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karim79 45 minutes ago [-]
I see. So AI is reducing the number of jobs in the tech sector because fewer people are needed to ship stuff (thanks to AI). And since fewer people are needed across the tech sector then we don't need things like Jira anymore because it can all be done on post-its or Google sheets or something, so there's no need for Atlassian accounts anymore. And Atlassian can now do more with less thanks to AI.
I can't wait for Atlassian physical sticky-notes to take over.
[Edit: grammo and formatting]
bdcravens 14 minutes ago [-]
In many cases, sticky notes are more productive.
karim79 6 minutes ago [-]
That's what we use, plus the more environmentally friendly version; the back of an opened paper envelope.
thoman23 7 minutes ago [-]
Where "many cases" all involve a team of 2 to 5 people working together in the same room and never bringing work home.
kthaker1224 55 seconds ago [-]
The 1,600 number blew my mind, and then I realized Atlassian employs almost 16,000. Kind of crazy.
Either way, I'd expect that those 1,600 people using AI to solve Atlassian's big problems would be better for the company in the long-run than reducing headcount with the same level of output
elzbardico 2 hours ago [-]
Atlassian 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.
gfiorav 1 hours ago [-]
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.
gexla 47 minutes ago [-]
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
mhitza 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
dd8601fn 14 minutes ago [-]
They started nagging every user in Jira to use their AI, now. It’s like straight out of the Microsoft “Dear god please please use our AI product!” playbook.
I’m honestly not sure what you even use AI for in Jira. Maybe there’s a purpose, but 90% of us are just moving tickets across the most expensive kanban board that money can… rent.
dbbk 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
ralph84 10 minutes ago [-]
They're not dying, but they're not healthy either. They've been around for 24 years and still haven't figured out how to turn a profit.
Rapzid 47 minutes ago [-]
TBF they have made major improvements, IMHO, to Jira and Confluence over the past few years.
000ooo000 42 minutes ago [-]
Anything in particular? I first used it about 10 years ago, on prem, and am currently using the cloud version. Current edition is clunky, slow, and constantly badgers me with Rovo shit I can't disable. IMHO, it reeks of a product once built by and for technical people that eventually got dumbed down by POs to the point of being painful for the original users. Obviously I'm no longer the target user because I assume someone somewhere appreciates these changes.
telman17 25 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps I just haven't noticed them, which is unfortunate. I have noticed that I often have to double or triple click to open a ticket on my board. There's no reason for such a core functionality to be that slow.
llama052 30 minutes ago [-]
I'd argue the opposite. The thing is so bloated and the simplest of things seem to be so hard. Import markdown in confluence? Nope not natively. Add an issue to the board? better go to the one workflow to do it and not in the actual ticket.
sally_glance 40 minutes ago [-]
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.
stackedinserter 1 hours ago [-]
Atlassian is very far from "dying"
56 minutes ago [-]
MeetingsBrowser 3 hours ago [-]
Layoffs because of AI make no sense to me.
Imagine you own a company that is paid to deliver packages. You use horses and differentiate by delivering quicker than everyone else.
Then cars are invented and everyone starts delivering packages faster.
In what world does a healthy growing business react to this by laying off couriers "in a pivot to automotive transportation".
Would a healthy business not switch everyone to driving cars and deliver even more packages?
Refreeze5224 24 minutes ago [-]
You're mixing up what AI is for compared to horses and cars. Horses/cars enable people to be more efficient. AI enables companies to fire people.
Horses/cars improve productivity. AI reduces payroll costs. That's the whole game here.
dozerly 9 minutes ago [-]
The assumption behind this comment is that AI is more productive than Human + AI at this point in time, and I don’t think we’ve seen that be true yet.
Refreeze5224 2 minutes ago [-]
No, the assumption is that companies are more interested in cutting labor costs than productivity. Even if you screw up and need to hire back 50% of those you fired, you still cut the labor costs of the 50% still fired. And you can pretend to be a cool, thought-leading, "AI-native" company, which might be enough to juice your share price enough to offset any actual productivity loss.
