‘Devastating blow’: Atlassian lays off 1,600 workers ahead of AI push
7 months ago by themachinestops to c/technology
Of all the shitty AI products flooding the market right now, Atlassian's Rovo has got to be the most useless I've had the misfortune of using.
They should be hiring more workers to fix their AI slop, not replacing them with even more of it.
Rovo made it easier for me to find things that search was quite useless at finding. I found no other benefits to Rovo.
We can only hope so.
I've suggested to my team a few times that we should start a new business developing "Atlassian, but good". They're up for it. So many of our wider business have never used "anything but Jira", and they can't see it for the steaming pile of shite that it is. Not just that it's a bad tool for developers, QE, project management or customer support, but they couldn't imagine anything that's better in any way, or how it would look if it didn't have so many issues.
Problem with being a business is that Atlassian isn't so much really a software company as much as they are a marketing thing that pretends to be software.
Agile consultants say "Atlassian", companies lap that up at the executive level and the employees roll with it because selecting Atlassian is "thought leadership". The people picking Atlassian are not the people using Atlassian. Paradoxically typical Atlassian rooted workflows are about as far from being actually agile as you can get.
Nothing, personally. Jira at our place only serves the bean counters in the programme management department. The data is a mess anyway, it just gives them the illusion of control.
I work in a large enterprise and most of our work is just stupid red tape satisfying processes and other teams' rules, many of which just exist to keep those teams employed. There's so much unnecessary work and BS going on.
Considering they are talking about making a replacement service, probably just GitHub/codeberg/etc and collab edit docs and discussions at the start, and then eat your own dogfood.
Check out what microslop is doing to github. Codeberg though, that's an option!
I'd want better tickets for dev and bugs than github has, not sure the codeberg offering there if any
Maybe start with Trac if it's still available. Freeware.
Hm. Bear with me. I've used jira on prem for a very long time and have used a multitude of other products.
Jira was quite good in comparison.
What am I missing?
(aside from the whole cloud requirement and atlassian behaving AI-shitty)
Jira Cloud isn't just the on-prem version of Jira where you're forced to use and pay for Atlassian's hosting, it's actually a different and much shittier version of the old on-prem Jira. Same goes for other Atlassian products such as Confluence.
It's no surprise to me that Atlassian is in trouble, as there's little reason I can see to use their products anymore, and they are just coasting on inertia at this point. Whereas 10 years ago, while it was still fun to knock their stuff, I had to admit they were actually pretty decent.
As much as this is overly simplistic, there's a sort of appeal here..
The good news when you have proper issue management is that you don't lose any issues. The bad news is you don't lose any issues.
In my work, the issue tracker has issues that are over 5 years old. Any time someone dares to just purge those, some one comes out of the woodwork to suddenly passionately care about this thing they have forgotten for years until the jira notification triggered them.
Projects that have pristine issue discipline tend to suck, as they waste so much energy on things that didn't matter whether or is fixing or engaging in an argument about the value. The better projects tend to say "fine, we will hold that issue in low priority backlog and get to it if we ever run out of better stuff to do", and the submitter is placated and everyone knows we will never run out of better stuff to do.
Focalboard. FOSS.
Maybe Linear?
Looks like their website became less telling than it was years ago. I think it was during the Atlassian force into the cloud where they showed up as a speedy/snappy, dev-focused issue tracking system. There's a free tier if you want to try.
Companies wanna feel special and have different workflows around tickets. Making customizable workflows that connect with a ton of different systems easily is a shockingly hard problem.
I feel like there’s a business opportunity to take 50% of Atlassians value and spin it up into something simple but getting the good 50% down is kinda hard as someone is going to miss one stupid feature that runs 40% of their workflows.
I would have more hate to send Jira's way if not for all are tickets being written like:
"As a developer given I am working on page X Then all functionality of page X is correct"
Then everybody gets pissy that page Y has a bug.
"I feel like we've gotten much better with our acceptance criteria" - one of the people getting pissy about page Y
“As a developer given I am working on page X Then all functionality of page X is correct”
Heh, I know exactly what accent to read this with.
Yeah...
I've had to use it in various forms for so long now and I can't believe how unintuitive it is to use. Nothing outside of adding comments is obvious. I dared to try to see what was in a previous sprint and it basically requires a custom report. Why isn't there just a view sprint dropdown or something? I did a quick search to see if it was just me which lead to the Jira subreddit (why is that a thing?) and felt like I was getting gaslit by all the jira 'professionals' calling it a skill issue
Prior Sprints do not Exist.
There is your active Sprint, there is a huge pile of all tickets that ever were, unable to be sorted by any reasonable metric, and there are the interlinks between tickets. Nothing else exists.
