78 ms·

Atlassian fired me while I was taking care of my wife who is fighting cancer

• trangus_1985 5y ago
  While the veracity of this is hard to determine, these sort of actions don't surprise me. If you have some of this evidence in writing, a lawyer might be a good place to start. However, what really stood out to me was the design, or lack of it. The childish paint.exe job on the hero image doesn't help either. It really reads like a scrawled out screed of grievances, being aired without much forethought. IANAL, but my understanding in the jurisdiction in which I live is that having this sort of stuff up can actually make your case harder! Refine the message and make it much more clear and logical. In my opinion, you should take this down and contact a lawyer.
  • mparnisari 5y ago
    This is not mine. I just found the link on Twitter.
  • rad_gruchalski 5y ago
    Same thoughts. And the title. This will lead to a defamation case and end up even worse than it is now.
    • t0mas88 5y ago
      For the author this isn't the best way, a lawyer and some settlement + NDA would have been. But for the community it's good that he choose to publish it and allow others to see this perspective. Not sure whether Atlassian would want to sue, that could become yet another example of the Streisand effect...
      • rad_gruchalski 5y ago
        > Not sure whether Atlassian would want to sue, that could become yet another example of the Streisand effect... Assuming the author speaks truth. If the story has holes, not taking an action by Atlassian sounds like a bad precedent.
  • sneak 5y ago
    If people don't speak out about bad conditions in the workplace, it will get swept quietly under the rug. With this, the information is out there for people to make their own judgements about it. I'm glad they drew the dicknoses, it makes it memorable. Legal recourse is only one avenue; a settlement usually involves hushing up. That's incompatible with warning others.
    • throwdecro 5y ago
      I agree. There's value in people getting angry enough that they prefer to attack as hard as they can, instead of getting the best outcome for themselves.
  • smnrchrds 5y ago
    It really depends on what they want to accomplish. Perhaps given the choice of (1) publicly exposing the company and causing them reputational harm, and (2) in X years time getting a Y$ settlement and having to sign an NDA saying they cannot speak ill of the company in return, they prefer 1. They don't seem to be trying to go the lawsuit way and they don't mention it in their post.
  • clemailacct1 5y ago
    > However, what really stood out to me was the design, or lack of it. The childish paint.exe job on the hero image doesn't help either. It really reads like a scrawled out screed of grievances, being aired without much forethought. Can you blame the guy? Im not some emotionless robot - I would be absolutely furious if I was peddled lies from my employer and be treated this way too. This notion that we need to rise above things at all times is just silly. The man has a lot on his plate and has every right to scribble on two Atlassian peoples image.
    • trangus_1985 5y ago
      >Can you blame the guy? IDK if you're trying to get a message out, doing things like that is extremely self-sabotaging to the message.
      • coupdejarnac 5y ago
        I mean, his wife has cancer, and he's being fucked with. It's easy to say from a distance that one should deal with everything in a calm, rational manner.
      • doovd 5y ago
        Sure, easy for a bystander to make this assessment.
        • trangus_1985 5y ago
          Correct. It's a good assessment and I stand by it.
          • heytherewhat 5y ago
            Ok genius, what is your better way to fix this? He already went through HR processes.
            • trangus_1985 5y ago
  • exikyut 5y ago
    One of the pennies that's been dropping for me recently is that extreme duress can provoke a mindset/belief that the capacity is not available to fulfill a particular global set of role(s), position(s), task(s), etc (in this case spanning worker/workplace-politician/father/husband/carer/human being). This "over-duress" seems to manifest as a sort of fundamental loss of core equilibrium that leaves an existential vacuum in its wake (maybe a bit like the mental spoon counter going negative), and if pushed far enough (circumstances hit the sour spot just right), I've noticed this can involuntarily be expressed to others in a somewhat irrational/illogical, clingy, needy, and unfortunately sometimes cringy way. While I don't think this particular case is as extreme as the end-state suggested by the trajectory described above, I find it interesting that the OP of the domain has the execution to put a domain and webpage together, and has published info that describes a situation that, in theory, is still redeemable... although now that this been published I do definitely think that it's a given that there's not very much this person can do to recover their professional relationship and retain their job with everyone keeping a straight face when they theoretically next come in to work. (Cue guaranteed awkward conversation the moment they get in...) I definitely get "just leave already, or hire a lawyer" vibes from this, but it's clear this person is at 101% emotional saturation and don't have the attention span for that, sadly. It is an excellent philosophical question as to whether this means this person's overall mental competence should be taken into question - if I'm ruthlessly honest, that's the instinctive response I have to this sort of thing, yet it's also entirely inappropriate in just about every realistic and non-realistic context I can think of. Yet it's what my brain reaches for every time. Uncanny valley is stupid sometimes. So I guess the caveat emptor for businesses here is, sometimes people will find themselves between rocks and hard places and try to get out of them by taking you up on claims that would reasonably be immediately disregarded as fashionable puffery ("unlimited PTO" is very obviously impossible).
    • darkerside 5y ago
      This person obviously doesn't care about the money. They are understandably bitter and angry and lashing out. Not sure what else to say about it. Feels a little voyeuristic just to have read it.
• seibelj 5y ago
  It might help others, but for your own sake I would take it down and hire a lawyer. It sounds like you are under a ton of stress. Having this up might make finding a new job difficult. Good luck and I hope your wife recovers.
  • donohoe 5y ago
    Site does not belong to OP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28555853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28555853
• aliswe 5y ago
  I dont get it. Are you trying to shift the pain on to someone else? It wont work. Leave this dead end and focus on something constructive. People are living in poverty in horrible situations in other countries, perhaps try to find a way to help them? For example.
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  Unlimited PTO has the downside of having no minimum that lets you go and push back against managers who do not want you to take it/haven't set things up so you can actually use it. I work for a company with unlimited PTO. However, if you are in a relatively niche role, it is hard to use as you block people when away. A couple colleagues have quit over it.
  • sneak 5y ago
    Unlimited PTO is always a passive-aggressive lie. Companies that start out the relationship with dishonesty are bad places to work.
    • Florin_Andrei 5y ago
      Yup. It becomes a negotiation, and the company by definition has orders of magnitude more negotiating power (arm-wrestling, etc) than you do. But hey, "freedom", yay!
      • munk-a 5y ago
        This is the unfortunate truth of a lot of US labour laws and why I prefer it up here in Canada. I know with certainty that my coworkers (even university coops!) have access to good healthcare and have provincially mandated vacation time. I work hard in my position and carry a fair amount of responsibility that I've accrued over the years - but I don't want any of my coworkers, no matter how junior and no matter how short their stay at this company may be, to struggle to live a healthy life.
    • chemeng 5y ago
      It's a cost savings measure for CA companies to avoid having to hold employee's earned vacation hours as a liability to be paid out if they are unused when the employee separates. This is also why they cannot set a minimum, as that would indicate an amount of earned vacation per year. To be clear, this is still very disingenuous and I believe companies should stop the practice.
• jerglingu 5y ago
  Can people not just take PTO whenever they want? Or does it breach some company policy at certain places? I don’t get why this person felt like he had to ask for time off when his wife had cancer. edit: thanks for the responses. My question was not on PTO accrual or the optics around it, but on the practice of just scheduling time off and taking it versus asking for permission. Today I learned I am either very lucky to be working at the places I have been, or maybe my bosses have been too timid to tell me no
  • MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    Did you read the article? According to the author, you don't accrue PTO there AT ALL. Your manager can basically just allow you to be paid for time when you aren't working at his discretion. No maximum, but no minimum too.
    • TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      The business needs are balanced against your time off. If the product you’re working on is behind schedule, for example, PTO is less likely to be approved.
      • MisterBastahrd 5y ago
        When you aren't actually accruing hours, "business needs" are a euphemism for "your manager's whims."
    • drstewart 5y ago
      >Your manager can basically just allow you to be paid for time when you aren't working at his discretion This has nothing to do with unlimited PTO, or even legally mandated vacation time. Even in Europe, which I'm sure all the people here will point to, has similar rules, e.g: https://www.howtogermany.com/pages/employee-rights.html https://www.howtogermany.com/pages/employee-rights.html >Employees must apply for vacation time and the employer must approve the written request. An employer can turn down a request due to urgent operational reasons or vacation applications of other employees who, due to "social factors", have a higher priority.