Capital will always be in opposition to the cost of labor and want to make it as close to zero as possible, and AI is a plausible story for attempting that, regardless of the reality of AI efficiency.
laughing_man 48 minutes ago [-]
It makes quite a bit of sense if the size of your market doesn't expand along with the new technology and you don't have a competitive advantage. Just because you have the capability to deliver more packages doesn't necessarily mean you'll have customers willing to pay you to deliver more packages.
itomato 1 hours ago [-]
They just announced GA of agentic assignees. It suggests a year or more of maturation. Rovo Dev has already been a thing.
The Java products are almost EOL.
They have already been assigning JAC tickets to Rovo and $TEAM is down.
What else should be done with the surplus headcount?
stingraycharles 1 hours ago [-]
Are you making the argument that Atlassian’s products are basically done, no more development needed?
falcor84 2 hours ago [-]
You need a very different skill set and culture for driving and maintaining cars than for driving and maintaining horses. I honestly think that for big changes like this (if you are willing to accept that AI is such), looking at it from the portfolio management angle, it makes more sense to just nuke the current operation and start a greenfield one.
selcuka 40 minutes ago [-]
> it makes more sense to just nuke the current operation and start a greenfield one
Why? What was wrong with the 1600 people they sacked? Do they have a magical 1600-person hire pool with the AI skills they want?
mempko 1 hours ago [-]
Senior engineers have been 'vibe coding' for over a decade before AI. Think what they do, they look at PRs all day and comment. Magically the code change reflecting their comments. It's the same thing now but machines are doing it, not humans. The issue is that junior engineers have no experience working like senior engineers. The reality is that it's not that hard to work in this way. There is no excuse for software companies not being able to re-train their more junior engineers to work this way.
falcor84 36 minutes ago [-]
That's a very nice analogy. I agree and thinking about my previous comment, I suppose I just lashed out because I really dislike Jira the product and don't think that it can be salvaged, but I don't have anything against the engineers working there, and agree that they can be mentored and reassigned to a product where they'd be able to create something good.
notfried 23 minutes ago [-]
If they are paying them 6-month severances like Block did, this means they are effectively saying 1,600 people for 6-months wouldn't have fixed JIRA's usability and performance, which if they could have done like many have been begging, they'd would probably make more money long-term than this firing would save.
dozerly 10 minutes ago [-]
I wholeheartedly believe that they could not have fixed it with 9,600 people months of work. They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that.
fyrn_ 4 minutes ago [-]
They need to just clean slate start from skratch. I don't believe that code base can be saved.
AI means it's easy to copy any SAAS now right? so should be easy /s
alexpotato 3 hours ago [-]
Chartr Daily had this chart [0] back in 2023 and it shows how much the big tech firms grew from 2016 to 2022.
Some of the firms, Apple being the exception, doubled or even almost tripled in size.
I'm sure AI is partly to blame here but I think a lot of it is over hiring and firms just getting bogged down in bureaucracy and trying to clear things out.
I don't think AI is even partially to blame. Unless Atlassian is claiming AI can fully replace 1,600 workers, layoffs don't make sense.
You need people driving AI to get the benefits.
Its like a courier service that uses horses firing people once cars are invented because cars are faster than horses. You would switch everyone from horses to cars and deliver more packages.
sally_glance 36 minutes ago [-]
Good point, but what if you were previously chaining horse carriage rides and now a car can cover the same distance as 10 of them with a single driver?
KnuthIsGod 1 hours ago [-]
AI is great !
It is a great excuse for underperforming and incompetent CEOs.
It provides the CEO with a wonderful excuse for sacking people.
simonw 18 minutes ago [-]
Has anyone seen any hints as to the role make up of those 1,600 jobs?
Would be interesting to know if they are majority engineering, or if that's a lot of sales and marketing and support and other roles in there.
I don’t think anyone believes this is because they are becoming more efficient because of AI. It may be a bit because AI makes their products even less attractive than they already were.
TutleCpt 3 hours ago [-]
Where are the most popular alternatives to Jira?
jemmyw 1 hours ago [-]
Linear is great if you fit into its workflow. It's very dev orientated.
