AI should not replace people at Atlassian, says CEO

neogodless

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343156 Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI (reuters.com) ~yesterday, 273+ comments

bloppe

I'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

ludicrousdispla

steering wheel manufacturer lays off thousands in anticipation of self-driving cars

ilaksh

> 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.”

Ekaros

When 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...

autoexec

> “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.

ChrisArchitect

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47343156

ddtaylor

Literally couldn't figure out the anti-pattern for rejecting all of the cookies so I moved on.

dormento

0) 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

What 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

I think it is a matter of a year or two where companies will be able to vibe-clone services like Atlassian provides easily.