• nsonha 5y ago
  Unlimited PTO is bs, just have a fixed number and pay people if they don't use them.
• drstewart 5y ago
  While I'm sure there are some legitimate grievances here, nothing about this makes the author look credible in any way. Personally, none of the claims made here seem to stand up to scrutiny. He claims that Atlassian has illegal hiring practices because of one instance where they passed on the first candidate that just cleared the technical bar? Or that unlimited PTO is a scam because his manager had to approve time off requests (completely standard practice - unlimited PTO or not)? Sorry, my pitchfork is staying put.
  • h4l0 5y ago
    Disclaimer; I work at Atlassian as a Software Engineer. First of all, he has this weird take at the very beginning > Interesting fact 1: Atlassian is the only company that has words "sh*" and "f*" in their core values. Those values are "Don't f* the customer" and "Open company no bulls**" (oh the irony). This 'take' immediately threw me off. Why would you even mention something this trivial? I'll give it a pass as his emotions were probably elevated. > After being in the company for more than a year I had found that folks with children are less likely to get a promotion. I had no evidence, it was a feeling. Most of the folks I've seen got promoted had children. Having no evidence to support your claim in an article like this (with a banger title) is a red flag to me. PTO is unfortunately something that I'm unfamiliar with. The country that I live in prohibits unlimited PTO by law, so I've never had that experience. Although, using the PTO that I acquire is still subject to approval of my manager. That part of the story is what the author should have really focused on. Going after the whole company in such a vicious manner is not a good look in my opinion. I agree with most of the top comments here. Stay low, get a lawyer, deal with this silently. Hope his wife has a fast and easy recovery. Tough times, tough challenges for the author personally. No matter how hard I try, I certainly wouldn't be able to fully empathize with him.
  • _hilro 5y ago
    > Or that unlimited PTO is a scam because his manager had to approve time off requests (completely standard practice - unlimited PTO or not If a company advertises unlimited PTO but then the company(or it's representatives) block my ability to take PTO, then yes it is a scam. Why doesn't Atlassian keep track of requests/denial rates and then intervene since they're so benevolent and worried about the potential future employees well-being?
• amackera 5y ago
  Sad story (though of course there's always more than one side to any story!) I hope folks are clueing into this by now, but flashy policies like "unlimited vacation" or "unlimited sick days" _are_ a scam. They sell well but never deliver what's on the tin. Instead, I'm a fan of "minimum X weeks PTO" or "minimum Y sick days". Any request under the minimum is automatically approved. Anything after is up to manager discretion.
• denverkarma 5y ago
  I'm sorry I can't speak to details as this is all very personal for the folks involved, but I know all the people involved in this story and can tell you this is not a very fair account of what happened. It was a long-running and very difficult situation for everyone involved.
  • strange_things 5y ago
    hello Atlassian PR employee. we believe you
    • atlasunshrugged 5y ago
      From a 2018 account with 400 karma?
      • mikestew 5y ago
        Yes, the five month old account with a whopping 67 karma is questioning another account's legitimacy. You'll be needing a knife for cutting through that irony.
        • kevinmgranger 5y ago
          They aren't necessarily implying it's a sockpuppet, but that they currently represent Atlassian PR.
          • mikestew 5y ago
            It's obvious what the implication is, yes. It's also not the charitable interpretation that the HN guidelines suggest. Especially when using one's five-month-old account to talk smack to people one has never met, let alone know where they work.
            • strange_things 5y ago
              Hi Mike. The fact that you discard my comment based on the measure of "karma" or how "old" my account is just as childish and "talking smack" as what you insinuate I am doing. You believe you are on the side of good moral but you are merely on the side of the self proclaimed strong.
• olingern 5y ago
  This exact scenario happened to me two months ago sans cancer and a wife. OP has my sympathy since my situation was not as challenging. Unlimited PTO is a joke and you will be penalized or fired for exercising the “benefit”
  • vnchr 5y ago
    I’ve never said no to a PTO request on my team since we adopted Unlimited PTO, but now I’m finding out that it’s been abused elsewhere and actually constitutes a red flag. I wonder if our company should revert to traditional PTO so that prospective candidates don’t avoid applying.
    • olingern 5y ago
      Unlimited PTO is widely adopted because companies now know that people statistically take less PTO and the less ethical of those companies would like to exploit that. I would rather work for a company that gives a generous amount so that I can work within the parameters / not feel guilty. It also allows me to put a total value on a offer as well.
    • acuozzo 5y ago
      > so that prospective candidates don’t avoid applying I'm not looking for a job at the moment, but FWIW, I would have to be under duress to take a job with "unlimited" PTO.
• gringoDan 5y ago
  Unlimited PTO is terrible for employees. Companies implement this policy so that they don't need to pay out unused vacation days when an employee quits (which is required by law in many locales). Further, people take less time off with unlimited PTO than with a fixed number of days. [1] Psychologically, this makes sense - with a fixed number of PTO days you feel entitled to take time off. With "unlimited PTO" you don't know where the boundaries are. At a former job, I had a good manager who asked HR for some guidance on "unlimited PTO" and shared it with our team. Unsurprisingly, HR had an unwritten policy for the number of days you could take off before you had to get PTO approval at the VP level. [1] https://blog.namely.com/unlimited-vacation-policy https://blog.namely.com/unlimited-vacation-policy
  • xwdv 5y ago
    I don’t think it’s that simple. If you’re willing to exploit unlimited PTO then it can be a better deal for the employee, you just have to get over your feelings about taking time off.
    • luckylion 5y ago
      And if you exploit it, you'll get fired. And if you're so valuable to them that they don't care, they'd be flexible on limited PTO as well, and just give you extremely generous limits.
      • xwdv 5y ago
        If you’re meeting your performance goals you won’t get fired. It’s a bluff to get you working more.
        • luckylion 5y ago
          That'd make you a super star. "Exploiting" it means taking considerable time off -- if you're gone for a third of the year and you're still hitting your goals, you're in the top 5% and companies without unlimited PTO will also get you sweet deals. But that's not what 95% of people are experiencing.
• SkipperCat 5y ago
  I'll accept that what the author posted is the truth. Atlassian did not give him what he wanted or needed. And now this battle is public, he will never get anything else from them. The proverbial glove has been thrown down and they will fight you on all fronts. To everyone else, If this happens to you, I implore you to get legal counsel ASAP, and keep it quiet. Find out all your options and strike a quiet deal with your employer. That is the best you'll ever get. Almost any large company has much deeper pockets than you do and their reputation is more valuable that their ethics. You'll rarely win in the court of public opinion and you'll probably never get hired anywhere again. I say this even if you were 100% in the right.
  • helloguillecl 5y ago
    And now tell us, how would the rest of us know how working for X it's like? Should we just rely on their HR marketing? By keeping it quiet, the company would be simply getting away with their unjust practices and unprofessional management. If it's clear that the company cannot see that they are doing something wrong... you'd be keeping it quiet to get exactly what from them?
    • sjtindell 5y ago
      I agree with both you and the above commenter. Perhaps it is optimal to keep quiet for yourself, but optimal for the group if none of us keep quiet. A tough problem.
      • bserge 5y ago
        Keep quiet on your real identity and use the anonymity of the Internet to share everything. Just be careful so it can't be traced back to you. That can be pretty limiting, but it's better than nothing.
      • barneygale 5y ago
        I really don't see the point of existing unless we try to make the world a better place. Props to OP for posting this.
• chana_masala 5y ago
  I've been waiting for almost three weeks for their internal recruiters to schedule an on-site. Each time I follow up they are "working on it." I've given up especially given their general reputation
• dvt 5y ago
  Yet again people airing their dirty laundry in public to get Twitter outrage points. We get it, corporations are bad. Do we even need a reminder? The past few decades have been filled will regular folks getting constantly screwed by Big Tech, Fortune 500s, and Wall Street. Nothing here is new. But my guy, lawyer up. Stuff like this could probably hurt more than help if you do end up going to court.
