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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 week

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.
- tiew9Vii 5y ago
  Agree, direct managers, make or break all the difference. Ex Atlassian. Worked on a good team. We were told we were seen as "high performance". I had positive reviews, was told I was, without doubt, the star/person who made the team, received a performance bonus when issued etc. I had a great two years, and then the business wanted to change some stuff, new CTO making his mark, ban some languages we had been using for two years that enabled us to be high performance and instead work more like the CTO's ex company, Gumtree which while large are non-descript. The team wasn't happy. The team was systematically watered down/broken up/moved elsewhere/members were replaced to align with the CTO's opinions. My manager, who had been good for the past two years, an evangelist for what we were doing and encouraging it, did a complete 360. What he was previously evangelizing for, he was actively hunting out, trying to crush and punish. Chat messages were being watched and then used against people in one and ones for criticizing specific code, nothing that looks out the ordinary on a dev chat room. A colleague and I talked outside work and later found we were being played against each other in a he said / she said. The same colleague got put on performance management for writing to many Lambdas in Java as we cannot be seen to be using the word Function anymore. My colleague resigned. On his last day, I was pulled into an office with some historic tweets on Twitter. Someone had actively searched me out on the internet, found some stuff to use against me, and I had my resignation on the table ready to sign. It gave me a bit of gardening leave just enough for some stock to vest as a severance package i guess. The manager who only a few months earlier who had nothing but praise and actively encouraging my/my teams work had now gone online, typed my name into Google to see what they could find. They found some messages, admittedly silly for me to post but nothing terrible, and used them against me to get rid of me for doing what he was an advocate for before the new CTO tried to make his mark. Worst sprint-review I'd ever been in, a team of 5-6 people, calling out issues with a pr, heads on desks because the manager says we have to merge a rewrite by another team. All devs were silent as they had already said everything, and the manager just pressed merge and said: "done". The specific manager was very career-driven, and the best thing for his career was to follow CTO direction. Rather than bat for his team, he systematically rebuilt it and turned on people to move them on. Glassdoor reviews around the time I left by other people where not great either. It's very culty, you are either in the cult or not.
  - archon810 5y ago
gambiting 5y ago
>> I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave. That's super poor, wtf. What do you even do after these first 4 months then? Give the baby to a babysitter? I know US law about this is weak, but wow.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  A lot of people lean on grandparents or spouses for kids. But to be honest, we all worked from home so it wasn't a big deal. It was common to see kids or babies in Zoom calls.
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    > we all worked from home so it wasn't a big deal As a parent of an infant myself (well she's one now), I cannot imagine trying to work while also caring for a child. Like I've done it, and it's incredibly, incredibly difficult. But yeah, if both parents are working you need childcare, and that's expensive if you don't have (much) family support.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Yes, US median is something like 2-5 weeks maternity leave and many require you to exhaust all of your accrued paid sick time and PTO first and many of them also require you to file it as FMLA (the federal red tape/insurance program for long term leave) even if you don't plan to extend past "given" amounts of maternity leave. So yeah, in corporate dystopian America, 3-4 months sure looks generous.
  - benglish11 5y ago
    I think you must misunderstand FMLA. FMLA is job protection to take care of medical issues (you or family member). It isn't really any red tape, but it prevents an employer from firing you during those 12 weeks and it prevents them from denying your PTO. So if you have 4 weeks of PTO saved up they cant deny your time off request to take care of your baby for 4 weeks. FMLA leave is unpaid.
albertgoeswoof 5y ago
What does your contract say with regards to unlimited vacation? If you take it literally how could they fire you if on your first day you leave for PTO and never return. I wonder if this has ever been tested in court
erosenbe0 5y ago
It actually says in the beginning that he was a P5, which I assume to be over 200k total comp, which is more or less the top few percent of software engineers nationwide. That is a great comp package even for management. So if you are indeed that valuable, any company would want to retain you, and you could ask for a lateral move to a new manager, or just bolt when things get hairy. Everybody wants to retain or hire the top talent. Edit: that is not to justify the alleged treatment, only placing the situation in relative terms. He wasn't being paid 80k at the only shop in town, with no other possibilities available.
- x0x0 5y ago
  The poster did get a lateral -- see the complaints about the new team and not being able to go back to the old team.
reaperducer 5y ago
I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave. It wasn't a big deal. It wasn't a big deal because it's the law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_of_1993 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  There implication is it was paid which is NOT the law "The FMLA allows eligible employees to take up to 12 work weeks of unpaid leave..."
  - jjav 5y ago
    The OP quote about the female manager doesn't really imply whether it was paid or not, one way or the other. That said, whether FMLA is unpaid or not depends on the state. I took my 12 weeks of FMLA parent leave (as a father) and I was paid weekly by the state (California). There is a cap to what the state will pay so it was less than my regular salary but it was a paid leave with the state providing the income. (On top of that my company made up the difference, but that was a benefit they chose to give. But even if the company was stingy and didn't want to pay anything during the leave, the state does provide some income.)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jjcm 5y ago
Another recent ex-Atlassian here (I left 4 months ago after working there for 5 years), and I'll +1 this. Was a really solid company. I took multiple 3+ week vacations over my 5 years, and one 3 month vacation. In addition it felt like the company actually cared about me. I had the best work life balance of any company I've worked for at Atlassian. Some other things about this article stood out to me though. The author brings up: "Interesting fact 1: Atlassian is the only company that has words "shit" and "fuck" in their core values." without the context here. These values are "Don't fuck the customer" and "Open company, no bullshit". It seems strange the author is calling out the language of values I actually feel were pretty decent. If anything this is just a reflection of word choices of Australian vs American cultures. It feels like the author is just trying to pull every gotchya out there due to a bad experience with a manager.
- oauea 5y ago
  > These values are "Don't fuck the customer" and "Open company, no bullshit". Huh. As a customer, this is surprising.
- duderific 5y ago
  Using those words in their official core values just seems a bit juvenile and unprofessional. Not a red flag, but maybe a yellow one.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    I agree it feels unprofessional. It would be like adding a hashtag.
    - senectus1 5y ago
      its very Australian.
  - jp0d 5y ago
    Those are quite commonly used words at Aussie companies. I guess it's just a cultural difference.
OJFord 5y ago
> I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave. Is that supposed to sound like a lot? Not all commenters are from the US! Here in the UK, AIUI, it fairly recently shifted from 12mo maternity (paternity I think was employers' discretion entirely?) leave to 12mo split between parents as they see fit, and not necessarily concurrently or at birth, etc.
- ssully 5y ago
  In the US, that is decent. My wife's job (non-tech) offers a month at like 75% pay I believe.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    I'm not trying to encourage anybody to quit their jobs for a different local job that I suppose will have better benefits - I'm commenting under the assumption that the discussion's a bit more abstract than that.
    - ssully 5y ago
      Oh, I understand and your point is good. I just wanted to add a little context that the benefits vary wildly when it comes to maternity leave.
- ununoctium87 5y ago
  You can’t compare US benefits to UK benefits. I’m fairly certain Atlassian’s EU offices will have very different parental leave to the US. IIRC, Aus is 6 months
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Well I'm comparing to UK (perhaps nee EU?) statutory requirements, of course there's some win-some/lose-some, I just think (even as a right-leaning^ bachelor) that's something worth legislating around. Especially if you're (I'm not) pro positive-discrimination: the 'time with newborn vs. work/pay/career progression' decision is awful for gender equality, surely? Traditionally it is indeed maternity leave, and if you don't even mandate a good amount of that then the 'better hires' are men (all of us, family size decisions aside), women who won't-have/have-had children, and women who value career more. (^: I say 'leaning' more because of US/UK political spectrum differences than anything else; feel free to read 'pretty solidly Conservative' in a UK context.)
jjav 5y ago
> We didn't even have to register our time off in a payroll system or anything like that. This tells me that it was entirely up to your manager to be ok with it or not, as it wasn't tracked anywhere else. That's a double edged sword. If you have an awesome manager, it's great. But if you have a workaholic manager, you'll have a difficult time getting any time off ever. It's much better overall to have a policy of N days per year (none of the "unlimited" lies) that accumulate clearly on your pacheck, that way there is never doubt or argument as to how many days you have earned and can take.
politelemon 5y ago
You might have a skewed or incomplete perception I'm thinking... Neither of the holiday amounts you've quoted here are big in any sense, they're actually quite low.
oauea 5y ago
> I usually took 3-4 weeks of PTO a year So the legal minimum in most countries?
arendtio 5y ago
> I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave. So when you say 'manager' you mean someone like a team lead (line manager) and they kept their teams? At least that is what I would expect when you write 'wasn't a big deal' and judging from the other stories I am not sure that is the case. How about male managers? Did they take parental leave too?

