Atlassian CEO Cites AI Shift When Announcing Plan To Shed 1,600 Jobs

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Atlassian plans to cut 1,600 jobs or a 10th of its global workforce, joining rivals in slashing staffing to cope with the advent of AI and a broader post-Covid industry slowdown. Australian billionaire founder Mike Cannon-Brookes explained the reductions in a staff memo, while also announcing his chief technology officer was leaving the Sydney-based company. "It would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn't change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas," Cannon-Brookes said. "It does."

Smells like "AI washing"

[Tablizer]

If AI made your company more productive, you wouldn't typically cut staff but take on more work, getting projects done at a faster rate with the same number of employees, becoming more profitable. Thus, this smells like mostly a sales slump, which can't typically be blamed on AI.

Re: Smells like "AI washing"

[liqu1d]

To be fair they haven't got anything that there isn't a better offering available now. Used to have a generous free tier that made me start paying for their service when I outgrew it. Now they've wildly restricted that free tier. Hardly surprising they're on their way out.

Re: Smells like "AI washing"

[Malc]

To be fair they haven't got anything there they didn't have a better offering for 10 or 15 years ago.

There, FTFY.

Jira and Confluence were seriously better in the past, then enshittification set in and they started forcing the subscription model. Now their updates fix things they've enshittified, but they enshittify something else. Just like Microsoft Office, there's been no improvement (quite the opposite in fact) for years, yet it costs more.

98% feature complete

[will4]

The question being as in other /. comments here is "Are Atlassain's products, for the majority of corporate users, feature complete?"

CTOs and IT heads have a compelling reason to stop buying the expensive multi-year licenses of these SaaS products since AI is a higher priority.

You are leasing the same car year after year at high cost, and the vendor insists on adding features you will never use as a way to increase your leasing cost every 3 years.....

Re:

[gweihir]

Thus, this smells like mostly a sales slump, which can't typically be blamed on AI.

Not yet, anyways. When AI has reduced product quality enough, then that will look different. Well, AWS may already have lost sales and customers due to AI caused outages.

Re:

[Petersko]

That only works if your company has access to "more work". If your contracts are being fully serviced, and your bottleneck is demand, "paid work" isn't on the table. Just "make work". And that is not efficient.

Finishing projects early only makes you more profitable if your project queue is oversubscribed.

Re: Smells like "AI washing"

[liqu1d]

A company of their scale is unlikely to be running out of other companies to take on. If they are it's because they're not competitive which surely means either more dev work to compete or slowly die in the corner. If it were a small company competing with giants I'd fully agree their ability to get more contracts would be a factor. These guys are the giants.

Re:

[Petersko]

I don't think that's a sound assumption. Big companies often outpace their contract pipeline. Some so it by design. Having staff "on the bench" is anticipation of work to come.

Atlassian derives the bulk of their income through subscriptions, not contracted projects. That's my assumption, but I think it's defensible.

I think if your point were true for them they would, as you suggest, keep consuming that project queue. Nobody company doesn't want revenue. But since they're looking at the other side of the led

Re: Smells like "AI washing"

[liqu1d]

Perhaps I'm mistaken then. Every so often I need a feature and google it to find out someone's asked for it a few years ago and it's been placed on todo. These features generally are supported by their competitors. This is where my reasoning probably fell apart but if I need X feature and they don't offer it but their competitor does Id move to their competitor. In my mind it makes sense for them to prioritise adding these features so I have no need to move. Presumably lacking some features also causes them

Re:

[rsilvergun]

They are also frantically freeing up Capital to spend on AI bullshit. You can thank the high interest rates for the mass layoffs normally they would just borrow money but with high interest rates that's not practical.

That is incidentally what high interest rates are designed to do. They are designed to create layoffs which forces you to spend less money so demand goes down.

It's yet another example of the books getting balanced on the backs of people who work for a living.

Re:

[deKernel]

Serious question for you. Have you ever thought about actually taking classes on economics and political science in lieu of simply spouting these foolish statements you come across from Redit? Hint, there are good reasons to increase interest rates because access to cheap money all the time triggers other issues.

Re:

[Local ID10T]

Thus, this smells like mostly a sales slump, which can't typically be blamed on AI.

You can't say that! It will hurt the stock price. If you say you are cutting staff because AI is awesome, you can buzzword the stock price higher..

Re:

[jenningsthecat]

If AI made your company more productive, you wouldn't typically cut staff but take on more work, getting projects done at a faster rate with the same number of employees, becoming more profitable. Thus, this smells like mostly a sales slump, which can't typically be blamed on AI.

But putting the blame for the sales slump where it really belongs could fall anywhere on the line between embarrassing and dangerous. A 'fall guy' like AI, which can't defend itself and is very unpopular in some quarters, is probably quite convenient in this situation.

.

Re:

[umghhh]

OTOH if they say it is AI it ay very well be - I mean when mgmt decides that a method X is better they will try it. Chances are that the problems will show up too late to make the deciding body look stupid when it matters. Who like me spent decades in the corporate world knows that the decisions and consequences are decoupled for most of the mgmt stuff. These decisions were tech related and now the tech related decision may have human side consequences. The consequnnces are visible much much later and will

Re:

[Hentes]

Atlassian is making dev tools though, so in their case the sales slump is because other companies are also cutting jobs "because of AI". BTW issues cascading like this is often how a depression starts...

