It’s not because of their garbage AI. It’s because their garbage AI is leading to people dropping them like a bad habit for open source and fucking Microsoft alternatives, so they need to reduce operating costs and CAPEX to demonstrate profit growth
TBH Atlassian was already such terrible slop, unsupervised AI might even make it better
We have https://codeberg.org/ as an alternative to Bitbucket, and you can have free public static pages like Netlify or Github pages.
Codeberg also offers private repos.
I’m amazed they had 1600 employees to begin with. I guess it takes a lot of resources to make something suck as hard as JIRA
Who else is going to put the sidebar as top bar, and then switch them back a couple years later?
They will rehire for less. The AI hype is just a wage suppression scheme.
My employer has been axing so many high level engineers it’s not even funny. I think that’s terrible for engineer morale. Why would you want to strive to improve and get promoted if it just makes you “too expensive to keep on payroll”?
We need more tech unions and tech coops.
Guillotines we need more guillotines
Add this on top of federal layoffs, inflation, tariffs, higher interest rates (I know they’re necessary sometimes), etc. The average American is getting screwed right now.
There is a Jira ticket (ID-240) for Atlassian requesting the ability to merge Atlassian accounts that is over 10 years old. I’m one of the 1,450 watchers. This news does not bode well for this ticket ever getting implemented.
well the good part is you don’t need to merge those accounts anymore
So you telling me Jira and all its related bullshit will get even worse? I hadn’t thought it possible.
There’s a chance that leaning out the team makes things better. Bloat kills dev teams.
But… ticketing systems are a bit like fashion. We could see some new shiny system come around that does more or less the same thing, but becomes fashionable for one reason or another and eats Atlassian’s lunch.
That’s just a failure of learning and imagination.
I’m just being facetious, I of course know there is no bottom to how shitty things can be.
You’re absolutely right!
Would you like me to yassify this ticket for you?
Put some emojis in my SQL, fam
Feel like that’s on you, unless you were born yesterday.
About 6 months ago they spent more than half a billion acquiring The Browser Company whose only currently-being-developed product is a pretty wrapper for ChatGPT
That explains the explosion of unwanted AI features in Jira these days. No, I don’t need you to re-write my fucking ticket comment!
AI-washing layoffs. They will replace jack shit with AI but that’s a better story than “we have to reduce costs because we don’t have cheap ways to refinance our $1B debt”.
Credit isn’t cheap and Iran is not going to make it cheaper, investments in software have tanked, so the only story that can still be told with an almost straight face is that they still have big growth opportunities thanks to the magic of AI.
I FUCKING hate jira with a passion. I swear to god that dumbfuck software is nothing but a miserable time sink.
I am sorry for the people who got laid off. Also there is no way AI is replacing the CTO….
I’ve had to use it in various forms for so long now and I can’t believe how unintuitive it is to use. Nothing outside of adding comments is obvious. I dared to try to see what was in a previous sprint and it basically requires a custom report. Why isn’t there just a view sprint dropdown or something? I did a quick search to see if it was just me which lead to the Jira subreddit (why is that a thing?) and felt like I was getting gaslit by all the jira ‘professionals’ calling it a skill issue
Calling it Unintuitive is being generous too!
Them and Salesforce can both be Thanos’d out of existence, pretty please
I use Jira at work and I still have no idea what the fuck it is, what it’s for, or why it’s so needlessly complicated. It’s a list of text with some dates and names. Why is that worth shit?
Omg yes… the legends and epics… its just shit
It creates pretty productivity related graphs your manager/PM loves, that’s the real usage.
Companies wanna feel special and have different workflows around tickets. Making customizable workflows that connect with a ton of different systems easily is a shockingly hard problem.
I feel like there’s a business opportunity to take 50% of Atlassians value and spin it up into something simple but getting the good 50% down is kinda hard as someone is going to miss one stupid feature that runs 40% of their workflows.
The biggest surprise in the article is that Atlassian is not profitable. How? They pretty much have a monopoly in the Jira-like space (look , I can’t even think of a generic name) and they charge a hefty sum for their products. How tf do they lose money?