When your Sprint ends, say goodbye for you shall literally never see your helpful comment that you put all those details into again.
@IWW4 @themachinestops
For some reason all #java #web #software usually escalates into horrible mess XD
same for #salesforce its a mess of a #brainfart but they developed their own #devlang probably full of #errors
The biggest surprise in the article is that Atlassian is not profitable. How? They pretty much have a monopoly in the Jira-like space (look , I can't even think of a generic name) and they charge a hefty sum for their products. How tf do they lose money?
The article lists an insane revenue of $1.6B, yet the losses are only on the order of $42M in the last 3 months. Against that much revenue, it looks to me like they are managing the company at a slight loss on purpose. They probably could close that gap if they wanted to, but have some favorable tax implications or something by running that "slight" loss.
(And who knows, maybe this is part of the attempt to close that gap and show a profit before the founders cash out and it all gets sold to a Shittier company)
Asana is… not a whole lot better.
There is a Jira ticket (ID-240) for Atlassian requesting the ability to merge Atlassian accounts that is over 10 years old. I'm one of the 1,450 watchers. This news does not bode well for this ticket ever getting implemented.
Good, someone has to think of the poor race car drivers, and their million dollar team.
A million dollars is probably just the catering budget, tbh. I don't even know what this company does, I just saw that no one else had pointed this out. It sounds like I'm lucky to not use their software.
Every company is just firing employees left and right and I'm not sure what they all expect to happen. I guess just through the magic of AI they can have less workers do more for the same pay. But damn, so many people let go all over the place.
They make jira, project management software that is so slow and annoying you're better off using a chat and shared files on Google drive.
They also make a bunch of other shitty software but jira is the most famous.
I was thinking along the same lines, like they probably spend more on fuel. I remember when Honda pissed everyone off in the 1990s after inflating F1 budgets and then suddenly leaving the sport when the Japanese market crashed. At the time they had Honda factory R&D teams designing and building engines just for F1 teams; that was probably tens of millions a year that wasn't even part of a team's budget... in the 80s and 90s.
Anyhow... F1 teams have a budget cap for several years now. For 2026, it's $215 million, and that doesn't include engines, nor driver and team manager salaries.
Are you serious? That's insane. I had no idea!
In February 2025, Williams Racing announced a record multi-year title sponsorship with Atlassian and will compete as Atlassian Williams Racing from the 2025 season of Formula One onwards. - https://en.wikipedia.org/...
I hope they can drive faster than their software loads content.
They will rehire for less. The AI hype is just a wage suppression scheme.
My employer has been axing so many high level engineers it's not even funny. I think that's terrible for engineer morale. Why would you want to strive to improve and get promoted if it just makes you "too expensive to keep on payroll"?
We need more tech unions and tech coops.
Guillotines we need more guillotines
We need to organize a proper rebellion before we get to guillotines and starting with unions is a place to work from.
"Robo", whenever I search something: “Let me define these search terms for you, even when they are not something you can define like that or you already know all of that, and better.”
You can't even disable that. Wasted LLM cost. On every search, I now give the response a thumbs down and flag the most fitting tag: Inappropriate.
My god, that's worse than Wonder buying shitty software from Sweetgreen for $186 million.
Feel like that's on you, unless you were born yesterday.
There's a chance that leaning out the team makes things better. Bloat kills dev teams.
But... ticketing systems are a bit like fashion. We could see some new shiny system come around that does more or less the same thing, but becomes fashionable for one reason or another and eats Atlassian's lunch.
Pretty much all of my colleagues wasted time, because Jira stores comments locally that you haven't yet sent, but does not do that for replies on comments. Those are gone after reopening the site for some reason.
3 coders and 1597 managers.
They renamed "project" to "space", so that it's harder to find what you are looking for.
They renamed "ticket" to "work item" to "issue". (We all still call it a ticket)
Stories? Events? Kanban?
Fuck you, I need a text box, date field and some box to tick that says I'm done.
All this so that some VP with their thumb up their ass who spends 2/3 of the year in Florida knows I'm working!
They renamed “ticket” to “work item” to “issue”. (We all still call it a ticket)
Those three terms all mean different things.
You could save a LOT of money by replacing the execs with AI.
You can save even more money by shutting down Atlassian and all its trash products
Ticketing systems are useful. It's not really all that practical to carry all that workflow and prioritization info as metadata on a version-control system. And some devs might think it's unnecessary, but that's because they're sheltered from all the higher-level planning, resourcing and portfolio management that they never need to think about.
