Back in the day we used Jira a lot. But we 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.
> “We are doing this to self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales while strengthening our financial profile,”
They take in billions every year but still come away with millions in negative income. I have no idea what their problem is but I'm pretty sure the 1,600 people they just fired weren't it. Throwing away people in yet another round of layoffs to further invest in AI is not a good sign.
Have you looked at the actual expenses and where you think they should cut rather than people? Or are you saying with all those people they should be able to turn their growth story around?
In my opinion, it is similar to Parkinson's Law [1] about work filling into the time given to it, but replace work with bureaucracy filling the aggregate enterprise revenue on offer. Atlassian's work, one might argue, is "done" but has such cashflow from business customers that they can continue to spend above and beyond what is needed to maintain what has been built to service their customer base. They could be 37signals/Basecamp, but they are enabled beyond that (from the business customer cashflows mentioned), and so these actions occur until an innovator comes along to replace them (and potentially, the cycle repeats due to enterprise sales cycle durations, inertia, etc).
You see this with all manner of large enterprise in my experience, where what they continue to do is "good enough" to allow for these inefficiencies and actions because they are, on some spectrum, "money printers" due to their moat and inertia. Creative destruction is not a forgone conclusion, nor fast. Is the incumbent exploring the problem spaces adjacent to their core business(es) to increase their TAM to increase shareholder value? Are they innovating? Or are they just churning and burning up revenue on meaningless work?
All of these companies doing layoffs to invest in AI is not about AI specifically, it is about reaching for profits and yield in a challenging business landscape and macro post zero interest rate policy ("ZIRP") imho. They are desperate for productivity growth, whether that is doing more with less people, AI, offshoring, whatever because money now has a cost.
I've become convinced that "investing in AI" is just the magic incantation CEOs are using to spin layoffs as a positive rather than a negative for the company's reputation among investors
AFAICT, it was just really badly managed. A long time ago it got about as much share of its main market as it was going to get. They took the cash flow from that and hired a bunch more engineers to try to break into adjacent markets, and failed, and failed and failed.
Now they are just retreating to the steady income from their core business
Pretty sure by putting "me too" in quotes and not saying #MeToo, what they're talking about is really FOMO. The companies are performing layoffs because of the trend
You are being downvoted because of the 'me too', but think you are refering to companies copying other companies (Amazon hires 10k? We hire 10k! Google fires 5k? we fire 5k) and not the 'me too' movement about sexual assault/harrassement.
I don't really see any relevance to "me too". Far more likely it's to cover from insane overhearing in the pandemic era, and no one wants to admit they overdid it.
People are downvoting because they think is "that" me too. What op meant is all the copycat management. "They use roflcopter.js? Then we must. They use AI? Then we must. They hire/fire 9070 people? Then we must."
When your customers have less developers you need yourself less developers. And if they are paying by the seat... Your income is directly affected by layoffs... So reduction does make sense.
And as they say any new companies can replace the Atlassian products by bespoke vibe coded alternatives in a few days...
Our company has drastically downsized its dependence on Atlassian in the past month, we will be completely free in a few more. With the help of modern AI tools we've been able to replace their products with internal tools that are better tailored to our needs.
Why have every company vibe code their own semi-good bespoke tool when instead one company can handcraft the tool with optimisations much better than AI can ever dream of, and then sell that tool for a reasonable enough markup that the value proposition is big enough. Especially if the tool is open source open core, so companies can PR improvements they think will be broadly applicable.
Did they ever get around to fixing basic bugs like "Jira and Confluence use different markdown dialects"?
They've had a decade to address those sorts of obvious problems that bite 100% of the end users of their stuff, and apparently employed over 1600 people during that decade. That's 160 centuries of person time. I wonder what it was wasted on, if not making their fairly small core product suite usable.
I think we're going to see more and more incumbent companies with big moats and terrible products get replaced with vibe coded solutions over the next year or two.
No, they simplified it by cancelling almost all non-cloud instances and moved to being a direct per-seat SaaS, with (apparently) all the same bugs but fewer features.
