This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
Trying to get Rovo to do things in JIRA is like trying to train a chimp to cram shit back into an elephant’s ass.
Atlassian now circling the drain.
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.
As a future customer, please include high quality connectors to import legacy data from Jira and Confluence. We're going to need them. Thank you in advance.
I FUCKING hate jira with a passion. I swear to god that dumbfuck software is nothing but a miserable time sink.
I am sorry for the people who got laid off. Also there is no way AI is replacing the CTO….
Them and Salesforce can both be Thanos’d out of existence, pretty please
I use Jira at work and I still have no idea what the fuck it is, what it's for, or why it's so needlessly complicated. It's a list of text with some dates and names. Why is that worth shit?
It creates pretty productivity related graphs your manager/PM loves, that's the real usage.
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
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)
Agile project management. And ticketing. And document management.
There are others. We are working on moving to Asana and other products.
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.
well the good part is you don't need to merge those accounts anymore
Yet they can sponsor an F1 team.
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 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"?
About 6 months ago they spent more than half a billion acquiring The Browser Company whose only currently-being-developed product is a pretty wrapper for ChatGPT
That explains the explosion of unwanted AI features in Jira these days. No, I don't need you to re-write my fucking ticket comment!
So you telling me Jira and all its related bullshit will get even worse? I hadn't thought it possible.
You're absolutely right!
Would you like me to yassify this ticket for you?
Put some emojis in my SQL, fam
I’m amazed they had 1600 employees to begin with. I guess it takes a lot of resources to make something suck as hard as JIRA
3 coders and 1597 managers.
Who else is going to put the sidebar as top bar, and then switch them back a couple years later?
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
Their products are utter garbage to begin with, this can only hasten their well-deserved demise.
"Uh, we need you to clear out your desk ASAP."
"Sure, just submit a JIRA ticket and I'll get right on it."
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 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
Trello has been getting worse
I switched to linear because trello got so bad. Jira has become bloated and impractical.
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.
"AI is too dumb to take our jobs" as if that matters. that's not even the point, the point of Generative AI is to mine data and devalue human labour. according to the like 120 people who run this world too many people are making too much money so now we have a dogshit "technology" made to cut your wages whenever it's convenient.
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.
That sucks, but how the fuck does Atlassian have 16,000 workers to begin with? What do they all do? And their products look like... Guestures at all of them
Yet everyone helps feed this AI beast. No one thinks... Maybe I'm helping this through my data.
Maybe because stock price hit the floor cause no profits from their work?
