Atlassian Reviews

Pros

Engineering talent is great, I'm always learning from others and have the opportunity to teach others. Culture is fantastic. Low stress, toxic-free culture (haven't met any coworkers I dislike - worst at most is neutral and even that's rare)

Cons

Getting slightly more corporate given the company growth. Compensation is competitive, but can still improve.

Pros

- Undoubtedly the best thing that you will get from working at Atlassian is excellent brand recognition from across Tech and also domestically within Australia. When you leave this will put you in a good position to negotiate with a new employer. The Atlassian PR is second to none, I cannot express enough how well this will work in your favour for your career. - If you want to focus and prioritise other things in life and not work too hard - Atlassian has "great" work life balance (great if you are lazy) and things are super flexible. - If you want endless beer, chips, magnums and other junk food and drink, you will love this place - but now that it's COVID, that has ended. - The founders seem like a decent bunch of guys. They are prob my favourite thing about Atlassian.

Cons

- Firstly if it is so great, why are so many people constantly leaving? The Atlassian's PR machine is exceptional, the company seems amazing and in the beginning it all seems too good to be true, that's because it is. Prepare for a reality shock if you join, that will be come apparent after about 2 years. - Oversharing - People overshare here in the guise of bringing their authentic self to work. It makes it a weird place to work and I think this contributes to all the weirdness that I will mention below. Sure I have met some close friends at work - but come on, it's work people, chill out! - Any company that has a value "Open Company No BS" and that constantly repeats how honest they are, well you can guess - aren't actually that open and honest. People at Atlassian don't really like honesty nor do they like to give it. Like all other large corporations people manipulate figures to look good, everyone pretends to care more about customers than everyone else and it be comes this endless orgy of fakeness. - Hello Political Correctness! You have never met a more sensitive bunch of people and you really need to be careful with what you say. Someone is often offended somewhere from something someone else said, no joke it could even be an emoji, rarely is anyone direct about it, instead it trickles down through other channels like HR and bosses. It makes a weird hard-to-address friction between teams which is really challenging when products are so decomposed and teams need to collaborate. - All the positive reviews here are from people that are new, I too drank the Kool-Aid in the beginning and reposted awesome things about Atlassian on my social media feed as well. All seemed amazing. But a few years in you start to see toxic and undesirable patterns that have always been there but you just didn't notice. - Atlassian's HR and bosses are not honest about compensation. For all this "Open Company No BS" BS, after years they still don't disclose compensation, they consistently say that are "looking into it" and "want to do it in the future" but the day never comes. New employees with less experience will come in at a higher base salary longer term employees, everyone talks negatively about salary even though it is frowned upon and when you contest your pay, you get told that your "total package is higher". Atlassian is well-known internally for underpaying and giving you beer and chips to compensation. It specifically does over loyal employees that stay with the company for a very long time, as over time the discrepancies between base pay widens and they give you BS about your "total package", that makes no sense as you don't get all the unvested stock if you leave and you don't get paid super on equity that has vested. Yet they continue to use this in discussions, and yes this happens even is if you are a star performer. - If you like to hustle and move fast - don't work here for long! I cannot express that strongly enough. The "work-life balance" expressed above is great if you want to do the bare minimum and get paid a better than average salary. The work ethic is non-existent and results in not much getting done. There is a pattern of endless excuses, deadlines move and move again and things move at a glacial place. Many long term employees have the "golden handcuffs" and just "rest and vest". That's hard to deal with when you really want to make change and are very passionate about your work. So the pattern is that ambitious smart people that you actually want to work with end up leaving and over time there is a consolidation of blog writing moochers. - Everyone likes to still thinks Atlassian is still a startup but in reality it is as nimble as the titanic. If you want to be innovative don't come here! Atlassian is the place where innovative minds come to wither. If you are a dev you will be working on a monolith, doing work on archaic products with archaic code bases. - Strategy ADHD - get ready for lots of changes, and then reversal of those changes, then reversal of those changes, starting and stopping and restarting of projects. It gets really tiring and everyone makes jokes and rolls their eyes over it. - Whilst the founders seem like a decent bunch of guys there are endless layers of manipulative, blog writing, figure-doctoring people in between which and this has only consolidated and worsened with time. - Someone that I worked with once expressed it well by saying "Atlassian is a second chance high school for losers". Everyone desperately wants to get along, often dysfunctionally so. This is a great opportunity for people that are good manipulators and want to accrue social capital with people who desperately need to be liked. I have seem some really incompetent people go far in this company, which in all honesty if that's you thing, hats off to you. But if you want to actually do good work, instead of writing fraudulent blogs about doing good work, go somewhere else. It seems like I am slamming Atlassian, but I am not saying don't work at Atlassian at all, what I am saying is be VERY strategic about it and approach it this way: 1. Go in with a plan and don't take anything on face value. 2. Plan to do frequent and periodical blogging and make sure you are constantly seen and heard across the company. 3. Repeat all the Atlassian jargon and values, but don't be too open or honest. 4. Get as much as you can whilst you are there and use that as a spring board to get out and go somewhere where people are actually genuine and not so desperate to be liked, so you can working on something with meaning and make some actual change. 5. Use how "happy you are at Atlassian" and all that "unvested equity" in discussions to negotiate the best salary as you go into a new company, to work on something with meaning.