I was talking to people I know about this topic and looking for obvious big success stories of vibecoding replacing enterprise tools like Atlassian I found they are very hard to find. At this stage I have no doubt that there are IT departments trying to displace SaaS products and re-engineer legacy systems, but it's probably too early to measure results.
I think any company with some motivated developers and a budget for h/w or cloud could rebuild a good enough JIRA in a month. I don't see how Atlassian survives long term
Because you see the IC side of the Atlassian toolkit. The management side is much more expansive and this starts mattering when you are coordinating larger projects.
That said, if you are a smaller company, you absolutely could kill Jira pretty quick.
Jira isn't the product, it's the development platform that builds the product (which is a codified version of all the bad business decisions your company has ever made).
0) Adopt AI; 1) Fire people; 2) People got no money; 3) People won't buy things, signup for services; 4) Enterprises feel pressure to optimize expenditure even more; 5) Enterprises invest into more AI; 6) Fire more people; 7) GOTO 0;
> Cannon-Brookes emphasized in his blog post that Atlassian does not follow the philosophy of replacing people with AI. At the same time, he also stated, “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. It does.”
Passive voice. It's not the situation, it's the executive's charted course of action in response to it. They are trying so hard to avoid any hint of culpability for the decision they are making. Laughable.
What do people use Atlassian for these days?
Back in the day we used Jira a lot. But we 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.
> “We are doing this to self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales while strengthening our financial profile,”
They take in billions every year but still come away with millions in negative income. I have no idea what their problem is but I'm pretty sure the 1,600 people they just fired weren't it. Throwing away people in yet another round of layoffs to further invest in AI is not a good sign.
Have you looked at the actual expenses and where you think they should cut rather than people? Or are you saying with all those people they should be able to turn their growth story around?
In my opinion, it is similar to Parkinson's Law [1] about work filling into the time given to it, but replace work with bureaucracy filling the aggregate enterprise revenue on offer. Atlassian's work, one might argue, is "done" but has such cashflow from business customers that they can continue to spend above and beyond what is needed to maintain what has been built to service their customer base. They could be 37signals/Basecamp, but they are enabled beyond that (from the business customer cashflows mentioned), and so these actions occur until an innovator comes along to replace them (and potentially, the cycle repeats due to enterprise sales cycle durations, inertia, etc).
You see this with all manner of large enterprise in my experience, where what they continue to do is "good enough" to allow for these inefficiencies and actions because they are, on some spectrum, "money printers" due to their moat and inertia. Creative destruction is not a forgone conclusion, nor fast. Is the incumbent exploring the problem spaces adjacent to their core business(es) to increase their TAM to increase shareholder value? Are they innovating? Or are they just churning and burning up revenue on meaningless work?
All of these companies doing layoffs to invest in AI is not about AI specifically, it is about reaching for profits and yield in a challenging business landscape and macro post zero interest rate policy ("ZIRP") imho. They are desperate for productivity growth, whether that is doing more with less people, AI, offshoring, whatever because money now has a cost.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
I've become convinced that "investing in AI" is just the magic incantation CEOs are using to spin layoffs as a positive rather than a negative for the company's reputation among investors
Yup. I thought this was an interesting take on the Block layoffs, from a former employee:
"I Worked for Block. Its A.I. Job Cuts Aren’t What They Seem."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/opinion/block-jack-dorsey...
also -
"Salesforce CEO says Block's cuts shouldn't fuel worries of mass layoffs: 'That company has its own unique issues'" https://www.aol.com/articles/salesforce-ceo-says-blocks-cuts...
one more :-) -
https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-companies-are-ai-washing...
They shove off people forced on them so they could grow faster, but the problem is, they don't have the ideas....
It's PR to cover management failure due to "me too", which reached ridiculous levels in the last 5 years.
I don't see what it has to do with "me too"
Take block:
AFAICT, it was just really badly managed. A long time ago it got about as much share of its main market as it was going to get. They took the cash flow from that and hired a bunch more engineers to try to break into adjacent markets, and failed, and failed and failed.
