Hacker News Reader

Comment by jalapenos | Hacker News Reader

Never been clear to me why they need so many staff, and where all their efforts are going.

In Australia, its basically cliche for engineers to leave for Atlassian. Atlassian seems to hoover up all the devs.

Just not clear why, for what is basically a to-do list app, that as far as I can recall over the last 5 years, hasn't meaningfully changed, makes very slow progress fixing bugs, and frequently has reliability problems.

Would be genuinely interested to hear from Atlassian devs what they do over there except collect larger paychecks than normal.

View on HN

Never underestimate scaling challenges. And as someone pointed out, their products are highly configurable which adds complexity. Throw multi tenancy on top along with long lived obscure features still in use by some large enterprise customers.

That’s how you open yourself up to a world of pain. Everything takes 5x long because you’re forced to maintain backwards compatibility for an ever increasing list of features, that Sales keeps baking into contracts to win and retain customers. Also, they easily have over a dozen or more products now.

It’s interesting how every company I’ve worked at in the last 15 years was a JIRA customer. That level of consistency is only matched by one other product: Slack.

Atlassian products are very complex. Jira alone has sophisticated low-code automation, extremely thorough templating for projects, a rich API, extensive support for i8n, meta-projects (Jira Plans), an add-on marketplace, and so on. Confluence is pretty amazing too when you really understand what it can do.

Edit: Jira’s tight integration with GitHub and ability to drive/be driven by GitHub actions is also a big deal.

> Confluence is pretty amazing too when you really understand what it can do.

What can this clunky wiki do?

Markdown, now in 2024?

> Confluence is pretty amazing too when you really understand what it can do.

Confluence UX is utter garbage, mediawiki is more than good enough

Internationally recognized name brand? Way better comp?

The biggest technology employers in Australia are banks and Atlassian.

> Never been clear to me

That sounds you a you problem.

> basically a to-do list app

What is more likely? That you have no idea what you are talking about, or a company with >10k employees and >$50 billion market cap is some kind of fraud and the entire market has it wrong? And all their customers who pay them billions of dollars must all be so mistaken to pay this money for a to-do app.

Well I suppose if one wasn't looking to bad faith rage vent to take one's mind off other problems in one's life, it's possible one could surmise they're really resource inefficient.

I'm not the only dev who says this, but I've never heard the same criticism leveled at say Google.

> one could surmise they're really resource inefficient

Wonderful analysis, thank so so much for adding so much value to this discussion.

Don't give in to hate and anger bro. Come back to the light

Reply on news.ycombinator.com