• donretag 5y ago
  Let me pile on here: unlimited PTO is a joke I once quite a job because they did not want me to take off for a week during Thanksgiving because of a deadline ... in January. Never took a vacation before that. Never again will I settle for unlimited PTO. Every time I have ask during interviews with unlimited PTO companies about how much PTO an average employee takes, they never have an answer.
  • yupper32 5y ago
    Why do you think unlimited vacation was the cause of that? Companies with set amounts of PTO can also deny your vacation request.
    • ermir 5y ago
      It’s about normalizing vacation, and having a minimum means you’ll take as much time off as anyone else on the team. Unlimited PTO means take as much as you want, but you have to have excellent social awareness to not damage your standing.
      • munk-a 5y ago
        Oh gods - I've never worked at a place with unlimited PTO and that sounds miserable. I'm a highly visible employee who fields a lot of questions from junior and intermediate folks - taking a three week block off always means the other very senior dev needs to shoulder the load (but we're on good terms and happy to see each other balance work and life)... more senior folks would be less able to take vacation due to how much more visible their absence would be.
        • detaro 5y ago
          It should be ok for absences to be visible. And if they are more than just visible, you have a bus factor problem, and past a certain company size that's not something you should have.
          • 5y ago
• jaeming 5y ago
  I worked at a company that had unlimted PTO when suddenly one day they revoked the policy because they said some people were abusing it. The new policy was still very generous (6 weeks PTO per year) so no one complained. Fast forward a year later and we were hearing things from executives and managers like, "you know you don't have to use all you're PTO, right?". I'd ask, oh, it will rollover to next year? The reply: "No, it won't. But that's really the wrong way to think about it." So it turns out people were taking much more time off now than when PTO was unlimited. They started denying request and making up trivial rules, like 2/3 of your team must be available at any time (regardless of the team size), oh, and those rules weren't in the official policy. Good luck trying to get specifics in writing. Eventually they changed back to an unlimited policy but secretly told managers they should start denying requests after x number of days have been used. I think it was five weeks, which again is still generous but it bothers me because the intent is to hide that number in hopes that people will use less. I also get no tracking for how many days I've already taken unless I go through my requests and count the approved ones myself. The unlimited policy is definitely a scam at many companies. Most of my team has been denied requests for reasons that don't exist in the written policy, like, "you recently had PTO already." Honestly I'd rather have a policy that only allowed 3 or 4 weeks with a minimum mandatory that each employee is required to take at least two weeks off per year.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    It is like unlimited benefits. As soon as you put limits on it, some people start to look at "using them up."
    • ethbr0 5y ago
      The counterpoint is also valid: don't have policies which, if used, would be untenable to the company. The best places I've worked have had PTO policies, no rollover (but flexibility for longer trips), and (critically) managers who would gripe at you at the end of the year if you didn't use your PTO. Expectations were clear, everyone was on an equal playing field, and PTO was sized to something the company could afford everyone making use of.
• georgeecollins 5y ago
  My only experience of unlimited PTO was at a startup that was very successful and full of people who worked very long hours and took almost no vacations. If you took a vacation everyone was very supportive, in the sense that: We are really glad you are doing this, we know how hard it must be for you to take a vacation. In my second year when I let people know that I was going to a second five day vacation (ie two one week vacations in a year) I could see opinions of me drop considerably. I was not a team player. If I ever were to work at a place with unlimited PTO, I would simply ask, what is the average PTO people take in a year. If they can't say, don't believe it. It's just a ploy to not have to account for vacation days or pay vacation days when there is turnover.
  • borski 5y ago
    We enforced a fairly strict “you should really take this minimum amount off per year” while we had our unlimited vacation policy. We never went so far as to punish anyone for not taking it, but we set the minimum expectations upfront, and that seemed to work well.
  • rjbwork 5y ago
    I really like this about my current employer. I take at least 4 weeks off a year in addition to medical/sick leave for things like dr's appointments and just not feeling well. They don't even track it as far as I can tell. Couldn't tell you my exact number I've taken this year or last year, but I take a full week every quarter and my managers have never quibbled about it or anything. I don't think I'd work somewhere that was so nit picky about PTO and looked down on fellow workers for taking it. That way quickly leads to burnout and long term lower productivity.
  • soared 5y ago
    I’ll give you a funny opposing story. I worked at oracle data cloud, a very small section of oracle. We got unlimited pto but the rest of oracle didn’t. They wouldn’t rebuild/change the hr system so we were told to just not put pto in the system and take it as needed. When I left I had taken close to two weeks, but was also paid out more than one paycheck’s worth for my “unused” pto.
• chrisco255 5y ago
  Recent ex-Atlassian employee here. No part of this article matches with my experience. It's one of the better companies I've worked for. I usually took 3-4 weeks of PTO a year, it wasn't a big deal. We didn't even have to register our time off in a payroll system or anything like that. Yeah you couldn't take 6 months off and expect to keep your job, but I felt like 3-5 weeks of PTO was the norm there. I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave. It wasn't a big deal. This article complains about being at a job for 2 years without a promotion. That's the mark of an entitled person. P4 is still a great position with solid pay.
  • olingern 5y ago
    Keep in mind managers often make or break your experience. The article could be about OP’s manager as much as it could be Atlassian. Companies that don’t provide any training and structure with how managers handle engineers end up with employees having wildly different experiences. So, I would find Atlassian at fault here
    • ununoctium87 5y ago
      Atlassian provides very thorough and structured training before anyone is allowed on the management ladder
      • anunnymouse 5y ago
        Oh, you again.
    • x0x0 5y ago
      Atlassian is ultimately responsible for the experience of all employees. That said, this employee seems to have long running grievances with his or her managers that predate the cancer diagnosis. Somewhere in there was a team switch (see the complaint about new techs / can't go back to the previous team.) So this spanned multiple managers. As near as I can infer: the central complaint is Atlassian didn't offer longterm paid leave to deal with the cancer treatment, this employee didn't want to use unpaid leave, and Atlassian expected him or her to either work or go on unpaid leave. It's hard to tell. This post and many of the details about it leaves me suspecting the relevant managers at Atlassian would tell a very different story.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• stevenpetryk 5y ago
  A lot of negative sentiment for unlimited PTO here. I had unlimited PTO at one of my previous jobs (Intercom), and my boss was very clear about how much felt like too much, but still encouraged me to take plenty. I took 30 days off one year and nobody batted an eye. It's an overly cynical viewpoint to say that all unlimited PTO policies are bad/meant to fuck over employees, because some management chains really _do_ want people to lead fulfilling lives.
  • _hilro 5y ago
    My future company is going to offer unlimited wages.. But obviously it's going to have to be manager approved. And obviously the manager has a budget. And obviously I don't care if the manager screws you because he starts to dislike you. Or because somebody in HR/higher up doesn't like you. But none of that is my concern - I'm great; I give unlimited wages to workers! Never mind there's no contract with a firm guaranteed figure. Think of the earning potential! UNLIMITED!!!* *Terms and conditions apply but the terms and conditions re too long and take away from the headline so just check them out on our website at <404>
    • stevenpetryk 5y ago
      How would you feel about unlimited with an enforced minimum?
• stevebmark 5y ago
  I'm not impressed by this hit piece. Maybe it's because I'm already jaded that "unlimited PTO" never really means that at companies, especially if it's only manager approved PTO. Offering medical leave where you keep your benefits seems reasonable to me (if not preferred? I don't see how this would qualify for PTO. Taking medical leave is something I see regularly, even at companies with "unlimited" PTO). Not being promoted while you're not working seems reasonable to me. This person is clearly very angry, to the point where they're trying to find any way to hit at Atlassian, like "there's favoritism," which is true of 99% of companies. I think the try-to-hit-from-every-angle result of the anger works against them in their main point that they were mislead into thinking they could use PTO to care for a loved one.