Now they are just retreating to the steady income from their core business
Pretty sure by putting "me too" in quotes and not saying #MeToo, what they're talking about is really FOMO. The companies are performing layoffs because of the trend
You are being downvoted because of the 'me too', but think you are refering to companies copying other companies (Amazon hires 10k? We hire 10k! Google fires 5k? we fire 5k) and not the 'me too' movement about sexual assault/harrassement.
I don't really see any relevance to "me too". Far more likely it's to cover from insane overhearing in the pandemic era, and no one wants to admit they overdid it.
People are downvoting because they think is "that" me too. What op meant is all the copycat management. "They use roflcopter.js? Then we must. They use AI? Then we must. They hire/fire 9070 people? Then we must."
How is this in any way related to me too? How is that what to took from this? I implore you to think critically.
I would guess the opposite, that anti-woke statements from management is a big red flag correlating with poor company performance
When your customers have less developers you need yourself less developers. And if they are paying by the seat... Your income is directly affected by layoffs... So reduction does make sense.
And as they say any new companies can replace the Atlassian products by bespoke vibe coded alternatives in a few days...
That last sentence holds a lot of truth.
Our company has drastically downsized its dependence on Atlassian in the past month, we will be completely free in a few more. With the help of modern AI tools we've been able to replace their products with internal tools that are better tailored to our needs.
Still feels weirdly inefficient.
Why have every company vibe code their own semi-good bespoke tool when instead one company can handcraft the tool with optimisations much better than AI can ever dream of, and then sell that tool for a reasonable enough markup that the value proposition is big enough. Especially if the tool is open source open core, so companies can PR improvements they think will be broadly applicable.
I last used Atlassian stuff about a decade ago.
Did they ever get around to fixing basic bugs like "Jira and Confluence use different markdown dialects"?
They've had a decade to address those sorts of obvious problems that bite 100% of the end users of their stuff, and apparently employed over 1600 people during that decade. That's 160 centuries of person time. I wonder what it was wasted on, if not making their fairly small core product suite usable.
I think we're going to see more and more incumbent companies with big moats and terrible products get replaced with vibe coded solutions over the next year or two.
No, they simplified it by cancelling almost all non-cloud instances and moved to being a direct per-seat SaaS, with (apparently) all the same bugs but fewer features.
I was talking to people I know about this topic and looking for obvious big success stories of vibecoding replacing enterprise tools like Atlassian I found they are very hard to find. At this stage I have no doubt that there are IT departments trying to displace SaaS products and re-engineer legacy systems, but it's probably too early to measure results.
I think any company with some motivated developers and a budget for h/w or cloud could rebuild a good enough JIRA in a month. I don't see how Atlassian survives long term
Because you see the IC side of the Atlassian toolkit. The management side is much more expansive and this starts mattering when you are coordinating larger projects.
That said, if you are a smaller company, you absolutely could kill Jira pretty quick.
Jira isn't the product, it's the development platform that builds the product (which is a codified version of all the bad business decisions your company has ever made).
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343156 Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI (reuters.com)
~yesterday, 273+ comments
Also:
An important update on our team https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342835 - Yesterday, 18 comments
steering wheel manufacturer lays off thousands in anticipation of self-driving cars
In this case, it is a little more than anticipation. Software dev job losses have already happened and continue to happen.
I really like this analogy, and I tend to think most analogies are contrived. This is spot on.
0) Adopt AI; 1) Fire people; 2) People got no money; 3) People won't buy things, signup for services; 4) Enterprises feel pressure to optimize expenditure even more; 5) Enterprises invest into more AI; 6) Fire more people; 7) GOTO 0;
Literally couldn't figure out the anti-pattern for rejecting all of the cookies so I moved on.
Firefox reader mode worked for me, but I agree it was terrible.
> Cannon-Brookes emphasized in his blog post that Atlassian does not follow the philosophy of replacing people with AI. At the same time, he also stated, “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. It does.”
Passive voice. It's not the situation, it's the executive's charted course of action in response to it. They are trying so hard to avoid any hint of culpability for the decision they are making. Laughable.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343156