I work on Aha! Develop https://www.aha.io/develop/overview which I obviously think is a great tool, especially if you're a team with a product manager.
computomatic 3 hours ago [-]
Have you tried nothing at all? Had great success with this on a 150+ dev team. Much preferred to jira. Admittedly does require a different approach to work than a jira-centric team is going to be familiar with.
moron4hire 56 minutes ago [-]
I 100%, sincerely agree that "nothing at all" is really a great option compared to Jira. I actually hired a whole person onto my project to make them responsible for ticket tracking, telling them they could use whatever they wanted so long as I never had to look at Jira again. They used Jira for a while because it's what other people were pressuring them to use, but ultimately they started using MS Planner. MS Planner! I mean, Planner is garbage too, but at least it's not Jira.
000ooo000 52 minutes ago [-]
Where do you put the story points????
falcor84 2 hours ago [-]
I like Clickup's way of allowing arbitrarily nested subtasks and easily promoting/demoting a task across levels, without having this hard distinction that Jira has between levels. I understand that some coporate managers like the rigidity, but in practice, it's just very hard to know the scope of a story early on, and I found this flexibility really valuable.
Linear is pretty nice IMO otoh have not experienced it at megacorp scale.
tombert 3 hours ago [-]
I don't know if it's "popular", but I use Clickup at work and I think it's generally fine. At least when I have used it it's less laggy and horrible than Jira.
kilroy123 3 hours ago [-]
Linear
antonymoose 3 hours ago [-]
What do you need out of Jira? Most any firm I’ve worked for could replace it with Trello or any Kanban style tool in a heartbeat.
MikeNotThePope 3 hours ago [-]
It's worth pointing out that Trello has been owned by Atlassian since 2017.
Redmine comes to mind? Or if you use jira for helpdesk then Request tracker
bamboozled 2 hours ago [-]
Excel spreadsheets, because that's what every project manager ends up using to actually get work done.
ipaddr 3 hours ago [-]
Mantis is awesome
Spixel_ 3 hours ago [-]
Notion is nice
itomato 1 hours ago [-]
Until you try to leave with your data.
tombert 3 hours ago [-]
Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse...
I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors.
Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude.
Unless this is just regular layoffs, but they know if they brand it as "AI" their investors will eat it up.
nemomarx 3 hours ago [-]
If everyone else is downsizing and using AI as an excuse, it's both a pretty good cover for any firing you might have wanted to do for a while, and you can reasonably assume you can hire back in the future because everyone else is firing too. Maybe you can even depress their wages a little?
alexpotato 3 hours ago [-]
> there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done
I distinctly remember a discussion where someone says "Man, I wish JIRA would add this feature/fix this bug"
Someone else pipes in: "I bet there is already a ticket on the JIRA bugtracker/feature board for this, it's not done and it's from 9 years ago" and lo and behold there was.
ryandrake 2 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, none of these companies are going to turn their AI loose on important, annoying, 9 year old bugs. They're just going to use it to cram more unwanted features into their software, just like they're doing today with human developers.
bombcar 3 hours ago [-]
It is just regular layoffs, and doing so admits they don't know what to do with the 1,600 people anyway, and probably didn't know what to do with them for years.
AI isn't going to help, but it bandaids over the issue so the investors aren't spooked.
tombert 3 hours ago [-]
That's kind of what I was getting at.
Laying thousands of people off often implies you hired thousands of more people than you actually needed, which makes investors feel like you're wasting their money. If you say "no they're all being replaced for $200/month of Claude Code!" then it makes you look like there was actually strategy to this.
carefree-bob 3 hours ago [-]
I think with fewer people working on it, the rate at which it gets worse will now decline!
Sol- 3 hours ago [-]
> there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done
I definitely buy this for the software sector or the economy as a whole, but for an individual company? Seems one would be bottlenecked by various factors quickly.
Perhaps better to let people go so that they can be productive elsewhere?
tombert 3 hours ago [-]
There's always bugs that can be fixed, there's always optimizations that can be done, there's always a feature that someone wants to build but hasn't had budget to do. There's always improvements that can be done for deployment. There's always ways of reducing memory. There's always ways of reducing ongoing expenses etc.