I think the person you were responding to meant that the execs were not useful (see the parent comment), or at least not as useful to the overall enterprise as their salaries would have lead you to believe, in comparison to a standard developer.
Yes workflow systems are useful. Jira is a bad implementation to a good idea. It might help if they listened to feedback from people who actually used their software to improve it. Tbf they do make some good changes occasionally, like adding dark mode (which isn't perfect but also it isn't nothing).
"Uh, we need you to clear out your desk ASAP."
"Sure, just submit a JIRA ticket and I'll get right on it."
Somehow, HR processes are always exempt from the ticketing process.
And yet oddly (and predictably, and likely disastrously, etc. -) some HR departments are among the very first to glibly upload their (our) everything's into constantly shifting unreliable AI "products". Not speaking hypothetically 😐
Funny stuff, that.
Because the people who work in HR spent their educational years avoiding anything technical.
that's because they don't want you to know when you're getting fired.
I used to watch the category for decoms that had keywords in the subject line. someone from HR found out somehow (loose lips probably) and they stopped making tickets entirely.
it's a shame really. I had a really awesome script watching the same criteria for my name 🤣. nothing heinous, just some farewell messages and dirty laundry.
It's weird, I got laid off by a west coast tech giant and they gave me two months' notice, and they were happy to have me doing nothing that whole time (and I'd had nothing to do for about six months prior to that). I was remote so I guess they felt that I couldn't fuck shit up on the way out.
Our HR critters use a case-management system, badly. They have an internal process, but never adapted the default workflows to match it. So the pendejitos are always trying to clean up self-inflicted gunshot wounds to their feet.
AI will have a scrum with itself.
It's even worse than that: it'll be a ServiceNow ticket.
JIRA and Bitbucket are so bad that even Microsoft Azure DevOps (that is a reskin of the decade old Visual Studio Online, which itself is a reskin on the two decade old Microsoft TFS) is somehow better than it. And everyone loves to hate on Microsoft products.
Are there any actually good enterprise grade Task tracker + Code repo combo that we should be suggesting the execs migrate to? Maybe the GitHub Enterprise product?
My org just rolled our own project management tool that matches our workflow now.
Edit/note: I probably didn't make my comment very clear. I'm aware it's 1600 being laid off. More that I didn't realise that Atlassian had 16k people in total. 16,000 people making their products progressively worse.
Even if their company only had 1600 ppl, I'd still say they were wasteful.
About 16k workers? How!?
What a waste of human effort, time and resources. All to make a few bad products, worse.
I'm not surprised. Jira is a monster.
As with any software, look how complex it is as a user, the hidden part is 10x worse.
It's possible to have complex, poorly-architected stuff going on behind the curtains, even if the UI is simple. And vice-versa. And even worse, like JIRA, both can be a dog's breakfast.
1600
It's not 16k, it's 800×2
It’s not because of their garbage AI. It’s because their garbage AI is leading to people dropping them like a bad habit for open source and fucking Microsoft alternatives, so they need to reduce operating costs and CAPEX to demonstrate profit growth
We have https://codeberg.org/ as an alternative to Bitbucket, and you can have free public static pages like Netlify or Github pages.
Codeberg also offers private repos.
Codeberg also offers private repos.
Sometimes, we do tolerate repositories that are not licensed optimally (e.g. due to historic reasons dating back decades).
Depending on how you read the FAQ entry, they may not explicitly talk about private non-commercial content, though.
I switched to linear because trello got so bad. Jira has become bloated and impractical.
Atlassian is getting thrashed in the stockmarket and they're using AI as a get out of jail free card to conduct massive layoffs.
Its too bad that in the end they are just making forgettable tools that jira aside already have extensive competition, that actually feel built for enterprise vs the garbage atlassian is making.
If it wasn't for the army of agile cultists who claim that work is impossible without Jira they'd probably already be a much smaller company.
They are the ones in charge of making sure bitbucket stops working every other Thursday.
TBH Atlassian was already such terrible slop, unsupervised AI might even make it better
I don't think AI needs collaboration and project management software. Good luck with that future.
Quite disappointed in him. Always thought he was a reasonable character but using e-mail is such a slap in the face.
This is going to be horrible. We’ve been trying to get a quote from them for a bit bucket subscription for the past 6 months with no success. I doubt we’ll be getting anything faster now.
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AI-washing layoffs. They will replace jack shit with AI but that's a better story than "we have to reduce costs because we don't have cheap ways to refinance our $1B debt".
Credit isn't cheap and Iran is not going to make it cheaper, investments in software have tanked, so the only story that can still be told with an almost straight face is that they still have big growth opportunities thanks to the magic of AI.
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