The article lists an insane revenue of $1.6B, yet the losses are only on the order of $42M in the last 3 months. Against that much revenue, it looks to me like they are managing the company at a slight loss on purpose. They probably could close that gap if they wanted to, but have some favorable tax implications or something by running that “slight” loss.
(And who knows, maybe this is part of the attempt to close that gap and show a profit before the founders cash out and it all gets sold to a Shittier company)
Agile project management. And ticketing. And document management.
There are others. We are working on moving to Asana and other products.
Redmine. Open source and free.
I greatly preferred Redmine back in the day. It was easy to extend it yourself too despite my dislike of Ruby.
Used Target Process as my last place. Way nicer than Jira IMO
Asana is… not a whole lot better.
Agreed.
Of all the shitty AI products flooding the market right now, Atlassian’s Rovo has got to be the most useless I’ve had the misfortune of using.
They should be hiring more workers to fix their AI slop, not replacing them with even more of it.
Rovo made it easier for me to find things that search was quite useless at finding. I found no other benefits to Rovo.
Trying to get Rovo to do things in JIRA is like trying to train a chimp to cram shit back into an elephant’s ass.
Made me chuckle)
Atlassian now circling the drain.
I hope they will go down the drain. No more Jira! 🙏
What would you use instead?
Nothing. I really hate the agile thing anyway.
We can only hope so.
I’ve suggested to my team a few times that we should start a new business developing “Atlassian, but good”. They’re up for it. So many of our wider business have never used “anything but Jira”, and they can’t see it for the steaming pile of shite that it is. Not just that it’s a bad tool for developers, QE, project management or customer support, but they couldn’t imagine anything that’s better in any way, or how it would look if it didn’t have so many issues.
Hi mate, fingers crossed for you and your teams.
Maybe start with Trac if it’s still available. Freeware.
Hm. Bear with me. I’ve used jira on prem for a very long time and have used a multitude of other products.
Jira was quite good in comparison.
What am I missing?
(aside from the whole cloud requirement and atlassian behaving AI-shitty)
As a future customer, please include high quality connectors to import legacy data from Jira and Confluence. We’re going to need them. Thank you in advance.
If you were starting a new company what would you use instead of Jira?
Nothing, personally. Jira at our place only serves the bean counters in the programme management department. The data is a mess anyway, it just gives them the illusion of control.
I work in a large enterprise and most of our work is just stupid red tape satisfying processes and other teams’ rules, many of which just exist to keep those teams employed. There’s so much unnecessary work and BS going on.
So then how would you document changes, work, etc. as is required by SOC2, PCI, SARBOX and other auditing frameworks that businesses require?
We don’t do any of those things. We’re not even developers. We just use Jira to log hours (which is basically one big fantasy obviously)
That’s definitely not a problem of Jira. You’re hating the product, when most likely your ire would be drawn to any application you were using for such a fucked up process.
Probably but Jira makes it so hard.
For example if I type 1h 33m it’s ok but 1h33m is not. It’s just a really awkward UI.
Considering they are talking about making a replacement service, probably just GitHub/codeberg/etc and collab edit docs and discussions at the start, and then eat your own dogfood.
Check out what microslop is doing to github. Codeberg though, that’s an option!
I’d want better tickets for dev and bugs than github has, not sure the codeberg offering there if any
Rovo AI sucks and they keep adding crap AI feature after crap feature. How about less AI?
Edit/note: I probably didn’t make my comment very clear. I’m aware it’s 1600 being laid off. More that I didn’t realise that Atlassian had 16k people in total. 16,000 people making their products progressively worse.
Even if their company only had 1600 ppl, I’d still say they were wasteful.
About 16k workers? How!?
What a waste of human effort, time and resources. All to make a few bad products, worse.
I’m not surprised. Jira is a monster.
As with any software, look how complex it is as a user, the hidden part is 10x worse.It’s possible to have complex, poorly-architected stuff going on behind the curtains, even if the UI is simple. And vice-versa. And even worse, like JIRA, both can be a dog’s breakfast.
1600
16k total headcount. Well, not that much longer
It’s not 16k, it’s 800×2