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.
tiew9Vii 5y ago
Agree, direct managers, make or break all the difference. Ex Atlassian. Worked on a good team. We were told we were seen as "high performance". I had positive reviews, was told I was, without doubt, the star/person who made the team, received a performance bonus when issued etc. I had a great two years, and then the business wanted to change some stuff, new CTO making his mark, ban some languages we had been using for two years that enabled us to be high performance and instead work more like the CTO's ex company, Gumtree which while large are non-descript. The team wasn't happy. The team was systematically watered down/broken up/moved elsewhere/members were replaced to align with the CTO's opinions. My manager, who had been good for the past two years, an evangelist for what we were doing and encouraging it, did a complete 360. What he was previously evangelizing for, he was actively hunting out, trying to crush and punish. Chat messages were being watched and then used against people in one and ones for criticizing specific code, nothing that looks out the ordinary on a dev chat room. A colleague and I talked outside work and later found we were being played against each other in a he said / she said. The same colleague got put on performance management for writing to many Lambdas in Java as we cannot be seen to be using the word Function anymore. My colleague resigned. On his last day, I was pulled into an office with some historic tweets on Twitter. Someone had actively searched me out on the internet, found some stuff to use against me, and I had my resignation on the table ready to sign. It gave me a bit of gardening leave just enough for some stock to vest as a severance package i guess. The manager who only a few months earlier who had nothing but praise and actively encouraging my/my teams work had now gone online, typed my name into Google to see what they could find. They found some messages, admittedly silly for me to post but nothing terrible, and used them against me to get rid of me for doing what he was an advocate for before the new CTO tried to make his mark. Worst sprint-review I'd ever been in, a team of 5-6 people, calling out issues with a pr, heads on desks because the manager says we have to merge a rewrite by another team. All devs were silent as they had already said everything, and the manager just pressed merge and said: "done". The specific manager was very career-driven, and the best thing for his career was to follow CTO direction. Rather than bat for his team, he systematically rebuilt it and turned on people to move them on. Glassdoor reviews around the time I left by other people where not great either. It's very culty, you are either in the cult or not.
- archon810 5y ago