I have worked for a bunch of companies, and even relatively new and young companies have all these things pile up pretty quickly.
jkubicek 3 hours ago [-]
Jira takes a measurable amount of time to make bulk-changes to a single ticket, which is insane. If they’re going to fix anything, fix that.
icedchai 3 hours ago [-]
Have you tried looking for a job recently? The job market is cooked and it's not getting better any time soon. The supply of candidates is way up. Salaries are going down. Even mediocre jobs show 100+ applicants on LinkedIn.
Avicebron 3 hours ago [-]
> Perhaps better to let people go so that they can be productive elsewhere?
True. Joining thousands of other unemployed developers sending applications into a job posting for a nonexistent role online is very productive. Probably good for the economy too now that I think about it.
jemmyw 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think it can get worse. In fact, it'd probably be better if Atlassian just stopped touching it.
bartread 3 hours ago [-]
> Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors.
Alternative take: I can't speak for BitBucket because I've never used it, but I've had enough time with JIRA and Confluence to last a lifetime, and these products are so bad - so clunky, so slow, so much friction in the UI - that I can't really see what useful value adding work Atlassian's 16,000 employees have actually been delivering. From that perspective losing 1600 of them seems like it's not likely to make much difference since, from my perspective as a user, they didn't appear to be doing anything useful in the first place.
I'm sorry if that comes across as a particularly savage take but Atlassian have wilfully been churning out absolute garbage for at least 15 years now (there was a time, in around 2006/7, when I thought JIRA was quite good - genuinely) and their products have made me miserable throughout a good chunk of my career, so my sympathy is pretty limited. If they can be bothered to make the products better, faster, more usable, and remove friction ruthlessly at every turn in their workflows, then I might well change my point of view.
tombert 3 hours ago [-]
I haven't used BitBucket in awhile but I remember it being "not that bad".
I agree with pretty much everything you said; I don't actually think that it's due to AI is my point. If their products are terrible and they're finally losing business over it, it makes enough sense to fire 10% of the workforce. I just don't think AI has much to do with it.
jonathrg 40 minutes ago [-]
Bitbucket is okay to use, the main problem like with every Atlassian product is that it is dog slow.
stego-tech 2 hours ago [-]
The comments hit at some, but not all, of the underlying drivers. I'll add a more comprehensive view and let you draw your own conclusions:
* Their balance sheet paints a messy picture. Their gross profit per quarter doubled from 23Q1 ($668mn) to 26Q2 ($1.35bn), but their net income has been a consistent loss - from -$13mn in 23Q1, to -$42.6mn in 26Q2. The company has generally failed to turn a meaningful profit after considering operating expenses, reflecting misaligned priorities of leadership.
* Their headcount similarly whipsaws of late. In 2021, it was 8.8k; by 2025, it was 13.8k; in the middle of COVID, it was as low as 6.4k. Even after these job cuts, their headcount remains roughly flat from 2025.
* Cutting jobs to invest in AI when you're already slowly bleeding cash isn't exactly a winning strategy. Atlassian's products have the benefit of organizational "stickiness", and their push to a cloud-only SaaS model hasn't gone all that well if you read the IT rags (lots of uniquely complicated migrations that don't transition well 1:1 to SaaS).
* That said, pointing to AI while cutting jobs isn't a bad play when you're courting investors, many of whom doubt the long-term viability of the XaaS model when AI can slop up boilerplate and internal-only solutions on the fly. If they're doing it to genuinely cut costs and try and right the ship, fingering AI isn't a bad cover.
* Except the reality is most of Atlassian's leadership gets their comp in equity, which has taken a serious hit of late on the markets just as vesting schedules wind down and leadership is changing over. I'd be on the lookout for SEC Form 4's from insiders in the coming weeks to confirm whether or not this was the case.
The reality is that the "AI layoffs" ploy is almost exclusively a cover story for corporations reasserting dominance and power over workers after a few (comparatively) good years (WFH, higher pay increases, wage gains, flex-time, etc). Every single one of these entities obviously has more work than people to do it, but if they can squeeze 90% of the workforce for 110% of the hours, that's a net gain for the corporation and a net loss for workers.