  • fossuser 5y ago
    Yeah agreed - the emails they show also have bad grammar and misspellings too along with the general writing. It's basically understood that unlimited PTO means untracked and within some reasonable amount - if you were at an At Will company in the US they don't owe you much. Obviously you can't just take 3 years off of 'unlimited PTO' so it's hard to claim you truly believe it's limitless imo. Expecting a promo when you're not working and expecting to be able to just take infinite vacation (even when dealing with tragedy) is just not realistic. There are other options (medical leave, extended leave, etc.) - some companies will go out of their way to be kind, but I wouldn't have that as my expectation. This kind of rant doesn't look great either - my take away is this person was probably just difficult in general, there may have been other reasons they were not promoted.
    • function_seven 5y ago
      > my take away is this person was probably just difficult in general, there may have been other reasons they were not promoted. My general impression is that it's the difficult people who use terms like "toxic" to describe those they clash with. His "Interesting fact 1" is also a red flag. Dirty words in some internal memo? I'm scandalized! I don't like Atlassian for their slow software, but I'm sure it's a fine company to work for.
• shadowgovt 5y ago
  As a general rule of thumb: Be very wary of unlimited sick days. I've worked at companies with and without unlimited sick days, and in practice, I've found: - companies with limited sick days are still willing to negotiate "going into debt" if something goes wrong - companies with unlimited sick days can make it a constant fight to justify time off I've definitely been at companies in the latter category that didn't make it a fight, but the risk is if they choose to make it a fight, you have no hard numbers to fall back on to say you're being treated fairly or unfairly.
• gambiting 5y ago
  >>- Can I take some of my PTO, I should have plenty, to take care of my wife? - I said. - No, it's not even a question, because you won't be using it as a vacation, right? Technically you won't be on PTO, so take a medical leave. How is the reply to this anything other than "it's none of your fucking business what I do on my PTO?"
• kqr 5y ago
  "Unlimited sick days" What's the alternative to this? Does disease normally obey corporate policy in the U.S.?
  • sauwan 5y ago
    Authorized absence (without pay)
• slownews45 5y ago
  Goodness. Susan Fowler - you read her reflection on working at Uber (she left, found a different position). Hard not to be 100% in her corner. At least for me! This though - what? Are all software engineers like this guy? He's been there pretty recently 2019. The whole thing with having a family / kids and atlassian is now facing a class action? When I was young I slept in a HAMMOCK while working at the office. I now have a family. And yes, it is harder to get promoted, simply because I have less interest in working 90 hour work weeks! The guy took parental leave during his career growth (and was only there a bit before). I mean, your job is kept for you, but you are also looking to get promoted while not there? Unlimited PTO is garbage. It means in consultation with your bosses and subject to their continued happiness and needs of company you can take time off. Reality is you get unequal usage - it's actually not FAIR, the nice person is to scared, the abuser abuses it until they run the risk of getting fired. Just do normal PTO plans folks so folks KNOW they have a right to their 4-6 weeks! I think unlimited PTO is the worst thing. This is not an atlassian thing though. Hard to believe there is not more to this story just given the style of this guys writing. My own piece of advice? Quit and get a better job. These companies don't deserve you. Why waste time on them? Every time I've done that (once) it was the best decision I made (ever). And if you think all managers are crap, become a consultant.
  • m0ck 5y ago
    >When I was young I slept in a HAMMOCK while working at the office. I now have a family. And yes, it is harder to get promoted, simply because I have less interest in working 90 hour work weeks! Honestly, that sounds awful. As an European I am always amazed at this American mentality. I would never ever work more than 40 hours a week as an employee. Even that I consider too much for a healthy life and I aim at ~30 hours a week. I would never agreed to be called in the middle of the night, because there is a production outage in a company I don't own. I would never lose a good night sleep over such company. I will put in my hours for the salary we have agreed on and that's it, I don't care. Americans have been collectively brainwashed into thinking that the corporations give a shit about them and that the success of the corporation is also the success of its employees. Especially in our field, given the shortage of qualified engineers, why should I care? You don't want me, you won't promote me? Fine, I will talk to the next recruiter in the long line that is pilling up in my inbox.
• V-eHGsd_ 5y ago
  the most surprising thing about this story to me is that the domain shitlassian.com was available.
  • mxxx 5y ago
    lol this was actually the first thing that crossed my mind
• short_sells_poo 5y ago
  Am I the only one who feels the entire work relationship and promotion process at Atlassian is a Kafkaesque nightmare? You have to earn X number of various statistics so that you can then be considered for promotion and they even go to the trouble if creating all these employment tiers. Are all big tech companies like this? It sounds like a miserable experience. "Blimey, I'm 10 code points short to be promoted from a level 3 widget engineer to a class F level 1 junior vice president manager. Maybe I can convert 50 of my code points that I've earned into management points. Also, the employee rulebook also says that I can roll a D20 and add any untaken holidays and if it's above 30 I'll get into the shortlist for next year." Who comes up with all this ridiculous gamified hierarchy? Maybe I'm just naive as I never worked in these BigCos...
  • denverkarma 5y ago
    The promo process there is a mess for sure. They were trying to fix the issue of having different offices all around the world, and that people's standards in different markets were - well - different. But the effort to create globally a standardized promotion process meant it became very hard to get promoted, and as a manager it sucked when you had people on your team who absolutely deserved it but got stuck in the process and had to wait 1-2 years more than they should have, or leave in order to get a vertical move.
• sokoloff 5y ago
  > Is it true that engineers with children are less likely to get a promotion? > It was a silly question, I sure that this behavior exists in Atlassian, but nobody likes to talk about that. In Atlassian it's no surprise and my manager said "yes, it's true". Just like that, exposing the company to liability. If there’s a casual relationship there after correcting for confounding factors, that’s obviously bad. If there’s a retrospective correlation found, it’s not clear that’s bad. Brand new grads tend not to have children. Early in career promotions tend to come more quickly and with more certainty. From this, I’d expect promotions of lead software engineers to be less frequent than entry-level SWEs and for the former group to also (and irrelevantly) be more likely to have children.
• paxys 5y ago
  Do people really come back from a 6 month paid parental leave and expect to get promoted? No shit the coworker who busted their ass the entire time will get picked over you. That isn't discrimination, just reality.
• markphip 5y ago
  It seems like a sad story all around. All of the parts about how the PTO works seems pretty normal to me though. You definitely do not accrue any days in an Unlimited PTO system, that is the whole point of it. The company wants to clear themselves of the obligations that comes with accrued vacation days. As an Engineering Manager myself though, I just cannot imagine not giving this guy as much PTO as he needed. I would have at the very least tried to work with him to help as much as I could such as maybe having him only work 2-3 days a week for a while. So just based on his version of events I tend to blame the managers and how they handled it. Even if I was getting pressure from my manager I would stand up for anyone that reported to me and their need to have time off in this situation. I hope his wife is recovering and that he has landed a new job somewhere.
• rejectfinite 5y ago
  This feels like a USA problem and not a company problem. Here we have federal/government regulated PTO/sickleave/vacations. :)
• zshift 5y ago
  I don’t understand why the author didn’t take medical leave. That’s exactly what this is for. You get reduced pay while on leave, though you can work with the company to see if they can fulfill a portion of that. My current employer covers 30%, while short-term covers 60%. 90% pay to be able to completely disconnect from work for several months is absolutely worth it. It does sound like communication with the manager was poor, though. The manager should have been more empathetic to their situation (depends heavily on how comfortable the employee was with giving out this information).
  • greg5green 5y ago
    They did take leave -- it's in that managers communications about how you cannot roll from leave directly into PTO.
• ggambetta 5y ago
  With everyone saying unlimited PTO is a joke, my experience is the opposite. I used to work at Improbable [0], which had (and still has) an unlimited holiday policy. I regularly took 5 or 6 weeks off per year, never had a single problem with that. Managers would actually encourage people to take time off if they weren't taking enough. Now at Google we have a very generous PTO policy, but I do miss not having to do time off arithmetic to see if I can spend one more week back home for Christmas. [0] http://improbable.io http://improbable.io
  • strangeattractr 5y ago
    I work in financial services we have set time off and managers are punished in their performance reviews when employees don't take their time off because it accrues as a liability and means that salary costs are 1/13th higher than they should be due to the liability. I think that a mandated minimum PTO allowance + discretionary 'unlimited' PTO would be better at a large organisation. Eventually a company grows to such a size that the influx of assholes is inevitable, mandating the minimum and accruing the expense aligns incentives better in my opinion.