Re: Smells like "AI washing"

[Hadlock]

Their stock price cratered when everyone realized you can vibe code a ticketing system very easily, which is what jira is at the end of the day. Cutting payroll is the easiest way to shed costs

Re:

[phantomfive]

I don't understand why anyone uses Jira.

Rovo keeps humping my leg

[stickman393]

In the last 24 months Atlassian has gone from one of my favorite software companies to possibly the worst, and it is all the fault of the AI hype train

Jira has been shitty for almost 20 years

[Somervillain]

For starters this is AI washing. There is a huge backlog of issues and missing features across their product family and markets for them to expand to. If your developers are 10x, you can don't cut by 10%, you boost your workload by 5x or more...expand to new markets or fix all those issues that were too expensive or minor to fix back in the 1x developer days. This needs to be prosecuted as it's obvious fraud to investors.

Fuck I'm old, I remember starting using Jira over 20 years ago. It started out cool for a brief moment, but as it took on more adult responsibilities, it became painful to use. I just assumed that was a consequence of being a full grown app....that power users needed the complexity....every employer I've worked at has been full time Altassian...confluence...also started amazing....seems to get shittier and slower. I can't remember when it improved last. Bitbucket? I guess it's fine. SourceTree is decent. But does ANYONE find Jira to be a pleasant experience? Do you find it to be intuitive? Do you look at it and say "yup, that's a well-designed product". It's a messy monster we adapt to and just find ways to make work...you can get things done, but fuck, it's just like Oracle RDBMS...a billion horrible decisions we just have gotten used to and stopped complaining about.

But regardless...Atlassian is a publicly traded company. Publicly traded companies cut during slumps. Productivity boosts lead to increased workload, not "let's earn last year's revenue for 10% less". If they've accumulated dead weight, the smart move is a targeted cut of underperformers, not a broad layoff like this.

Re:

[chas.williams]

Atlassian has decided to move its products to the cloud. That means fewer versions floating around in the wild submitting bug reports and generating support calls. It's the typical contracture after you have vendor lock-in across multiple products. Squeeze those customers for whatever is left in their checkbooks.

If AI software is so easy

[wakeboarder]

Then why don't we write projects to mimic Atlassian products? It's because you have to have humans.

Re:

[Junta]

Actually a relatively high risk to Atlassian....

The big thing is that somehow, they got every 'Agile' consultant in the world to declare that you are properly Agile if and only if you use Jira.

Now the trendy thing is to say you are AI aligned, not Agile aligned. So replace your guy implementing your oh-so-special and unique workflow tortuously in Jira with someone to vibe code up your own truly bespoke issue management solution.

What do people use Atlassian for these days?

[linuxguy]

Back in the day we used Jira a lot. But also had GitHub accounts. The integration of the two wasn't great so we switched to GitHub issues and kicked Jira to the curb. This saved money and also a lot of hassle in trying to keep the two in sync. I am wondering if many others went a similar route.

We did use Confluence and I do miss it. I would love to find an opensource replacement for it that stores files in markdown format. Like Obsidian, but for teams.

Re: What do people use Atlassian for these days?

[Hazmeister]

Sounds like you should try https://js.wiki/ [js.wiki] . You can write pages in markdown.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

GitHub does have Wiki, though it's fairly bare-bones. https://docs.github.com/en/com... [github.com]

Atlassian can go suck it!

[Hank21]

I feel bad for the developers being layed off, but the company has been rotten for years ever since they commercialized and did away with standalone confluence and forced everyone to cloud, breaking compatibility with 3rd party apps and destroying that ecosystem. What a a great product that they cratered. I'm still, to this day, looking for a viable replacement that is not on the same money grabbing trajectory (Bookstack is looking good)

At-lassian / my org has dumped and gone

[Pseudonymous Powers]

Oh, no, Confluence has contracted AInfluenza? Where will my company dump its undifferentiated mass of documents that no one has ever bothered to read and, increasingly frequently, no one has even bothered to write?

AI Fixation

[Gilmoure]

The decimation

AI's major contribution: soup lines

[BrendaEM]

Remember folks, when unemployment reaches 10%, we are officially in a depression.

atlassian data center end of life = end of atlassi

[Joe_Dragon]

atlassian data center end of life = end of atlassian for some.

Another CEO says ....

[JasterBobaMereel]

We are embracing AI and so we don't need as many people - every time it is they are doing badly so they need to save money, and AI is an excuse that is good PR

Stand Up company

[aoism]

I was at Atlassian for 4 years until laid off during their shedding of HipChat. Mike Canon-Brooks (MCB) is a totally stand up guy and really takes care of his people, and the company does take care of its customers. One of their mottos I still live by today is 'dont fuck the customer' (Aussies, am I right?). Despite being laid off, it is pretty close to one of the best places I've ever worked at and I hold him and the company in the highest regards. Sure some of the software suffers from founders code probl