Efficiency, over-hiring, right-sizing, AI; it's all bullshit smokescreens for greed, plain and simple. Don't be fooled by narratives to the contrary.
verelo 3 hours ago [-]
It's likely not all this, but i expect an element is: there is a meaningful number of people essentially refusing to work with AI.
Antidotal but I have spoken to friends at Google who are telling me many co-workers say "I tried it didn't work, ill do it myself" when really they just didn't try very hard at all.
piker 3 hours ago [-]
That would be a stupid reason to fire someone when the jury is still out on the net productivity benefits of using AI to code at scale.
verelo 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, but would that really surprise you?
Edit: that is to say, if you had a % of your workforce avoiding helping you explore a current trend (valuable or not tbd sure), I can see rational arguments around removing them from the team.
vips7L 3 hours ago [-]
Does it matter how someone gets their work done as long as its done on time? Why does using a specific tool matter?
tombert 3 hours ago [-]
To add to the speculation, it's possible that the people refusing to use it are working slower. Even if the code that they write is objectively better by any metric you'd like, humans can't really pump out code as fast as Claude or Codex can.
If you can get something into "good enough" territory in 1/10th the time of someone who can get it into "great" territory, that is often worth it.
vips7L 51 minutes ago [-]
I genuinely don't believe the rate at which you produce code matters.
orangecoffee 8 minutes ago [-]
Dude, the time for work is going down drastically, about a third of before. Are you not facing it?
d4v3 48 minutes ago [-]
I mean, if they are using more AI and less of the devs who made it what it is... it might be better? A little tongue-in-cheek, but I find jira and confluence much less annoying now that I just made a claude skill for each of them and now I don't have to interact with their UI very often anymore
quicklime 3 hours ago [-]
It’s not that their employees are no longer needed, it’s that their product (jira) is no longer needed. When you’ve got AI agents taking bigger and bigger steps, you don’t need to micromanage people through jira as much anymore. Companies will likely switch to something lighter.
Jira regularly makes it to the top of lists of the most hated enterprise software, there’s definitely appetite in the market for a replacement.
This is developer wishcasting, to be frank. AI has not obviated the need for Jira and the idea that companies are moving to "something lighter" (what are they moving to?) has no basis in reality.
quicklime 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re not. But if you’re right i think it’s more “investor wishcasting” than developers.
It really doesn’t matter what us devs think. Investors and industry leaders have decided that AI development is the way forward and we’re going to be managing teams of agents from now on. So we’re not going back to fine-grained task management in jira - what used to live in jira will now live markdown files, and largely be written and read by agents.
Higher level tasks might go into something like Linear, who knows.
If the investors are wrong, and this is all fantasy, then maybe people will go back to Jira, and Atlassian stocks will recover.
neal_jones 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t know about established companies pivoting but new operations/projects don’t seem to default to Jira like they did previously. In my very non-scientific sample size, I’ve noticed a shift in the last 3-6 months
siva7 3 hours ago [-]
It's regular layoffs because of AI
heohk 3 hours ago [-]
What does the "incur $230 million in charges" mean? Why would it cost them money to lay people off and have less office space?
Possibly a bad LLM edit; maybe they meant to say would save $230 million through reduced headcount and less office space?
bmac 3 hours ago [-]
One time charges are pretty typical when layoffs are announced. They are usually the cost of severance pay for the weeks or months of salary paid to employees who are no longer working. Office space leases are typically long term (multiple years) and accounting rules require they recognize the expected future cost of that now-useless space when the layoff decision is made. In practice, cash won't actually change hands for the office space until rent is due in future months. And companies will work with the landlord to get out of the lease (but often pay some penalty for the privilege).
bombcar 3 hours ago [-]
Usually layoffs have a one-time charge associated with closures and severance and other such payments (COBRA?).
But $230 million over 1,600 is $145k per person.
twoodfin 3 hours ago [-]
I’d guess some of that is accounting for taxes on profit they’ll now have to pay that otherwise would have been deductible if spent on salaries for R&D?
robryan 3 hours ago [-]
Block reportedly handed out a bunch of incentives to the people staying, could be similar to that.
elzbardico 2 hours ago [-]
Also, please note that maybe not all employees on this layoff are US-based.