• eecc 5y ago
  Well, I'll keep quiet because who knows how far libel law goes. Having said that, "we've got deadlines" doesn't resonate well with https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-1330 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-1330 smh
• xutopia 5y ago
  The best scenario for PTO is when they say "You have X weeks of garante PTO per year. If you need more time off for whatever reason that is between you and your manager."
• masa331 5y ago
  I'm sorry that your wife is fighting cancer. It's terrible and i wish you overcome it together. But other than that i don't get the article. You are a software engineer in US. You are part of the elite, you have top salary, you will probably never have to worry about job security and money. You can make decent savings. You have powers to build your own business. Something a few billions other people don't have. Yet you are crying like a baby that you maybe got a bit screwed. Take it as a lesson for your next interviews and employments with other big and rich technology companies. It's not like you spent your whole life there.
• seanjregan 5y ago
  My wife had a heart attack not long after giving birth to my second child. My parental leave was planned for a few weeks later. When I got the call, I closed my laptop walked out of a meeting and went to the hospital. I didn't come back to Atlassian until my life was sorted out many months later. They handled everything for me to make it easier. I'll add that they pay 100% of my health plan and the birth of my kids cost less than the 3 whole foods bag I bought on the way home.
  • frabbit 5y ago
    Whole Foods? Aren't they the union-busting[1] exploiters? I'll take your anecdote under advisement. 1. https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/20/21228324/amazon-whole-foods-unionization-heat-map-union https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/20/21228324/amazon-whole-foo...
• darkerside 5y ago
  I feel bad for this person. I like to think that I wouldn't be so bitter and angry in this situation, but really, who can say? That situation being, his wife has cancer, which has nothing to do with Atlassian. It does sound like he has had some subpar managers (which is the cost of promoting from within, you will have managers learning on the job), but it also sounds like he is lashing out at a company for being a company. Light on details, and clearly one-sided. Again, I don't totally blame him. Life has dealt him a shit hand this year.
• _xerces_ 5y ago
  OP might have a valid point, but the childish way he chose to share his message and the poor English aren't going to help when it comes to finding future employment.
• howeyc 5y ago
  > I've been working two years without promotion, bad Atlassain. > I went on PTO and another worker took over and important project. This coworker did a fantastic job on a project with high visibility. They got promoted, not me. The reason you took PTO doesn't really matter, work either got done by you or it didn't. The one the that did the work got promoted, pikachu face meme. Yes, the wife's diagnoses sucks a lot, and you should probably get PTO in some way, but the promotion points are just weird.
• rmk 5y ago
  Unlimited PTO appears to be a bone of contention here. The simple fact is that "unlimited" PTO is never unlimited in practice, and there's the all-important caveat of "subject to management approval" even with unlimited PTO. Unlimited PTO is simply a way for the company to get away with no money paid out to you at separation from the company. In that sense, it really is a scam that can entrap the unwary and the naive. The other fact of life is that HR is there to protect the company, not the individual employee, when there is a problem. The priority for HR is to eliminate, reduce or limit company exposure to liability from noncompliance with employment law. A secondary objective is to be the eyes and ears of the company (via exit interviews, complaints from disgruntled employees, etc.). As with any job function, HR can also fail at this task (the Susan Rigetti case at Uber), sometimes in spectacular ways. If you are in an adversarial situation with the company, be very careful about HR and document every single dealing with them. Seek independent legal counsel, and walk away from a bad employment situation before you even need to seek out such support.
  • nominally_human 5y ago
    I think “unlimited” is a weird term. There are limits, because as an employee, you were hired to do a job. I think the proper term someone used was “untracked” which is more accurate. Internally the benefit is called “vacay your way”, which is really framing it as a very flexible vacation policy… which it truly is. As I posted earlier, it is really what you make of it, and those who do not use it loses it.
    • rmk 5y ago
      "Unlimited" is deceptive advertising in action, plain and simple. Not weird, but a sort of deception that's now de rigeur in the industry. "Unlimited" should really be interpreted as "zero", but "more than zero if management approves". Paid leave, on the other hand, has actual substance.
  • tomcorrigan 5y ago
    What you are describing is 'no guaranteed PTO - everything is at the whim of your manager' which is a far cry from the 'unlimited PTO' narrative the employer is pushing. Calling it unlimited if it comes with limits is disingenuous and likely to cause anger and resentment as we can see here.
• h_jason 5y ago
  Current Atlassian here: This article doesn’t represent my experience at the company so far at all. My team has been super chill about taking 3-4+ weeks of PTO, we’ve got people having kids and getting promo, we have people taking parental leave and coming back in good standing on the team, and we’ve had people take carer’s leave without any problem. Not sure if this person was in bad standing with the team to begin with or just happened to have a tough manager, but this kind of vitriol is not at all justified from what I’ve seen at the company. I have seen several overly entitled people throw tantrums about inadequate pay/benefits/conditions since I’ve been here, and that’s pretty much how I would categorize this website.
  • Tomis02 5y ago
    > This article doesn’t represent my experience at the company so far at all. Good for you, but your personal experience is not really relevant. Assuming the article is true, it sounds like Atlassian allowed a bad manager to make some very poor decisions. > just happened to have a tough manager You make it sound like it's an act of God. "Just happened". No, it's Atlassian's fault here, they advertise some values but don't really enforce them.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• hartator 5y ago
  I never got the unlimited PTO policy. Can’t you immediately go in vacation with no end after being hired? Obviously not, so why lying instead of just clearly laying out policies?
  • tartoran 5y ago
    Uncertainty makes people shy away from reclaiming their time off. Unlimited PTO is supposed to be a better deal for the employer not the employee. Not saying that some employees don’t abuse the system but on average the needle favors the employer.
• slackfan 5y ago
  So why didn't you quit? It's not like the job market has been massively hot or anything for the past three years. I've seen people run into similar (not to the same extreme) issues at various employers over the years, and the answer is "ok", as you hop back into the interview pool and then shortly give your two weeks.
  • chii 5y ago
    > So why didn't you quit? just to play the devil's advocate - the person from the website has to look after his sick wife. Quitting, and looking for another job, while having to do so, is probably going to be harder than asking for leave from an employer. If you meant, why didn't he quite earlier, before the wife's illness - i would presume that atlassian is the best option he had at the time, and that's why he didn't quit!
    • slackfan 5y ago
      Counterpoint: It's not like holding down a shitty job is preventing you from job hunting. Find another gig, give your two weeks, start the new gig on monday, make sure your new insurance plan is up to snuff before you give your notice.
• transitory_pce 5y ago
  The problem likely isn't the company -- is the reporting line and the inexperienced middle manager he was reporting to. Dont suffer these people. Esclate to N+1. Eventually you reach someone sensible.
• Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
  Is this specific to Atlassian? It sounds like most US employment horror stories. Shit employment rights, lack of PTO, shitty managers, etc. Obviously it's bad, but this just sounds like US corporate culture to me. 99% sure you wouldn't see the same horror stories from an EU Atlassian office purely because worker rights are better, you legally have more paid time off and the "unlimited vacation" bait doesn't exist.
• xrd 5y ago
  "Unlimited PTO" is the worst thing in the world. It was super confusing to my wife who thought I should just take vacation as much as possible. And, it is just an accounting trick to avoid paying out accumulated PTO when you leave. Seeing "unlimited PTO" as a perk will make me skip applying for a job. This guy has sacrificed a lot to do this. It's probably not going to go well for him, and the impact to Atlassian will be minimal. He probably will be dragged into court and this will make his life so much worse. I bet he signed something saying he would need to have this fight under arbitration, and is now in violation of his contract. Atlassian holds all the cards here, sadly. Probably the only happy outcome for him is if some politician (perhaps a anti-tech anti-monopolist politician) could take up his case. I was subject to something similar when my youngest daughter got sick eventually leading to my termination, and the company holds all the cards and the laws don't prevent them from screwing their employees. I do think we should have laws that protect employees and that could happen through legal changes.
