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Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse... I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be don

• verelo 7mo ago
  It's likely not all this, but i expect an element is: there is a meaningful number of people essentially refusing to work with AI. Antidotal but I have spoken to friends at Google who are telling me many co-workers say "I tried it didn't work, ill do it myself" when really they just didn't try very hard at all.
  • piker 7mo ago
    That would be a stupid reason to fire someone when the jury is still out on the net productivity benefits of using AI to code at scale.
    • verelo 7mo ago
      Sure, but would that really surprise you? Edit: that is to say, if you had a % of your workforce avoiding helping you explore a current trend (valuable or not tbd sure), I can see rational arguments around removing them from the team.
      • mekael 7mo ago
        If, as a member of the c-suite, I find that a noticeable percentage of my company's workforce isn't "helping to explorer a current trend" then either they know something I don't or I haven't given them the time/methods by which to explore. The latter is actually the more pertinent item, as I've seen several times that an initiative get rolled out by leadership, some teams have free time to play around and use it, and other teams have so much on their plate that they're barely able to keep their heads above water, let alone take on another experiment. If someone is worried about getting a project knocked out by end of month/quarter/year in order to keep their job, they're not going to mess about. Now, that's a leadership failure, but it happens more often than not.
  • vips7L 7mo ago
    Does it matter how someone gets their work done as long as its done on time? Why does using a specific tool matter?
    • tombert 7mo ago
      To add to the speculation, it's possible that the people refusing to use it are working slower. Even if the code that they write is objectively better by any metric you'd like, humans can't really pump out code as fast as Claude or Codex can. If you can get something into "good enough" territory in 1/10th the time of someone who can get it into "great" territory, that is often worth it.
      • vips7L 7mo ago
        I genuinely don't believe the rate at which you produce code matters.
    • orangecoffee 7mo ago
      Dude, the time for work is going down drastically, about a third of before. Are you not facing it?
      • vips7L 7mo ago
        Dude, no I’m not. The bottle neck was never producing code.
      • ShinTakuya 7mo ago
        If you're experiencing this you're either a very junior dev or you're not as senior as your title might suggest...
        • vips7L 7mo ago
          They’re not facing this. They’re just lying.
• nemomarx 7mo ago
  If everyone else is downsizing and using AI as an excuse, it's both a pretty good cover for any firing you might have wanted to do for a while, and you can reasonably assume you can hire back in the future because everyone else is firing too. Maybe you can even depress their wages a little?
  • nikau 7mo ago
    Except you burn a tonne of cash on redundancy payouts
  • theappsecguy 7mo ago
    I think this is exactly what/how C-suite thinks. It's incredibly dumb because of how much hiring/firing costs in terms of ramp up/context/productivity etc, and inevitably, they will have fired people that are great and have kept people that suck but know how to play the game.
• siva7 7mo ago
  It's regular layoffs because of AI
• alexpotato 7mo ago
  > there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done I distinctly remember a discussion where someone says "Man, I wish JIRA would add this feature/fix this bug" Someone else pipes in: "I bet there is already a ticket on the JIRA bugtracker/feature board for this, it's not done and it's from 9 years ago" and lo and behold there was.
  • ryandrake 7mo ago
    Unfortunately, none of these companies are going to turn their AI loose on important, annoying, 9 year old bugs. They're just going to use it to cram more unwanted features into their software, just like they're doing today with human developers.
• bombcar 7mo ago
  It is just regular layoffs, and doing so admits they don't know what to do with the 1,600 people anyway, and probably didn't know what to do with them for years. AI isn't going to help, but it bandaids over the issue so the investors aren't spooked.
  • tombert 7mo ago
    That's kind of what I was getting at. Laying thousands of people off often implies you hired thousands of more people than you actually needed, which makes investors feel like you're wasting their money. If you say "no they're all being replaced for $200/month of Claude Code!" then it makes you look like there was actually strategy to this.
• Sol- 7mo ago
  > there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done I definitely buy this for the software sector or the economy as a whole, but for an individual company? Seems one would be bottlenecked by various factors quickly. Perhaps better to let people go so that they can be productive elsewhere?
  • tombert 7mo ago
    There's always bugs that can be fixed, there's always optimizations that can be done, there's always a feature that someone wants to build but hasn't had budget to do. There's always improvements that can be done for deployment. There's always ways of reducing memory. There's always ways of reducing ongoing expenses etc. I have worked for a bunch of companies, and even relatively new and young companies have all these things pile up pretty quickly.
    • jkubicek 7mo ago
      Jira takes a measurable amount of time to make bulk-changes to a single ticket, which is insane. If they’re going to fix anything, fix that.
  • Avicebron 7mo ago
    > Perhaps better to let people go so that they can be productive elsewhere? True. Joining thousands of other unemployed developers sending applications into a job posting for a nonexistent role online is very productive. Probably good for the economy too now that I think about it.
  • icedchai 7mo ago
    Have you tried looking for a job recently? The job market is cooked and it's not getting better any time soon. The supply of candidates is way up. Salaries are going down. Even mediocre jobs show 100+ applicants on LinkedIn.
• carefree-bob 7mo ago
  I think with fewer people working on it, the rate at which it gets worse will now decline!