In several countries, laying off people come with legal requirements for mandatory minimal severance, health insurance extensions, legal taxes and government fees and all kind of compensatory one-time payments for the fired employeer.
jbl0ndie 3 hours ago [-]
Possibly not. Buying yourself out of employment and commercial rental contracts can give rise to costs.
In the UK, statutory redundancy pay, after 2 years of service, is 1 week of pay per year of service and 1.5 weeks if you're over 41.
For a long duration commercial lease it might be worth paying to break the contract rather than the running costs for an unused building.
These are probably short-term costs, with longer term savings projected from the reduction in headcount and premises.
icedchai 3 hours ago [-]
"Charges" are severance and related benefits.
If they have to close offices, they may have to break leases, etc.
piker 3 hours ago [-]
A charitable take would be that some of that is attributable to benefits packages to help the people transition to new work?
3 hours ago [-]
natnat 3 hours ago [-]
It's the severance cost, mostly.
arthurcolle 3 hours ago [-]
possibly the spending required to do all the severances
mjfisher 3 hours ago [-]
Can anyone recommend good alternatives to Jira? Things that keep me defaulting to it:
- Scales well from simple configuration and workflows to more complex multiboard views/custom fields/layouts per issue type etc
- Good OOTB integration with common CI/CD - see PRs, deploys etc from each ticket
- Good (adequate?) integration with their wiki in Confluence
- JQL for being able to do custom reporting tooling (get me all issues transitioned to X status in this time period)
Things that frustrate me:
- Complexity/UI around configuration
- Very poor kanban metrics reporting
lousken 3 hours ago [-]
We've switched to Jetbrains Youtrack, it doesn't have as many features, but turns out nobody was using most of them anyway.
It's Jira + Confluence bundled together including SSO.
kgeist 27 minutes ago [-]
We (~200 devs) migrated from Jira to Youtrack 10 years ago, and its functionality has been more than enough. Honestly, I don't remember anyone ever seriously complaining about it, aside from maybe a few nitpicks. A very solid product.
esskay 3 hours ago [-]
Notepad.
Seriously, you need a heck of a lot more than a random HN reply to give you Jira alternatives if you've been embedded into its ecosystem for any length of time - and my condolences if you have.
mjfisher 3 hours ago [-]
It's fine, just not stellar. It was terrible (UX, speed, consistency) ten years ago. It's better now - mostly gets out of people's way and just works. It doesn't delight me.
p0u4a 3 hours ago [-]
Linear
TheAtomic 26 minutes ago [-]
10% of their workforce roughly.
1 hours ago [-]
lousken 3 hours ago [-]
Should've sent those 1600 people to fix their horrible performance of cloud apps, oh well I guess opening a jira ticket will now take not 5 but 10 seconds.
gnulinux996 3 hours ago [-]
My reading is they are _announcing_ the job cuts to keep the stock from tumbling.
I don't think any AI productivity gains are involved.
eek2121 3 hours ago [-]
This is fine. I suspect many folks have been trying to get away from JIRA and related apps for a while now. chef's kiss
bastardoperator 3 hours ago [-]
If a shop tells me they use Atlassian/Jira I see that as a big negative.
laughing_man 36 minutes ago [-]
I'm retired now, but if I were looking for a job I'd try to find a company not using Atlassian products. In theory you're not supposed to use them as a (micro-) management tool, but companies like to do just that.
tigerlily 3 hours ago [-]
The Druuge Mauler chugs on.
kace91 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
the_real_cher 2 hours ago [-]
Ironically you can actually use AI to replace Jira.
stego-tech 3 hours ago [-]
Welp. Fuck Atlassian. Their resistance towards arbitrary RTO mandates and a people-first culture had me tolerate the weirdness of JIRA and Confluence, but now?
Fuck ‘em. Rolling my own using shelfware, kthxbai.
I can't wait for Atlassian physical sticky-notes to take over.
[Edit: grammo and formatting]
Either way, I'd expect that those 1,600 people using AI to solve Atlassian's big problems would be better for the company in the long-run than reducing headcount with the same level of output
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.
- 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.
