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Atlassian defends firing engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- bediger4000 6mo agoDoes Atlassian's CEO realize that we all now know that he really is a rich jerk?
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- razingeden 6mo agoI had no idea who he even was, but as a former user of several Atlassian products , pass me a pitchfork.
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- _doctor_love 6mo agohttps://archive.is/nWTrk https://archive.is/nWTrk
- danny_codes 6mo agoI’ve noticed rich people seem to have the absolute thinnest skin. Maybe not enough bullying? Or too much? Unclear
- therobots927 6mo agoThey’re downvoting you, and proving your point in doing so.
- pm90 6mo agoGenerally people in power will surround themselves with yes-men. It takes a good amount of humility and sincerity to look beyond this and deliberately choose people with a spine to listen to. The most charitable interpretation is that most rich/powerful people are just as flawed as everyone else. Obviously, their power/wealth makes them less deserving of that charity ultimately.
- jamesfinlayson 6mo ago> Generally people in power will surround themselves with yes-men. It's probably a CEO thing too - you have some vision for the company so you're going to hire people that enable that vision, not people that will question your every move.
- vladmk 6mo agoIt’s not a CEO thing - just like Jerk employees exist, jerk CEOs exist too
- giantrobot 6mo ago> The most charitable interpretation is that most rich/powerful people are just as flawed as everyone else. I can't believe that. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps at their private schools and then had to claw and fight as a legacy admission to the school their parents attended. From there they lived hand to mouth destitute with barely a million dollar loan from their parents! Then there was the existential crisis of meeting with their college roommates' parents and their own parents' bridge buddies to secure millions in loans. It was their flawless vision and skill that let them be at the right place and the right time. If they wouldn't have had the foresight to fall out of a lucky vagina we would all be worse off. You see they're scrappy go getters that started from the absolute bottom. They're infallible supermen whose greatest assets are their humility and unerring genius.
- colechristensen 6mo agoEh, you don't hear about the ones who are well adjusted. Usually nobody cares if you're a poor jerk. At least unless you do something phenomenal you don't get wide attention. "New" rich people, especially those with power over other people, can develop plenty of complexes and insecurities that come out as weakness... like firing somebody for mocking them. "Old" rich, generational wealth tend to develop a set of manners and habits where they don't get noticed or embarrass themselves quite so much by displaying such weakness. You don't stay rich for a long time if you act like a fool.
- Barrin92 6mo agoI've been in positions to hire/fire before and never, ever would I fire someone over a kindergarten insult. How pathetic do you have to be to pull rank over "you rich jerk" excellent case btw why you should never let these tech bros have power over your life, they're super charged angry little school boys with worse fantasies than a Soviet commissar
- cedws 6mo agoCEO is one of the least meritocratic jobs ever. It’s all just vibes, and the vibes are based off of what school you went to, who your parents know, where you grew up. Deep down they probably know this hence the insecurity. If it were a meritocracy they’d be toppled fast.
- jona-f 6mo agoCan we agree that you are exaggerating? Not that you are totally wrong, but the flip side is, that ceos do need a different skillset. Workers who excel at the bureaucratic grind might not make the best leaders for lack of vision and empathy. Then again the concept of an empathic leader also seems to be foreign to many. It's hard to see anything with all the bullshit covering everything.
- briga 6mo agoRegardless of the fact that he probably is a jerk, it doesn't seem like appropriate workplace behavior to be calling anyone a jerk. Just because you have free speech doesn't mean that your speech should have no consequences. Maybe it's unfair and a double standard, but to me it seems like a no-brainer that you shouldn't be calling people names in your workplace.
- desecratedbody 6mo agoI was going to write a similar comment, but it turns out that isn’t what she said but rather what Atlassian has said she suggested he is. https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2026/ex-atlassian-engineer-fights-dismissal-after-criticising-ceo.html https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2026/ex-atlassian-engineer-fig... > … It was an irrelevant personal attack and insult directed at a colleague, essentially calling him a ‘rich jerk’. > Unterwurzacher reportedly parodied the CEO on Slack, writing, “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
- pm90 6mo agoWow. I mean, come on, thats like the least offensive thing ever. At the most, maybe tell the manager to tell them thats not the “spirit” of the workplace, but firing for this is a step too far. If the CEO wasn’t a jerk before he certainly is now.