  • bragr 5y ago
    It depends on the company. I worked at a place with unlimited PTO where taking time off was encouraged and people typically took 3+ weeks a year. It was great being able to take long well deserved vacation without worrying you wouldn't have the days to cover getting sick or a family emergency. tl;dr unlimited PTO can be great, just make sure to ask lots of follow up questions about culture.
    • nrki 5y ago
      This is pretty funny from an EU employees perspective..."unlimited" == ~3 weeks?! Our guaranteed 5 weeks + ~10 public holidays is better than "unlimited" PTO.
• jedberg 5y ago
  I've found that it makes much more sense to call it "untracked" PTO instead of "unlimited". Obviously there is a limit. But untracked implies that as long as things get done in a timely manner, no one will hassle you. So far I've only worked at one place with untracked PTO, and it was great. Took more vacation there than anywhere else I had worked, and management was really good about not only pushing you to take PTO but taking it themselves in big blocks to show that such behavior was OK.
  • nominally_human 5y ago
    I agree with the use of “unlimited” and “untracked” or maybe “flexible” would be better terms. I personally only had good experiences with what Atlassian does, and it required me to change my attitude toward time off for the better, as I am now accept that I should take time off, to both reward myself and to unwind or detach from work.
• fleddr 5y ago
  I'm from Europe, and would be in general agreement that US work culture is harsh in many ways. Also, it's entirely believable that companies present themselves as better than they really are. Further, I sympathize with the author's difficult personal situation. With that out of the way, I generally find the article absurd. First, and this is probably my age, I continue to be surprised by how low the bar is these days for angry employees to expose dirt on the public internet. In this case it seems to be anonymous, but I personally still live by the code that you keep this stuff private. None of the claims made seem to warrant such aggressive and counterproductive action, and drawing noses on founder's faces makes the entire thing look incredibly childish. Also, when you call your manager "Rio, with his manager being Sean", I hope those are pseudonyms. But they're not, since the names are directly in the company's response, so there goes your anonymity. "In Atlassian you're disposable" Yes, it's called employment. Every employee in every company is disposable. This isn't an excuse to treat you badly, but disposable you are. Live with that expectation, instead of thinking they're your friends or family. They're not. Likewise, employers are disposable. "Long-term it turned out to be a good move, since I received no promotion or salary increase in 2.5 years" "It has been 2+ years at Atlassian and I am still stuck in the same role" Again, I must be getting old. Do people expect a yearly promotion these days? The above to me sounds like extreme impatience. Further, it's unreasonable to expect unlimited promotion opportunities. If the "salary house" in a team of 10 allows for 3 seniors, it means not everybody can be promoted to senior. Promotions are part of a distribution and have caps, that's not unreasonable, it's common sense. As to HOW the selection is made on whom gets promoted, agreed that this can be a messy and sometimes unfair process. Indeed, personal factors may be at play and there's the roll of the dice regarding whether managers like you. that point is fair, yet highly common in business, and hard to solve. In this case, a very hard claim is made that you can't get a promotion when you have children, whilst the evidence to support this conclusion is thin, and based on a single exaggerated case. As for approving/denying any type of leave, the situation he describes does sound very harsh. In general though, even in work cultures far more generous with leave days, managers still needing to approve/decline them is common. A decline should mean postponement, not that you can never take the days. Honestly, I'm having a hard time making sense of this particular claim. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding on both sides. "There's a lot of favoritism in the company" Get used to it. This is how the human species works. It doesn't mean you have to kiss up like a weasel, but unfortunate as it is, managing your visibility and selling yourself is part of any professional work life. Take this simple yet brutal life lesson from this old man: your job is to make your manager look good, as well as to not make them look bad. That's the job. "Wellbeing and COVID" Indeed, companies do not care about your well being. Stop having this expectation. If they could downsize a team, automate your job or offshore it, they will. If this would lead to personal catastrophe, nobody cares. This is the nature of business. Employees aren't much better. They easily switch employer and will definitely not help out when the business is going under, they run instead. There's no loyalty in commerce. "Employment law violations" Another confusing claim. A single qualified candidate is interviewed and the manager wants to do more, to get a bigger sample set. Likely with the idea to pick the best from the subset. What absurd law would be violated here? Seems like plain common sense. Anyway, I'll end it here. It seems to me like the author is dealing with a lot of personal trauma, so the piece should be read with that in mind.
• mgd_uk 5y ago
  I've worked at Atlassian for more than 4 years. I don't recognize this portrait at all. I and everyone around me have had plenty of time off when needed, with very little push back. Atlassian does way more than is required for our wellbeing, and is genuinely the best company I've worked for. Lots of people around me have taken time of for sickness, to look after family, for parental leave, or just because they need a break - everything from a day to multiple months - and I've seen nothing other than support for them from others at every level. This person clearly had a bad experience, and I'm sorry for them. But it's by no means typical at Atlassian.
• vladTheInhaler 5y ago
  I know somebody who has been navigating Atlassian's PTO policy. For what it's worth, their manager and team have been very accommodating, notwithstanding the extremely unclear policies. That being said, unlimited PTO is a scam. Nothing more to it. Imagine if your bank didn't keep track of your account balance, instead offering "unlimited" withdrawals. Then, whenever they feel like you have withdrawn "too much", they terminate your account. Nobody would sign up for that! Unlimited PTO is no different - it's a way to take advantage of the power imbalance between employer and employee, nothing more.
• black_13 5y ago
  Everyone that works is at mercy of some employers healthcare policy. Simple universal healthcare.
• NetOpWibby 5y ago
  I was fired from a small dev shop in Boston six years ago while grieving a miscarriage. The founder had his favorite employee fire me while he conveniently ducked out. I don’t wish harm on most people and I definitely would not wish the experience of miscarriage on anyone, but I’d like to punch him in the mouth. I have a healthy 5-y.o. boy now but that memory still stings.
• 3minus1 5y ago
  Does anyone know the "points" system he's talking about? I'm surprised a senior engineer would have easily measurable chunks of work to complete. That sounds more like jr. engineer, but maybe Atlassian is really good at estimating LOE.
• 28304283409234 5y ago
  Interviewed with Atlassian in 2010 or so. They were building their cloud. Built on Openvz. Pre-docker chroot. I had a lot of experience with all the tech they wanted to use. Halfway through the interview they even offered to migrate me to Sidney. Until I said I had kids. Best interview I ever did. Never heard from them again. Dodged a bullet.
  • georgebarnett 5y ago
    I was on the core team that built the platform underlying version of the cloud systems. Many of my peers had kids, as did many people who moved to Australia to work with us. I can’t speak to your circumstance, however in 13 years I’ve never seen an instance of what you described.
• timdaub 5y ago
  I'm honestly surprised that people ever believed that unlimited PTO bullshit. I mean literally using these two words together is already a lie.
• MarkMarine 5y ago
  I just mentally x-ed out Atlassian from my list of companies I would consider working for. It's courageous of this person to post this and not take the severance.
• danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  Interesting fact 1: Atlassian is the only company that has words "shit" and "fuck" in their core values. This is a deliberately misleading statement. And not verifiable as a fact. When someone makes a deliberately misleading statement it's difficult to believe anything they then say.
  • unclekev 5y ago
    > And not verifiable as a fact https://www.atlassian.com/company/values https://www.atlassian.com/company/values - Open company, no bullshit - Don’t Fuck the customer Unless you are talking about them being the "only company". I'm sure there are others out there with similar ones but Atlassian is the only one I can find where internal company values containing "shit" and "fuck" are proudly displayed to the customers.
    • danielmarkbruce 5y ago
      Yes, I'm talking about "only". In retrospect I shouldn't have even noted it though. The misleading aspect is the thing to note.
• jjmorrison 5y ago
  This is what the google / facebook monopolies have done to silicon valley culture. People want the least amount of work and accountability, but feel entitled to every promotion, bump, perk in the book. At the end of the day, to pay these salaries, the company needs to drive performance and growth. Keeping a company alive is super hard - it's not your safety net.
