Atlassian defends firing engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'
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Worked at Atlassian for 5 years, had plenty of interactions with Mike. I wouldn’t categorize him as a jerk. I have plenty of disagreements about decisions he’s made, and I think he heavily over-hired (and is paying for it now), but a jerk he is not.
The reality is Atlassian has mechanisms, for better or for worse, that reward social discontent - Hello (their internal Confluence instance which has Reddit-like upvoting on blogs) and their karma bot on slack. Both of which tend to result in people gamifying these to boost their social status, which as you’ve seen with Reddit, often results in a subset of people realizing negative comments get more attention than positive ones. This got out of hand and they’ve been trying to dial it back, leading to cuts like these. It’s been a problem at Atlassian for a while.
A opposed to what actually happened: Mike (CEO) fired 19,000 people. Then Mike held a video AMA regarding the firings. Mike took the meeting from the headquarters of the NBA team he owns.
The employee, Unterwurzacher, parodied the CEO on Slack, writing, “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
Then that employee was fired.
> Regardless of the fact that he probably is a jerk
and
> Does Atlassian's CEO realize that we all now know that he really is a rich jerk?
My comment was just meant to provide an insider perspective as a foil to those who had given theirs.
We don't really have enough information to adjudicate either way, the article doesn't include a transcript of what she actually said or a transcript of what was being said in the courtroom with context (tribunalroom? boardroom? wherever the lawyer was talking).
It seems a bit pointless to hypothesise what might have happened then decide whether the imaginary actions were reasonable in the hypothetical scenario. If we're going to debate correctness there needs to be actual source material instead of this third-hand summary behind a paywall.
that he's showing off how rich he is as the result of throwing these people on the street is just part of the system weve built
He has since purchased a private jet under controversy.
His company now sponsors an F1 team.
He now seems to be a typical billionaire. You don’t get to be a billionaire without being ruthless.
He probably is now a rich jerk. When I worked at Atlassian and on boarded, one of the managers said if you are in a lift with Mike or Scott, and they asked what you do here, you better tell them what value you are bringing…
Mike was also very public he was proud Atlassian was not a high payer, he wouldn’t compete with Google etc on pay, at the time, yet people still wanted to work at Atlassian. Also didn’t hide the fact they absolutely utilised lack of local market knowledge for visa holders when nearly have the office was a temporary visa holder at the time.
Maybe businesses shouldn’t get that big.
The size of a business may not be the best part to care about, maybe the power of a single executive is more concerning - but one person holding power over 19k people who have no representation to bargain with that person (like an elected official) is extremely unbalanced.
(Anyway: the main offence is using the term "jerk" instead of "wanker").
-- Robert Caro
Most of us aren't good people at heart.
> Most of us aren't good people at heart.
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/450864-the-line-separating-...
What the actual fuck. I would not work at a place with something like that.
Over here in the USA, I don't think any customer service worker expects to be able to openly mock a customer and still have a job. I struggle to imagine the idea of calling my boss a wanker to his face and still expecting to have a job. To insult the CEO seems like it might as well be a resignation - if you have that little respect for leadership, why are you working at that company?
What an astoundingly dumb question. Most people work somewhere to get paid, and If you think its unusual to hate the boss, oh boy, do I have news for you!
It's funny that such a cognitive dissonance between freedoms and rights vs the absolutist tyranny of corporate life making a mockery of those freedoms can coexist in the same society with the same staying power.
I just think it's stranger for the USA's work culture to be so deferential to leadership while its societal values are outwardly quite loud about freedoms, it's more understandable to me for East Asia to be that way. For the USA case it's probably a mixture of the servitude/slavery past with still being quite religious compared to other Western peers.
You just can't talk about a CEO as if they're a person interacting and hiring people individually because they just don't.
When an employee communicates broadly inside a company, even if it's not directly to outsiders, that is essentially public. As we can see in this thread some random person chimed in with the details. But s/neighbor/your wife/ if that helps the analogy and insider vs. outsider is the issue. It's an imperfect one as they all tend to be.
This is why for example quarterly results are not generally communicated to all insiders in a company before they are released, because they are going to leak.
I think my analogy, though imperfect, demonstrates that when you have some sort of employment or other relationship, "bad mouthing" the other party, either in public or in private, is expected to be damaging to this relationship. The CEO of your company is the closest thing to the single person employing you. He runs the entity that employs you.
If one of my 2000 employees wrote something in Slack? No, I don’t think it would even register.
https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2026/ex-atlassian-engineer-fig...
> … It was an irrelevant personal attack and insult directed at a colleague, essentially calling him a ‘rich jerk’.
> Unterwurzacher reportedly parodied the CEO on Slack, writing, “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
If the CEO wasn’t a jerk before he certainly is now.
Even just generally, if you make someone lose face publicly, they're prone to lash out at you since they often feel they can't back down.
The most charitable interpretation is that most rich/powerful people are just as flawed as everyone else. Obviously, their power/wealth makes them less deserving of that charity ultimately.
I can't believe that. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps at their private schools and then had to claw and fight as a legacy admission to the school their parents attended. From there they lived hand to mouth destitute with barely a million dollar loan from their parents!
Then there was the existential crisis of meeting with their college roommates' parents and their own parents' bridge buddies to secure millions in loans. It was their flawless vision and skill that let them be at the right place and the right time. If they wouldn't have had the foresight to fall out of a lucky vagina we would all be worse off.
You see they're scrappy go getters that started from the absolute bottom. They're infallible supermen whose greatest assets are their humility and unerring genius.
It's probably a CEO thing too - you have some vision for the company so you're going to hire people that enable that vision, not people that will question your every move.
Usually nobody cares if you're a poor jerk. At least unless you do something phenomenal you don't get wide attention.
"New" rich people, especially those with power over other people, can develop plenty of complexes and insecurities that come out as weakness... like firing somebody for mocking them.
"Old" rich, generational wealth tend to develop a set of manners and habits where they don't get noticed or embarrass themselves quite so much by displaying such weakness.
You don't stay rich for a long time if you act like a fool.
excellent case btw why you should never let these tech bros have power over your life, they're super charged angry little school boys with worse fantasies than a Soviet commissar
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47478579
If you consider choosing to leave a job of a tool a choice that people can easily make, then sure. Otherwise, yeah a good portion of employees don't have any say in the software their managers choose, and either use it or get let go