• bartread 7mo ago
  > Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors. Alternative take: I can't speak for BitBucket because I've never used it, but I've had enough time with JIRA and Confluence to last a lifetime, and these products are so bad - so clunky, so slow, so much friction in the UI - that I can't really see what useful value adding work Atlassian's 16,000 employees have actually been delivering. From that perspective losing 1600 of them seems like it's not likely to make much difference since, from my perspective as a user, they didn't appear to be doing anything useful in the first place. I'm sorry if that comes across as a particularly savage take but Atlassian have wilfully been churning out absolute garbage for at least 15 years now (there was a time, in around 2006/7, when I thought JIRA was quite good - genuinely) and their products have made me miserable throughout a good chunk of my career, so my sympathy is pretty limited. If they can be bothered to make the products better, faster, more usable, and remove friction ruthlessly at every turn in their workflows, then I might well change my point of view.
  • tombert 7mo ago
    I haven't used BitBucket in awhile but I remember it being "not that bad". I agree with pretty much everything you said; I don't actually think that it's due to AI is my point. If their products are terrible and they're finally losing business over it, it makes enough sense to fire 10% of the workforce. I just don't think AI has much to do with it.
    • jonathrg 7mo ago
      Bitbucket is okay to use, the main problem like with every Atlassian product is that it is dog slow.
  • nunez 7mo ago
    I last used Bitbucket in 2021-ish. It was fine for what it was, especially on-premise, but it's a very hard sell in a world where GitLab and webhooks exist and even harder now that Gitea is finally picking up steam.
• quicklime 7mo ago
  It’s not that their employees are no longer needed, it’s that their product (jira) is no longer needed. When you’ve got AI agents taking bigger and bigger steps, you don’t need to micromanage people through jira as much anymore. Companies will likely switch to something lighter. Jira regularly makes it to the top of lists of the most hated enterprise software, there’s definitely appetite in the market for a replacement. Their stock has been taking a huge hit over the last few months because of this: https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/ai-is-eating-software-and-it-s-cost-atlassian-duo-34-6-billion-20260205-p5nzs3.html https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/ai-is-eating-softw...
  • mvdtnz 7mo ago
    This is developer wishcasting, to be frank. AI has not obviated the need for Jira and the idea that companies are moving to "something lighter" (what are they moving to?) has no basis in reality.
    • quicklime 7mo ago
      Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re not. But if you’re right i think it’s more “investor wishcasting” than developers. It really doesn’t matter what us devs think. Investors and industry leaders have decided that AI development is the way forward and we’re going to be managing teams of agents from now on. So we’re not going back to fine-grained task management in jira - what used to live in jira will now live markdown files, and largely be written and read by agents. Higher level tasks might go into something like Linear, who knows. If the investors are wrong, and this is all fantasy, then maybe people will go back to Jira, and Atlassian stocks will recover.
      • toraway 7mo ago
        If I was controlling a swarm of 1000 agents who do all the dev work on my extremely complex enterprise SaaS product with tightly defined business logic I feel like I’d definitely want something like Jira to manage what they’re working on. They could also pivot to developing something for that exact use case if it’s a bad fit and if there’s such clear demand. But truly they’re just cost cutting here and AI is really neither here nor there.
• stego-tech 7mo ago
  The comments hit at some, but not all, of the underlying drivers. I'll add a more comprehensive view and let you draw your own conclusions: * Their balance sheet paints a messy picture. Their gross profit per quarter doubled from 23Q1 ($668mn) to 26Q2 ($1.35bn), but their net income has been a consistent loss - from -$13mn in 23Q1, to -$42.6mn in 26Q2. The company has generally failed to turn a meaningful profit after considering operating expenses, reflecting misaligned priorities of leadership. * Their headcount similarly whipsaws of late. In 2021, it was 8.8k; by 2025, it was 13.8k; in the middle of COVID, it was as low as 6.4k. Even after these job cuts, their headcount remains roughly flat from 2025. * Cutting jobs to invest in AI when you're already slowly bleeding cash isn't exactly a winning strategy. Atlassian's products have the benefit of organizational "stickiness", and their push to a cloud-only SaaS model hasn't gone all that well if you read the IT rags (lots of uniquely complicated migrations that don't transition well 1:1 to SaaS). * That said, pointing to AI while cutting jobs isn't a bad play when you're courting investors, many of whom doubt the long-term viability of the XaaS model when AI can slop up boilerplate and internal-only solutions on the fly. If they're doing it to genuinely cut costs and try and right the ship, fingering AI isn't a bad cover. * Except the reality is most of Atlassian's leadership gets their comp in equity, which has taken a serious hit of late on the markets just as vesting schedules wind down and leadership is changing over. I'd be on the lookout for SEC Form 4's from insiders in the coming weeks to confirm whether or not this was the case. The reality is that the "AI layoffs" ploy is almost exclusively a cover story for corporations reasserting dominance and power over workers after a few (comparatively) good years (WFH, higher pay increases, wage gains, flex-time, etc). Every single one of these entities obviously has more work than people to do it, but if they can squeeze 90% of the workforce for 110% of the hours, that's a net gain for the corporation and a net loss for workers. Efficiency, over-hiring, right-sizing, AI; it's all bullshit smokescreens for greed, plain and simple. Don't be fooled by narratives to the contrary.
• jemmyw 7mo ago
  I don't think it can get worse. In fact, it'd probably be better if Atlassian just stopped touching it.
• d4v3 7mo ago
  I mean, if they are using more AI and less of the devs who made it what it is... it might be better? A little tongue-in-cheek, but I find jira and confluence much less annoying now that I just made a claude skill for each of them and now I don't have to interact with their UI very often anymore
• thewhitetulip 7mo ago
  This is a tacit acceptance that AI maybe isn't as great as they make it out to be. And since the fact that claude code is an electron app and not AI generated optimized binary per platform, it's abundantly clear that perhaps AI is not all they hype it up to be.