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AI should not replace people at Atlassian, says CEO
- neogodless 8mo agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343156 Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI (reuters.com) ~yesterday, 273+ comments
- bigwheels 8mo agoAlso: An important update on our team https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342835 - Yesterday, 18 comments
- bloppe 8mo agoI've become convinced that "investing in AI" is just the magic incantation CEOs are using to spin layoffs as a positive rather than a negative for the company's reputation among investors
- apercu 8mo agoIt's PR to cover management failure due to "me too", which reached ridiculous levels in the last 5 years.
- lokar 8mo agoI don't see what it has to do with "me too" Take block: AFAICT, it was just really badly managed. A long time ago it got about as much share of its main market as it was going to get. They took the cash flow from that and hired a bunch more engineers to try to break into adjacent markets, and failed, and failed and failed. Now they are just retreating to the steady income from their core business
- entropicdrifter 8mo agoPretty sure by putting "me too" in quotes and not saying #MeToo, what they're talking about is really FOMO. The companies are performing layoffs because of the trend
- lokar 8mo agoOh, probably
- apercu 8mo agoAs previous commenter said “me too” in the (lack of) leadership vein, not the sexual harassment tag.
- afavour 8mo agoI don't really see any relevance to "me too". Far more likely it's to cover from insane overhearing in the pandemic era, and no one wants to admit they overdid it.
- dv_dt 8mo agoI would guess the opposite, that anti-woke statements from management is a big red flag correlating with poor company performance
- Bluescreenbuddy 8mo agoHow is this in any way related to me too? How is that what to took from this? I implore you to think critically.
- odshoifsdhfs 8mo agoYou are being downvoted because of the 'me too', but think you are refering to companies copying other companies (Amazon hires 10k? We hire 10k! Google fires 5k? we fire 5k) and not the 'me too' movement about sexual assault/harrassement.
- dormento 8mo agoPeople are downvoting because they think is "that" me too. What op meant is all the copycat management. "They use roflcopter.js? Then we must. They use AI? Then we must. They hire/fire 9070 people? Then we must."
- afavour 8mo agoYup. I thought this was an interesting take on the Block layoffs, from a former employee: "I Worked for Block. Its A.I. Job Cuts Aren’t What They Seem." https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/opinion/block-jack-dorsey-layoffs-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/opinion/block-jack-dorsey...
- mandeepj 8mo agoalso - "Salesforce CEO says Block's cuts shouldn't fuel worries of mass layoffs: 'That company has its own unique issues'" https://www.aol.com/articles/salesforce-ceo-says-blocks-cuts-183522292.html https://www.aol.com/articles/salesforce-ceo-says-blocks-cuts... one more :-) - https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-companies-are-ai-washing-layoffs-2000724759 https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-companies-are-ai-washing...
- toomuchtodo 8mo agoJack Dorsey’s 4,000 Job Cuts at Block Arouse Suspicions of AI-Washing - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-01/jack-dorsey-s-4-000-job-cuts-at-block-arouse-suspicions-of-ai-washing https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-01/jack-dors... | https://archive.today/QhUJT https://archive.today/QhUJT - March 1st, 2026 Sam Altman Says Companies Are ‘AI Washing’ Layoffs - https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-companies-are-ai-washing-layoffs-2000724759 https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-companies-are-ai-washing... - February 21st, 2026 HN Search: AI Washing - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=AI%20washing&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- lofaszvanitt 8mo agoThey shove off people forced on them so they could grow faster, but the problem is, they don't have the ideas....
- bigfatkitten 8mo agoAI isn’t replacing anyone, rather the money previously used to pay those people’s salaries etc is now being spent on AI.
- ptak_dev 8mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ludicrousdispla 8mo agosteering wheel manufacturer lays off thousands in anticipation of self-driving cars
- rootusrootus 8mo agoI really like this analogy, and I tend to think most analogies are contrived. This is spot on.
- cheema33 8mo agoIn this case, it is a little more than anticipation. Software dev job losses have already happened and continue to happen.
- rootusrootus 8mo agoBut have we seen any that are plausibly caused by AI, rather than just using AI as a cover for more boring, typical business reasons?
- cheema33 8mo ago> But have we seen any that are plausibly caused by AI.. Does it matter if Atlassian is losing seat licenses because devs are being let go?
- rootusrootus 8mo agoIf that could be proven, then it would be a plausible cause. But without that detail, this is circular reasoning. Those people were let go for the same reason Atlassian let people go -- not AI, just a cover for more mundane business reasons.
- ilaksh 8mo ago> Cannon-Brookes emphasized in his blog post that Atlassian does not follow the philosophy of replacing people with AI. At the same time, he also stated, “It would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.”
- salawat 8mo agoPassive voice. It's not the situation, it's the executive's charted course of action in response to it. They are trying so hard to avoid any hint of culpability for the decision they are making. Laughable.
- Ekaros 8mo agoWhen your customers have less developers you need yourself less developers. And if they are paying by the seat... Your income is directly affected by layoffs... So reduction does make sense. And as they say any new companies can replace the Atlassian products by bespoke vibe coded alternatives in a few days...
- NwtnsMthd 8mo agoThat last sentence holds a lot of truth. Our company has drastically downsized its dependence on Atlassian in the past month, we will be completely free in a few more. With the help of modern AI tools we've been able to replace their products with internal tools that are better tailored to our needs.