• hkt 5y ago
  Tech workers need unions. Most have benificent funds to support people through hardship too. UK: https://utaw.tech/about https://utaw.tech/about USA: lots here https://organize.fyi/#tech https://organize.fyi/#tech Aus: https://www.cwu.org.au/ https://www.cwu.org.au/
• efnx 5y ago
  I was working at Formation.ai in SF when my wife was diagnosed with stage 3b breast cancer. Formation had an "unlimited PTO" policy and didn't even bat an eye at letting me take all the time I needed to care for my wife and family during that extremely difficult time. I still had some responsibilities but they were not time sensitive and rather minimal. The company never asked for any formal count of my time off or anything like that. It was simply "oh my gosh, we are so sorry - you take all the time you need and if there's anything else we can help with just let us know." I'm very, very thankful that I happened to be working for them when all of this happened - I was very lucky.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Jerry2 5y ago
  What is PASCAL at Atlassian? Some kind of a career assessment tool?
• lnanek2 5y ago
  It's true that "unlimited" is just a scam so that the company doesn't have to pay accrued unused vacation. I think most people just read between the lines and understand it is "unlimited with manager approval." 8 weeks is quite a lot. I don't know anyone at my unlimited vacay company that has taken that much. 4 is normal. 6 is kind of pushing it. I usually take 2. This is the US, though, I've heard Europeans expect more. Maybe instead of demanding 8 he should have just offered to take 4 and use family medical leave for the other 4. Seems like a fair offer that works out to 50% salary. FMLA is more legally protected than PTO as well, since the PTO could have fine print, essentially, saying it is with approval. I've definitely been in the position before where my SO needed more care than I could give when going through a tough pregnancy and after without getting negative comments from management about my availability. In my case I hired a nanny. Could be tough for him if he's more cash strapped, though. Still have my job, however. Also, he might be better off removing a lot of the informal language about "lies" and "shit". People will take him more seriously if he makes the tone a bit more objective while still pointing out the employers' legal obligations weren't met if they violated FMLA, or the weaker argument that they didn't provide what offered in the job listing if that's the strongest argument against them, etc..
• iainctduncan 5y ago
  I would never, ever, work somewhere with unlimited time off. It's a total scam. There's no way that doesn't come with unspoken expectations, guilt trips, peer comparisons, and all kinds of shit I want none of. I want to work what I've agreed to, and take no flak from anyone when I don't want to work.
• satisfice 5y ago
  I work for my wife, so with a wink and a nod I get time off whenever I want it. Incredibly, there is no rule against a spouses working for each other where I am employed! And it’s not like management doesn’t know about this conflict of interest— my wife owns the company. I am the only employee, though, so I have some leverage.
• amaajemyfren 5y ago
  For those like me who didn't understand initially : PTO ⩶ Paid Time Off
• umvi 5y ago
  One time I joined a company that had unlimited PTO and I immediately tried to take 3 years of PTO and it was denied. Unlimited indeed, what a scam.
• aaomidi 5y ago
  Meanwhile tech workers still resist the idea of unionizing.
• jp0d 5y ago
  I was reading all the comments here and wondering how come you don't have at least 4 weeks of paid annual leaves! Then realised that many of the comments are from Americans. I'd have thought Atlassian being an Aussie company would have to give you at least 4 weeks of annual leave. But being an Aussie company can't change the mindset of the managers in another country!
• NoPicklez 5y ago
  To me a policy of unlimited PTO looks great from the outside when companies are trying to win over new employees and have a pissing contest around who has the best perks. However, its unlimited until it impacts your teams and the role that you are actually employed to do. I agree that if you want to be flexible you implement a flexible PTO policy that still has a limit that can be built up over time. Exceptions to that limit can be granted.
• brenainn 5y ago
  This makes me think of the spate of mental health initiatives I've been seeing in workplaces over the last few years. It's a cynical opinion, but I can't believe anyone actually cares. Things like team "check in" calls and higher ups saying you can approach them about anything. But outside of maybe direct colleagues I trust on a personal level, I wouldn't tell anyone anything. I imagine if you went to someone higher up the chain and said you were depressed and anxious, or, god forbid, approaching suicidal, they would hand you off and put as much distance between you and them as possible. Maybe not care at all isn't right, but rather the care is reserved for non-complex, easy to solve issues, and anything beyond that carries stigma and poses some level of risk for your employer. I'm skeptical that this person's initiative will lead to positive outcomes, but all the best to them and I hope their wife recovers fully.
• jrjarrett 5y ago
  This is a particular hot button for me, since when I started working, I got separate banks of vacation and sick time. It took me years to build up to a decent amount of vacation time; I rarely took sick time, but that was time when I truly couldn’t work and needed to recover from something. My last job was a fixed bank of PTO- that had to account for everything; vacation, sick. I was constantly anxious if I woke up feeling unwell because that was some number of days I wouldn’t be able to take as vacation. If a company wants to have a limited amount of time off, they really need vacation and sick time as separate banks, treated differently for different reasons-vacation for planned, sick time for unplanned.
• RattleyCooper 5y ago
  Woooowwwww, I went to their website and scrolled down and of course they're bragging about them donating to cancer research . Oof...
• ThrustVectoring 5y ago
  If you're worried about this sort of thing happening to you - and you should be - this comment is a reminder that disability insurance exists and is extremely reasonably priced on a software developer or other white-collar professional salary. With an insurance policy paying the bills, you can plan on taking unpaid time off to take care of your partner if the worst should happen. It's morbid to think about, but going into these situations with a robust contingency plan absolutely beats the alternative.
  • chii 5y ago
    yes, i agree. One should not depend on the altruism of an employer, regardless of whether the employer is actually altruistic or not. Otherwise, when reality fails to meet your expectations, it is you, not the party with more power, that suffers. I say this not implying that atlassian is behaving badly - i'm making a general comment that your employer is not responsible for your well-being beyond the mandates by law.
• john_yaya 5y ago
  It’s time to rename “Unlimited PTO” to something more honest and realistic. Of course, HR will still call it that, but giving it a better name will help people see it for what it is. I propose “Vacation By Request” or maybe “PTO TBD.”
• brailsafe 5y ago
  Lot of talk about how one's experience at a given company depends on their specific manager, also talk about CTO coming in and changing stuff. I think it needs more emphasis how top-down hierarchy is very vulnerable to stupid management decisions. I worked at a company 5 years ago that I wa shocked to find myself actually get to a level of comfort with on my team, because I'm not a person who fits well with careerist bureaucrats and big conpanies in general. Me and this other frontend guy figured out part of this big codebase we inherited, and developed good collaboration with ea h other and the broader team which had developed naturally. Move forward 3 months after that, and my manager's manager (who was never there, but really wanted his outgoing boss' job) decided he'd make an impact by shuffling all the teams into arbitrary groups based presumably on some listicle he read in LinkedIn. I didn't last long and burnt out for years trying to make the best of it.
• stevev 5y ago
  I think the biggest and most important ingredient to have in his situation is his relationship with his boss or manager. It would be best if these things are handled at the HR level. It is a cultural thing or issue in some companies. If your boss supports you, you’ll be fine, else better start looking for a new job.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• smus 5y ago
  Jesus, glad to hear. Will certainly never work at Atlassian.
• 8heuyqlk313 5y ago
  Another ex-Atlassian here - this post sounds a world away from my experiences. I have narcolepsy, and I told my team, and everyone was super accommodating. On nights when I didn't sleep well (I also have epilepsy, and sleep deprivation can cause seizures), I'd just take the day off, or take a half-day. I never had anyone complain or make an issue of it - the other way round actually, sometimes I'd wfh and everyone would tell me that I didn't have to. I worked in the US office for a while and I took heaps of leave - at least 6 or 7 weeks, but broken up into bits. I guess it depends on your manager, but for my office the sense was generally that you could just organise time off and put in a request, and it would be granted - at least for short holidays. If you wanted to take multiple weeks off, you were meant to discuss it with your manager and it could be denied, but from what I experienced, they would try to see how to make it work. I actually ended up quitting because I got put under a bad manager, and that definitely is an issue - some people were promoted into management too early, and without enough training, and they weren't great at it. I know Atlassian had identified that as an issue that they were trying to solve, but I guess it's not that easy. Reading this article, it sounds like the poster probably had one of those managers. But yea, when I left, there was this whole option to keep health insurance for a month or so after leaving (I didn't need it as I was going back to Australia, so I didn't pay that much attention). OP's experience sounds awful re: dealing with his wife's cancer and a poor manager, but I don't think his claims are entirely fair.
