. Noisy kids, pesky spouses, among other things.

      What happens in office is that at some point you have to go because you get hungry or because you need a break, and since you can't really eat or relax in the office, what happens is that you go home and stay there.

      The population of coworkers I've had that have gone home after lunch and have not shown back up at the office is exactly zero.

      Instead, you eat

  • And just in case: They will keep paying them, right?
  • There was this bunch of Yahoos who had a similar policy seven years ago. Some broad stopped it...
    • ...Some broad stopped it...

      And Yahoo's decline accelerated after that happened.

      • ...Some broad stopped it...

        And Yahoo's decline accelerated after that happened.

        Marissa Mayer was a terrible CEO, but she took the helm of a failing company. Her performance was pretty consistent with her predecessor and successor. Sure, if she was awesome, Yahoo could have had a comeback. Flickr is a great site and Yahoo Finance is surprisingly strong....so I think it's simultaneously true that Marissa Mayer was a garbage CEO and Yahoo was a doomed company, but let's be clear, Yahoo was a sinking ship when she boarded.

  • "We will seek out amazing, diverse talent unbounded by the physical footprint of our offices,"

    TRANSLATION:

    "We will dump those expensive offices, pocket the cash, and tell our employees they're 'lucky to have a job' and to shut the fuck up if they don't like it"

    • And is this evil in which way?

      • I didn't say it was evil, and I personally don't consider it to be so.

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Not evil, just foolish. When your staff leave your office, so does your source code and all your ideas and all your employees are not free to look for better employment elsewhere and even start businesses. Likely they want their employees to quote work on contract and take the lowest quote and spend money debugging, so they pay nothing in the end. They want to go churn and burn on software they do not have much hope for in the future and want to milk it for all it is worth for as long as they can, whilst cu

  • All this work from home stuff sounds good in the short term, but what comes next when the companies stark optimizing for working from home? Some big companies have already hinted that with your work location no longer tied to an office that your pay could vary depending on your home. All those people that used to commute 2 hrs away to have a high paying job while living in a cheaper area? Well, your pay might match your home location and not the pricey city where the office was. What about overseas wor
    • Mainstream offshore outsourcing is 20 years old now. If they could find people to do your job in India, they would have done so already. Believe me, 15 years ago, every business that hired technical professionals was desperately trying to do so. Some jobs were permanently lost, but most weren't. I think the total number of jobs actually increased. Most were in limbo for 10 years while management figured out their experiment failed. I had to train my replacements a dozen times...and each time the outso

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