gambiting 5y ago

>> I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave. That's super poor, wtf. What do you even do after these first 4 months then? Give the baby to a babysitter? I know US law about this is weak, but wow.

chrisco255 5y ago
A lot of people lean on grandparents or spouses for kids. But to be honest, we all worked from home so it wasn't a big deal. It was common to see kids or babies in Zoom calls.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  > we all worked from home so it wasn't a big deal As a parent of an infant myself (well she's one now), I cannot imagine trying to work while also caring for a child. Like I've done it, and it's incredibly, incredibly difficult. But yeah, if both parents are working you need childcare, and that's expensive if you don't have (much) family support.
WorldMaker 5y ago
Yes, US median is something like 2-5 weeks maternity leave and many require you to exhaust all of your accrued paid sick time and PTO first and many of them also require you to file it as FMLA (the federal red tape/insurance program for long term leave) even if you don't plan to extend past "given" amounts of maternity leave. So yeah, in corporate dystopian America, 3-4 months sure looks generous.
- benglish11 5y ago
  I think you must misunderstand FMLA. FMLA is job protection to take care of medical issues (you or family member). It isn't really any red tape, but it prevents an employer from firing you during those 12 weeks and it prevents them from denying your PTO. So if you have 4 weeks of PTO saved up they cant deny your time off request to take care of your baby for 4 weeks. FMLA leave is unpaid.

albertgoeswoof 5y ago

What does your contract say with regards to unlimited vacation? If you take it literally how could they fire you if on your first day you leave for PTO and never return. I wonder if this has ever been tested in court

erosenbe0 5y ago

It actually says in the beginning that he was a P5, which I assume to be over 200k total comp, which is more or less the top few percent of software engineers nationwide. That is a great comp package even for management. So if you are indeed that valuable, any company would want to retain you, and you could ask for a lateral move to a new manager, or just bolt when things get hairy. Everybody wants to retain or hire the top talent. Edit: that is not to justify the alleged treatment, only placing the situation in relative terms. He wasn't being paid 80k at the only shop in town, with no other possibilities available.

x0x0 5y ago
The poster did get a lateral -- see the complaints about the new team and not being able to go back to the old team.

reaperducer 5y ago

I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave. It wasn't a big deal. It wasn't a big deal because it's the law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_of_1993 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...