- jamesfinlayson 6mo agoYeah this should have been a quiet word from HR to not say stuff like that.
- hackable_sand 6mo agoStill too far
- 9x39 6mo agoMaking powerful people feel bad usually gets a negative response from them. Even just generally, if you make someone lose face publicly, they're prone to lash out at you since they often feel they can't back down.
- pmdulaney 6mo agoI do think a sincere apology and a promise to behave himself or herself in the future should be acceptable.
- jjcm 6mo agoSince there’s a lot of assumptions on personality here, I’ll toss my perspective here. Worked at Atlassian for 5 years, had plenty of interactions with Mike. I wouldn’t categorize him as a jerk. I have plenty of disagreements about decisions he’s made, and I think he heavily over-hired (and is paying for it now), but a jerk he is not. The reality is Atlassian has mechanisms, for better or for worse, that reward social discontent - Hello (their internal Confluence instance which has Reddit-like upvoting on blogs) and their karma bot on slack. Both of which tend to result in people gamifying these to boost their social status, which as you’ve seen with Reddit, often results in a subset of people realizing negative comments get more attention than positive ones. This got out of hand and they’ve been trying to dial it back, leading to cuts like these. It’s been a problem at Atlassian for a while.
- nerdsniper 6mo agoThe employee didn't call him a jerk. That was a straw-man from Atlassian. Now we're arguing over whether he's a jerk or not. A opposed to what actually happened: Mike (CEO) fired 19,000 people. Then Mike held a video AMA regarding the firings. Mike took the meeting from the headquarters of the NBA team he owns. The employee, Unterwurzacher, parodied the CEO on Slack, writing, “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.” Then that employee was fired.
- jjcm 6mo agoCorrect, but as of writing this the two top comments were: > Regardless of the fact that he probably is a jerk and > Does Atlassian's CEO realize that we all now know that he really is a rich jerk? My comment was just meant to provide an insider perspective as a foil to those who had given theirs.
- rambojohnson 6mo ago[dead]
- 8note 6mo ago
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agoMarch 16 story OP; Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47478579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47478579
- therobots927 6mo agoWell, is he a rich jerk?
- pm90 6mo agoHas there ever been a positive story or product out of this wretched company; which has possibly destroyed billions in value across the US software sector by forcing everyone to use their disgustingly bad project management tool? When I interviewed there (and anecdotally from the people I know that worked there), at least they seemed like a nice place to work at. But alas even that had to be destroyed.
- Avicebron 6mo agolol the only atlassian engineer I knew spent 3 months 4 times a year "working remotely" from various resorts across Europe, I'm sure the 4-hour review of javascript she did per month was really worth that plus the apartment in brooklyn.. absolutely insane
- denkmoon 6mo agoNobody is forced to use it, they use it because it aligns with managers' incentives. Which are not related to ensuring technical work is completed effectively. Or having good visibility. Everything being obscure and hard to use allows you to paint the picture with your own words rather than the picture being painted right there on the computer screen plain as day.
- DerArzt 6mo ago> Nobody is forced to use it If you consider choosing to leave a job of a tool a choice that people can easily make, then sure. Otherwise, yeah a good portion of employees don't have any say in the software their managers choose, and either use it or get let go
- denkmoon 6mo agoSorry, no _business_ is forced to use it. Of course employees have to use the tools their workplace selects...
- grebc 6mo agoI’m surprised he’s not busier shutting down coal or gas plants in Australia.
- tqi 6mo agoThis is maybe beside the point but it annoys me how many CEOs wax poetic about "locking in" and "grindset" but then seem to have infinite time for bullshit side projects like owning an NBA team.
- ryandvm 6mo agoIndeed. So much so that the richest CEO of all is spread across so many companies that there's no way he's actually doing any real "work".
- amelie0 6mo ago[flagged]