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
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’m honestly not sure what you even use AI for in Jira. Maybe there’s a purpose, but 90% of us are just moving tickets across the most expensive kanban board that money can… rent.
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.
Imagine you own a company that is paid to deliver packages. You use horses and differentiate by delivering quicker than everyone else.
Then cars are invented and everyone starts delivering packages faster.
In what world does a healthy growing business react to this by laying off couriers "in a pivot to automotive transportation".
Would a healthy business not switch everyone to driving cars and deliver even more packages?
Horses/cars improve productivity. AI reduces payroll costs. That's the whole game here.
Capital will always be in opposition to the cost of labor and want to make it as close to zero as possible, and AI is a plausible story for attempting that, regardless of the reality of AI efficiency.
The Java products are almost EOL.
They have already been assigning JAC tickets to Rovo and $TEAM is down.
What else should be done with the surplus headcount?
Why? What was wrong with the 1600 people they sacked? Do they have a magical 1600-person hire pool with the AI skills they want?
Some of the firms, Apple being the exception, doubled or even almost tripled in size.
I'm sure AI is partly to blame here but I think a lot of it is over hiring and firms just getting bogged down in bureaucracy and trying to clear things out.
0 - https://www.instagram.com/p/CnxN-Mayo3N/
You need people driving AI to get the benefits.
Its like a courier service that uses horses firing people once cars are invented because cars are faster than horses. You would switch everyone from horses to cars and deliver more packages.
It is a great excuse for underperforming and incompetent CEOs.
It provides the CEO with a wonderful excuse for sacking people.
Would be interesting to know if they are majority engineering, or if that's a lot of sales and marketing and support and other roles in there.
I work on Aha! Develop https://www.aha.io/develop/overview which I obviously think is a great tool, especially if you're a team with a product manager.
I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors.
Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude.
Unless this is just regular layoffs, but they know if they brand it as "AI" their investors will eat it up.
I distinctly remember a discussion where someone says "Man, I wish JIRA would add this feature/fix this bug"
Someone else pipes in: "I bet there is already a ticket on the JIRA bugtracker/feature board for this, it's not done and it's from 9 years ago" and lo and behold there was.
AI isn't going to help, but it bandaids over the issue so the investors aren't spooked.
Laying thousands of people off often implies you hired thousands of more people than you actually needed, which makes investors feel like you're wasting their money. If you say "no they're all being replaced for $200/month of Claude Code!" then it makes you look like there was actually strategy to this.
I definitely buy this for the software sector or the economy as a whole, but for an individual company? Seems one would be bottlenecked by various factors quickly.
Perhaps better to let people go so that they can be productive elsewhere?
I have worked for a bunch of companies, and even relatively new and young companies have all these things pile up pretty quickly.
True. Joining thousands of other unemployed developers sending applications into a job posting for a nonexistent role online is very productive. Probably good for the economy too now that I think about it.
Alternative take: I can't speak for BitBucket because I've never used it, but I've had enough time with JIRA and Confluence to last a lifetime, and these products are so bad - so clunky, so slow, so much friction in the UI - that I can't really see what useful value adding work Atlassian's 16,000 employees have actually been delivering. From that perspective losing 1600 of them seems like it's not likely to make much difference since, from my perspective as a user, they didn't appear to be doing anything useful in the first place.
I'm sorry if that comes across as a particularly savage take but Atlassian have wilfully been churning out absolute garbage for at least 15 years now (there was a time, in around 2006/7, when I thought JIRA was quite good - genuinely) and their products have made me miserable throughout a good chunk of my career, so my sympathy is pretty limited. If they can be bothered to make the products better, faster, more usable, and remove friction ruthlessly at every turn in their workflows, then I might well change my point of view.
I agree with pretty much everything you said; I don't actually think that it's due to AI is my point. If their products are terrible and they're finally losing business over it, it makes enough sense to fire 10% of the workforce. I just don't think AI has much to do with it.
* Their balance sheet paints a messy picture. Their gross profit per quarter doubled from 23Q1 ($668mn) to 26Q2 ($1.35bn), but their net income has been a consistent loss - from -$13mn in 23Q1, to -$42.6mn in 26Q2. The company has generally failed to turn a meaningful profit after considering operating expenses, reflecting misaligned priorities of leadership.
