Link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/12/atlassian-layoffs-software-technology-ai-push-mike-cannon-brookes-asx

Software giant Atlassian has announced it is laying off about 10% of its workforce, or roughly 1,600 positions, and replacing its chief technology officer as it restructures to invest further in artificial intelligence.

Shares of the company rose more than 4% in extended trading on the Nasdaq.

The company’s co-founder, Mike Cannon-Brookes, told employees the move was “the right decision for Atlassian” in a note circulated late Wednesday, US time.

“But that doesn’t mean it’s easy,” he said. “Far from it. I know this has a huge impact on each of you, and it weighs heavily on me and Atlassian today.”

About 640 affected employees are in North America, 480 in Australia and 250 in India, with the remainder spread across Japan, the Philippines, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, a spokesperson said.

Sinking profit - > cut operations costs -> sell it to investors as investments in ai / or increasing productivity with ai or bla bla ai.
So company is sinking , but stock price is up… placebo economics

I hate the AI thing in confluence. Stop asking me to improve writing or summarize. I know how to read and write.

Is it really because of the AI or because we’re going into a quiet recession?

Both, honestly. It's also because people are realizing that they hate Jira.

You can turn that off.

If they’re going all in AI then they’re gonna have to do better that their barely adequate Rovo chat feature.

Maybe if they spent more time fixing 12 year old data corruption bugs instead of chasing AI slop…

Most notable part for me in the article was not the AI stuff … but that Atlassian has never been profitable.

Not surprising for a tech company. But for one as big and kinda foundational in the service it provides … I found it surprising. Imagine if MS or Apple or Google were never profitable and companies were just entirely reliant on their services!

Couple that with how little love anyone has for Jira/confluence … and yea … good luck with that Atlassian.

No, I like to know how to read and write.

Hello, I just wanted to say that I hate Jira.

It's Atlassian, which we call Half-Assed-ian. They make Flatulence and Jeer-a.

Jira sucks so much

I spent weeks moving a company’s decades-long history from on-prem to their cloud after they EOL’d their self hosted products. What a letdown. Somehow a multibillion dollar company can’t compete with an ancient quad core server shoved in a coat closet when it comes to page load times.

The constant upselling for their shite AI products drives me crazy. And the worst part is the elements are dynamic and uBlock can’t consistently kill it. Ugh.

Somehow a multibillion dollar company can’t compete with an ancient quad core server shoved in a coat closet when it comes to page load times.

To be fair, it's nearly impossible for remote sites to beat on-prem page load times, given the added per-component transit times over the internet.

TBF have no idea how that many devs can make such poor products - Design by committee I guess. Having attempted their hiring process, why can’t the devs just use their incredible b-tree implementing skills to make Jira not shit?

*laughing as Atlassian dies*

“I guess I was the…”

*puts on sunglasses*

“jeer-a all along.”

Oh hey, it’s vibe reporting again.

Notice how it’s not “fired because of AI”, but “fired amid AI push”. They really wanna sell readers a particular story, but they know there’s a journalistic line they can’t cross (yet), so they put two pieces of information next to each other and encourage you to fill in the gaps.

This technique is everywhere.

Totally true, but I’m talking an order of magnitude or two difference…

A query returning ~100 jira tickets would take about 250-300ms on our old beater running Postgres on busted old SAS drives shared with a bunch of other crap. Seek times were atrocious but not catastrophic. It usually didn’t timeout, and only crashed once in a while.

Sunning the same search on jira cloud now takes 2-3 seconds, often even more because the page first has to load 20 MB of JavaScript bullshit. Time from clicking a link to seeing information is so long you’ve got enough time to take a sip and put the coffee down.

Like I get it, distributed systems are hard. And having a multi tenant system as big as they run is probably crazy complicated. But come on, there’s no excuse for that level of consistently bad performance!!

Shhh ... the cloud is the only way forward. Heresy!

Or providing a way to backup their cloud instances instead of deprecating the only way to do it. (They have a solution but it's just for the enterprise customers.)

The company’s co-founder, Mike Cannon-Brookes [worth $7.2 billion], told employees the move was “the right decision for Atlassian” in a note circulated late Wednesday, US time.

“But that doesn’t mean it’s easy,” he said. “Far from it. I know this has a huge impact on each of you, and it weighs heavily on me and Atlassian today.” Cannon-Brookes used some wads of cash to dry his crocodile tears. "This is why I have to sleep on a big bed full of money tonight."

Not me.

(I've known that all along, since I first laid eyes upon it and it refused to sort by "date".)

Lol, firing the CTO during a "technology push" means he warned them they were being morons about to ruin the company.

It's all fucking deck chairs at this point.

wraaaaaaawwwww electric guitar music

Losing the CTO is not a huge loss, tbh.

I used to work there. As a dev you're very limited on what you can change. Anything that was ever supported (even undocumented features or bugs) are heavily relied on by some customers.

Not profitable by design. No profit means no tax to pay.

Oh, I hope this kills them. I'm desperate to never use Confluence or Jira ever again.

Sure, but don't worry, the huge losses are coming

I've not had a cto worth a shit ever. They sit around playing with new tech or demanding status reports but never seen one actually be helpful

That's not OP's point. The point is they are clearly getting rid of the guy for telling them their AI plans are dumb. I've seen it before. If you see a leader get dismissed or resign right as there is a big policy shift that's what's going on internally.

Do you mean in this specific instance or in general? Cuz my CTO left and we had to directly report to the COO who had 0 understanding of whatever development issues we encountered. It was a huge pain

https://xkcd.com/1172/

I meant Rajeev specifically. Not sure if you've worked with him or not.

Oh right mb, I thought this was more of a general statement haha