- fred_is_fred 8mo agoI think any company with some motivated developers and a budget for h/w or cloud could rebuild a good enough JIRA in a month. I don't see how Atlassian survives long term
- bombcar 8mo agoJira isn't the product, it's the development platform that builds the product (which is a codified version of all the bad business decisions your company has ever made).
- ebiester 8mo agoBecause you see the IC side of the Atlassian toolkit. The management side is much more expansive and this starts mattering when you are coordinating larger projects. That said, if you are a smaller company, you absolutely could kill Jira pretty quick.
- habinero 8mo agoI hate Jira just as much the next engineer, but this is not at all accurate lol. The reason all ticketing systems are kind of terrible is they have to deal with a lot of complexity. Jira has waaayyyyy more features than you think it does. Ticketing systems are not dumb CRUD apps, they're systems that build workflow engines. If you've never built a workflow engine, they're annoying but fine. Building an engine that can implement any special snowflake flavor of business workflow in a way that's reasonable with a reasonable UI is difficult. And yes, you could write it for your special use case, but use cases change a lot and different groups need different use cases and the time you spend dicking around on building ticketing software that already exists is time you're not spending on shipping, and at the end of the day Jira is like $15/seat at sticker price, why are you bothering? And that's why Jira is both terrible and still popular.
- autoexec 8mo ago> “We are doing this to self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales while strengthening our financial profile,” They take in billions every year but still come away with millions in negative income. I have no idea what their problem is but I'm pretty sure the 1,600 people they just fired weren't it. Throwing away people in yet another round of layoffs to further invest in AI is not a good sign.
- toomuchtodo 8mo agoIn my opinion, it is similar to Parkinson's Law [1] about work filling into the time given to it, but replace work with bureaucracy filling the aggregate enterprise revenue on offer. Atlassian's work, one might argue, is "done" but has such cashflow from business customers that they can continue to spend above and beyond what is needed to maintain what has been built to service their customer base. They could be 37signals/Basecamp, but they are enabled beyond that (from the business customer cashflows mentioned), and so these actions occur until an innovator comes along to replace them (and potentially, the cycle repeats due to enterprise sales cycle durations, inertia, etc). You see this with all manner of large enterprise in my experience, where what they continue to do is "good enough" to allow for these inefficiencies and actions because they are, on some spectrum, "money printers" due to their moat and inertia. Creative destruction is not a forgone conclusion, nor fast. Is the incumbent exploring the problem spaces adjacent to their core business(es) to increase their TAM to increase shareholder value? Are they innovating? Or are they just churning and burning up revenue on meaningless work? All of these companies doing layoffs to invest in AI is not about AI specifically, it is about reaching for profits and yield in a challenging business landscape and macro post zero interest rate policy ("ZIRP") imho. They are desperate for productivity growth, whether that is doing more with less people, AI, offshoring, whatever because money now has a cost. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
- dasil003 8mo agoThis is spot on. I'm always amused when people talk about how much staffing a given product "needs". That's not how headcount works or even system design works. What actually happens is that company headcount grows based on how much money they make (or how much they raise), this justifies hiring more people. Then, structure is added, both to systems (eg. microservices), and to operations (eg. jira, workday, salesforce, etc) so that communication overhead doesn't grind everything to a halt. Then, once the business stops growing, headcount must shrink. This may take a long time, and it will be couched in all kinds of corporate bullshit to try to preserve morale and investor sentiment, but that is all window-dressing.
- ChrisArchitect 8mo ago[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343156
- ddtaylor 8mo agoLiterally couldn't figure out the anti-pattern for rejecting all of the cookies so I moved on.
- BlackFly 8mo agoFirefox reader mode worked for me, but I agree it was terrible.
- ddtaylor 8mo agoMy plan with anti-patterns is to just turn away and move on to something else. People need to vote with their attention. If the content and information is important it will make its way to me eventually through a better channel. Yeah, it's selfish, but it's the only way I have to fight enshittification of the web.
- pabs3 8mo agoBrowsers can often delete/reject cookies, might be a better option than relying on websites to be ethical.
- ddtaylor 8mo agoMy only goal was to read the content that was linked and they put up a large full screen block.
- dormento 8mo ago0) Adopt AI; 1) Fire people; 2) People got no money; 3) People won't buy things, signup for services; 4) Enterprises feel pressure to optimize expenditure even more; 5) Enterprises invest into more AI; 6) Fire more people; 7) GOTO 0;
- cheema33 8mo agoWhat do people use Atlassian for these days? Back in the day we used Jira a lot. But we also had GitHub accounts. The integration of the two wasn't great so we switched to GitHub issues and kicked Jira to the curb. This saved money and also a lot of hassle in trying to keep the two in sync. I am wondering if many others went a similar route. We did use Confluence and I do miss it. I would love to find an opensource replacement for it that stores files in markdown format. Like Obsidian, but for teams.
- varispeed 8mo agoI think it is a matter of a year or two where companies will be able to vibe-clone services like Atlassian provides easily.
- raiph_ai 8mo agoI feel bad for all the employees that were affected. Atlassian years ago started as an innovative company, look at their original mission statement. "Open company, no bullshit" and Don't F&%# the customer. They truly had great products that complemented each other. The problem now, is alot of the tools are not need, or can be made with some vibe coding.