Used to be a great place--stay away now! - Principal Data Scientist Atlassian Employee Review

2.0
May 22, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The business is very strong. Companies can't suddenly quit Jira. There were a lot of very smart people who worked here. Remote work is probably here to stay. Many teams report that the work is easy. I like my manager, and my team. If I didn't, I would have quit months ago. Atlassian gets two stars instead of one because I haven't experienced malicious incompetence, just the regular kind. Some tech employees have it worse than we do.

Cons

The business being very strong doesn't translate into pay or even respect for the people who work here. Atlassian leadership completely abandoned our values six months ago, at the first hint of a "challenging macro environment". If layoffs were even necessary, they were necessitated by our founders' reckless hiring spree. Yet, there has been little to no accountability for the overhiring (mandated by founders), the customer-hated product experience (enabled by founders), or the declining revenue growth (ignored by founders). Not only has there been a lack of accountability, the executives have the audacity to double down and say the reason we're not doing well (defined as the stock price not endlessly soaring) is because individual contributors are working too slow. Mike and Scott were fantastic at running a company with a thousand people. They haven't hired the right people to run a 5,000- or 10,000-person company, and we still have them along with multiple layers of management weighing in on minor decisions. We've paid consultants to come in and tell us how to scale, then ignored their recommendations. Stack ranking in performance reviews is phenomenally stupid, and will be the death knell for a famous culture that has been in a tailspin since February 2023. We reorganize every six months, then wonder why we move so slow. The data organization is a shock to people who come from modern tech companies. In terms of practices and technology, we're so far behind it's hard to believe. The people are fine, even good, but the C-level doesn't have a clue how to build a large company. It's surprising how fast things went south here. I left a glowing review a couple years ago, and that was my experience. It turns out everything I was working for was wasted. I've seen the work of hundreds of people mis-allocated or ultimately unwound because of a change in strategy, which many of us foresaw long before it happened.

Explore other reviews about Atlassian

5.0
Jun 24, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Start up vibes great people

Cons

Lots of things currently shifting due to acquisition

3.0
Apr 30, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Amazing people, I loved the core values, competitive salary, great benefits

Cons

I want to start by saying I am not bitter or angry. Working for Atlassian was a whirlwind. I was there for 11 months before being laid off via email. In my time there, I went through 2 re-orgs and 3 managers. It just always felt like being on a hamster wheel… in a hurricane. Today I received an email 7 weeks after I was laid off that started with, “ Congrats on your first year at Atlassian—we know that's a huge accomplishment and are beyond thrilled to be celebrating with you!” It was a bummer to receive that, to say the least, but it included a link to leave this Glassdoor review to “ help provide invaluable insight to future candidates and help us to improve your experience as an employee continually.” so here I am. My advice is to do proper change management of your automated emails when you layoff 5% of your workforce so that emails like this aren’t sent to hard working former employees that you eliminated congratulating them on a milestone they never reached. I know this wasn’t intentional, but it hurt.

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