tick_tock_tick 5y ago
There implication is it was paid which is NOT the law "The FMLA allows eligible employees to take up to 12 work weeks of unpaid leave..."
- jjav 5y ago
  The OP quote about the female manager doesn't really imply whether it was paid or not, one way or the other. That said, whether FMLA is unpaid or not depends on the state. I took my 12 weeks of FMLA parent leave (as a father) and I was paid weekly by the state (California). There is a cap to what the state will pay so it was less than my regular salary but it was a paid leave with the state providing the income. (On top of that my company made up the difference, but that was a benefit they chose to give. But even if the company was stingy and didn't want to pay anything during the leave, the state does provide some income.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

jjcm 5y ago

Another recent ex-Atlassian here (I left 4 months ago after working there for 5 years), and I'll +1 this. Was a really solid company. I took multiple 3+ week vacations over my 5 years, and one 3 month vacation. In addition it felt like the company actually cared about me. I had the best work life balance of any company I've worked for at Atlassian. Some other things about this article stood out to me though. The author brings up: "Interesting fact 1: Atlassian is the only company that has words "shit" and "fuck" in their core values." without the context here. These values are "Don't fuck the customer" and "Open company, no bullshit". It seems strange the author is calling out the language of values I actually feel were pretty decent. If anything this is just a reflection of word choices of Australian vs American cultures. It feels like the author is just trying to pull every gotchya out there due to a bad experience with a manager.

oauea 5y ago
> These values are "Don't fuck the customer" and "Open company, no bullshit". Huh. As a customer, this is surprising.
duderific 5y ago
Using those words in their official core values just seems a bit juvenile and unprofessional. Not a red flag, but maybe a yellow one.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  I agree it feels unprofessional. It would be like adding a hashtag.
  - senectus1 5y ago
    its very Australian.
- jp0d 5y ago
  Those are quite commonly used words at Aussie companies. I guess it's just a cultural difference.

OJFord 5y ago

> I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave. Is that supposed to sound like a lot? Not all commenters are from the US! Here in the UK, AIUI, it fairly recently shifted from 12mo maternity (paternity I think was employers' discretion entirely?) leave to 12mo split between parents as they see fit, and not necessarily concurrently or at birth, etc.

ssully 5y ago
In the US, that is decent. My wife's job (non-tech) offers a month at like 75% pay I believe.
- OJFord 5y ago
  I'm not trying to encourage anybody to quit their jobs for a different local job that I suppose will have better benefits - I'm commenting under the assumption that the discussion's a bit more abstract than that.
  - ssully 5y ago
    Oh, I understand and your point is good. I just wanted to add a little context that the benefits vary wildly when it comes to maternity leave.
ununoctium87 5y ago
You can’t compare US benefits to UK benefits. I’m fairly certain Atlassian’s EU offices will have very different parental leave to the US. IIRC, Aus is 6 months
- OJFord 5y ago
  Well I'm comparing to UK (perhaps nee EU?) statutory requirements, of course there's some win-some/lose-some, I just think (even as a right-leaning^ bachelor) that's something worth legislating around. Especially if you're (I'm not) pro positive-discrimination: the 'time with newborn vs. work/pay/career progression' decision is awful for gender equality, surely? Traditionally it is indeed maternity leave, and if you don't even mandate a good amount of that then the 'better hires' are men (all of us, family size decisions aside), women who won't-have/have-had children, and women who value career more. (^: I say 'leaning' more because of US/UK political spectrum differences than anything else; feel free to read 'pretty solidly Conservative' in a UK context.)

jjav 5y ago

> We didn't even have to register our time off in a payroll system or anything like that. This tells me that it was entirely up to your manager to be ok with it or not, as it wasn't tracked anywhere else. That's a double edged sword. If you have an awesome manager, it's great. But if you have a workaholic manager, you'll have a difficult time getting any time off ever. It's much better overall to have a policy of N days per year (none of the "unlimited" lies) that accumulate clearly on your pacheck, that way there is never doubt or argument as to how many days you have earned and can take.

politelemon 5y ago

You might have a skewed or incomplete perception I'm thinking... Neither of the holiday amounts you've quoted here are big in any sense, they're actually quite low.

oauea 5y ago

> I usually took 3-4 weeks of PTO a year So the legal minimum in most countries?

arendtio 5y ago

> I also had female managers who took 3-4 months of maternity leave. So when you say 'manager' you mean someone like a team lead (line manager) and they kept their teams? At least that is what I would expect when you write 'wasn't a big deal' and judging from the other stories I am not sure that is the case. How about male managers? Did they take parental leave too?