Atlassian defends firing engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'

bediger4000

Does Atlassian's CEO realize that we all now know that he really is a rich jerk?

_doctor_love

https://archive.is/nWTrk

danny_codes

I’ve noticed rich people seem to have the absolute thinnest skin. Maybe not enough bullying? Or too much? Unclear

briga

Regardless 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.

pmdulaney

I do think a sincere apology and a promise to behave himself or herself in the future should be acceptable.

jjcm

Since 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.

ChrisArchitect

March 16 story OP; Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47478579

therobots927

Well, is he a rich jerk?

pm90

Has 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.

grebc

I’m surprised he’s not busier shutting down coal or gas plants in Australia.

tqi

This 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.