• someonehere 5y ago
  I thought SF had safeguards in place to prevent abusive workplaces like this when someone needs family leave? Seems like there’s a lawsuit waiting to happen: https://www.alanadelmanlaw.com/th-family-and-medical-leave-rights/ https://www.alanadelmanlaw.com/th-family-and-medical-leave-r...
• dev_throw 5y ago
  Can a company in CA terminate employment for an employee on long term disability like stage 4 cancer after a certain period of time?
• trynewideas 5y ago
  I've worked at two tech companies with "unlimited PTO" and both have extremely strict reporting and request processes that prevent using it, even with months of notice. The worst instances were when PTO was approved well in advance, and then revoked too late to change plans, making it actually _cost_ me money. The other two tech companies I've worked at had officially limited, roll-over PTO that accumulates with experience, and both had "honor system" reporting that allowed us to take more than that if we needed it for emergencies, as long as we kept people affected by it in the loop and made an effort to hand off any impacted work. Naturally, the latter was the vastly better experience, and my unused PTO paid out to me when I left both jobs, unlike the unlimited PTO company.
• thoughtmore 5y ago
  I worked for a company for 2+ years where I was good enough to get two pay raises above the norm and one promotion. Until one day, I was given a stack of resumes and told to review them and reject all of them for some reason (so a couple of H1B engineers could get a Green Card). I refused and found myself being let go about six weeks after. They offered me severance and I consulted a employment lawyer who just shook his head and said my best bet was to just take the severance as no lawyer could take this case on a contingency basis and even hiring him would possibly make me unemployable in my field. When windmills can shred you no point in tilting at them. You can't pay your hospital bills and mortgage with principles.
• zerm778 5y ago
  hackernews white knight have your back but I'd love to hear Atlassian side of the story
• kubatyszko 5y ago
  I'll make it simple regarding unlimited PTO: It exists ONLY so that the company does NOT have to pay you for the unused vacation upon leaving, there is NO OTHER reason for the PTO. But yes, creative "marketing" twists it and makes it look great outside...
• xivzgrev 5y ago
  I know this guy is hurt and struggling, but…this post is pretty ranty. I think the gist is 1) wife got cancer 2) he took leave to help 3) he wanted to keep supporting / get more time off 4) company didn’t accept that, and moved to terminate Seems pretty…normal? Not really sure what Atlassian is doing wrong here
  • heytherewhat 5y ago
    Well ethically they should have just given more leave and money and he would have been happy. When the company offers unlimited PTO and unlimited sick leave and the dude gets only a little bit of leave 6 weeks severance, that's not very fair. But sounds like his manager is a douche and the source of most of the problems. The manager should probably get in trouble or be audited for his actions.
• neycoda 5y ago
  Welcome to end-stage capitalism, where discompassionate corporations throw human lives into meatgrinders to maximize profit while being worshipped more than God.
• jessejjohnson 5y ago
  Excellent post of useful information. Hoping your wife, and you, are on a positive track forward.
• fancyfork 5y ago
  Sorry that author had a bad experience. As a current employee, I have a different experience. Some things that company did since I joined: - work from anywhere (after covid) - it gives day offs to whole company to help with burnout - it added perks for mental health - it has 6 months maternity leave (this was only for moms, now both parents get 6 months) - I didn’t have any issues when I wanted to get PTO - it provided financial package to help with work from home setup Having said these, I understand experience depends a lot to your direct manager. I completely disagree what author says about founders. I think integrity and doing good is their core.
• dustymcp 5y ago
  its funny how this story sides with ther products being userhostile aswell, i wonder if that is just a coincidence..
• jabbay 5y ago
  Not a smart guy huh [redacted] … > Object.values(__NEXT_DATA__.props.pageProps.records.entity)[0] {id: "05d7b99e-61e7-4505-8037-cf99a05a2aeb", name: "[redacted]", image: "https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a-/AOh14GhztpqYMmg1A_-DYtR--MPMBRyLSMCVFfzSb81uAQ=s100 https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a-/AOh14GhztpqYMmg1A_-DYtR..."}
• tinyhouse 5y ago
  The author made a major mistake. It's a long rant about Atlassian. He should've focused just about his PTO issue when his wife got cancer. Atlassian's hiring and promotion practices are not that relevant.
• mdb333 5y ago
  Unlimited PTO is fundamentally use it or lose it... which is illegal (at least here in Cali). I don't know why the Division of Labor hasn't come out and said as much yet. I filed a claim against previous employer (several years back before everybody was on the unlimited bandwagon) with an 'unlimited' PTO and ended up with ~20k awarded. Process took forever, and of course the devil is in the details with employment docs, agreements, etc... but worth pursuing if you're still salty over the situation. Prior to that I found myself in a similar situation... basically getting the boot for availing myself of sick leave when my family needed me. Fortunately, I got a big chunk of cash upon leaving and it gave me a much needed boost for moving on. So best advice I can give is to not let the situation keep you down or hold you back. And in general, a good reminder: HR has one job and its not to protect you the employee.
• 1290cc 5y ago
  Unlimited PTO has always been about attracting talent (it looks great on paper) and ensuring you manage HR costs. If you have unlimited PTO there is no need to track it and no need to payout employees when they leave.
• kakemo 5y ago
  This has been hard for me to share but my experience at Atlassian has been both shocking and nearly broke me. - Managers pushing people into a "bad performance" year so they can’t leave the team. - Ridiculing new parents wanting to take parental leave. - Not open to any sort of feedback. Retaliating. - Wide spread fear of speaking up. - Actively position people on grunt work based on visa status, individuals who can’t easily leave. - Performance improvement feedback unclear and confusing, resulting in unnecessary work and burnout. - Surprise management and shock firings on a regular basis with no clear learnings. Consistently ignore this feedback when raised with managers privately. It was not clear to me how I could have raised these issues with the HR department privately.
• techydude 5y ago
  As the other half of a former Atlassian employee, I can very much confirm that a lot of the essence of the OP's story is real, and particularly endemic to Atlassian's San Francisco office, one which has not groked nor imported the Australian work ethic of their Sydney head office. The issue with POCs is very real, but I don't beleive it to be universal nor 'from above', much more about the biases of individual middle-managers. Atlassian has a long and painful history of promoting from within, for management roles (team lead, feature lead, product manager, etc), from a pool of mostly programming staff wanting to "give management a go", often with zero management training, far too often with poor consequences for those who then find themselves being managed by a once-peer programmer who's now 'off the leash', and sometimes with 'something to prove'. Programmers love to dis "management", but most of them make terrible managers theselves and havent a fucking clue how to be one; thee response characteristics of transistors and flesh don't correlate well. In my other half's case, a 'sw development manager' (2.5 years experience in that role, followed by 1.3 years somewhere else that presumably didn't work out) was hired from outside to lead a Bitbucket team but with a title one level above the actual role (and salary to match). Within a year or so there was nothing left of that team of 5 who in all other respects was high performing and loved working with each other, they all either resigned or moved to other products, meanwhile Fuckface McL**s, as I tended to call him, got a demotion and continues to fester within. This was the final straw after 3+ years of languishing in a P4 'Programmer' role, because of the revolving door of team-leads that came before Fuckface, andother Atlassian hallmark. (1 employer and 2 promotions over following 2.5 years and he's now considered a 'Principal Programmer' in US nomenclature). Atlassian's Glassdoor reviews are a classic case of greenwashing, with interns and recent recruits often sent in waves to flood over the... let's just say less enthusiastic reviews they get from more experienced staff - present or recent past. It's a little depressing, but not surprising, that the vast majority of the comments on this post are fixated on the semantics of "unlimited PTO"...