* Their headcount similarly whipsaws of late. In 2021, it was 8.8k; by 2025, it was 13.8k; in the middle of COVID, it was as low as 6.4k. Even after these job cuts, their headcount remains roughly flat from 2025.
* Cutting jobs to invest in AI when you're already slowly bleeding cash isn't exactly a winning strategy. Atlassian's products have the benefit of organizational "stickiness", and their push to a cloud-only SaaS model hasn't gone all that well if you read the IT rags (lots of uniquely complicated migrations that don't transition well 1:1 to SaaS).
* That said, pointing to AI while cutting jobs isn't a bad play when you're courting investors, many of whom doubt the long-term viability of the XaaS model when AI can slop up boilerplate and internal-only solutions on the fly. If they're doing it to genuinely cut costs and try and right the ship, fingering AI isn't a bad cover.
* Except the reality is most of Atlassian's leadership gets their comp in equity, which has taken a serious hit of late on the markets just as vesting schedules wind down and leadership is changing over. I'd be on the lookout for SEC Form 4's from insiders in the coming weeks to confirm whether or not this was the case.
The reality is that the "AI layoffs" ploy is almost exclusively a cover story for corporations reasserting dominance and power over workers after a few (comparatively) good years (WFH, higher pay increases, wage gains, flex-time, etc). Every single one of these entities obviously has more work than people to do it, but if they can squeeze 90% of the workforce for 110% of the hours, that's a net gain for the corporation and a net loss for workers.
Efficiency, over-hiring, right-sizing, AI; it's all bullshit smokescreens for greed, plain and simple. Don't be fooled by narratives to the contrary.
Antidotal but I have spoken to friends at Google who are telling me many co-workers say "I tried it didn't work, ill do it myself" when really they just didn't try very hard at all.
Edit: that is to say, if you had a % of your workforce avoiding helping you explore a current trend (valuable or not tbd sure), I can see rational arguments around removing them from the team.
If you can get something into "good enough" territory in 1/10th the time of someone who can get it into "great" territory, that is often worth it.
Jira regularly makes it to the top of lists of the most hated enterprise software, there’s definitely appetite in the market for a replacement.
Their stock has been taking a huge hit over the last few months because of this: https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/ai-is-eating-softw...
It really doesn’t matter what us devs think. Investors and industry leaders have decided that AI development is the way forward and we’re going to be managing teams of agents from now on. So we’re not going back to fine-grained task management in jira - what used to live in jira will now live markdown files, and largely be written and read by agents.
Higher level tasks might go into something like Linear, who knows.
If the investors are wrong, and this is all fantasy, then maybe people will go back to Jira, and Atlassian stocks will recover.
Possibly a bad LLM edit; maybe they meant to say would save $230 million through reduced headcount and less office space?
But $230 million over 1,600 is $145k per person.
In several countries, laying off people come with legal requirements for mandatory minimal severance, health insurance extensions, legal taxes and government fees and all kind of compensatory one-time payments for the fired employeer.
In the UK, statutory redundancy pay, after 2 years of service, is 1 week of pay per year of service and 1.5 weeks if you're over 41.
For a long duration commercial lease it might be worth paying to break the contract rather than the running costs for an unused building.
These are probably short-term costs, with longer term savings projected from the reduction in headcount and premises.
- Scales well from simple configuration and workflows to more complex multiboard views/custom fields/layouts per issue type etc
- Good OOTB integration with common CI/CD - see PRs, deploys etc from each ticket
- Good (adequate?) integration with their wiki in Confluence
- JQL for being able to do custom reporting tooling (get me all issues transitioned to X status in this time period)
Things that frustrate me:
- Complexity/UI around configuration
- Very poor kanban metrics reporting
Seriously, you need a heck of a lot more than a random HN reply to give you Jira alternatives if you've been embedded into its ecosystem for any length of time - and my condolences if you have.
I don't think any AI productivity gains are involved.
Fuck ‘em. Rolling my own using shelfware, kthxbai.
@dang
AI is a convenient way to hide their their poor strategy and execution.