Atlassian CEO Cites AI Shift When Announcing Plan To Shed 1,600 Jobs (bloomberg.com)
(Thursday March 12, 2026 @12:00PM (BeauHD)
from the AI-washing dept.)
- Reference: 0180957366
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/03/12/0722207/atlassian-ceo-cites-ai-shift-when-announcing-plan-to-shed-1600-jobs
- Source link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-11/atlassian-team-ceo-announces-layoffs-of-1-600-citing-ai-shift
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg:
> Atlassian [1]plans to cut 1,600 jobs or a 10th of its global workforce , joining rivals in slashing staffing to cope with the advent of AI and a broader post-Covid industry slowdown. Australian billionaire founder Mike Cannon-Brookes explained the reductions in a staff memo, while also announcing his chief technology officer was leaving the Sydney-based company. "It would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn't change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas," Cannon-Brookes said. "It does."
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/atlassian-ceo-cites-ai-shift-220933887.html
> Atlassian [1]plans to cut 1,600 jobs or a 10th of its global workforce , joining rivals in slashing staffing to cope with the advent of AI and a broader post-Covid industry slowdown. Australian billionaire founder Mike Cannon-Brookes explained the reductions in a staff memo, while also announcing his chief technology officer was leaving the Sydney-based company. "It would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn't change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas," Cannon-Brookes said. "It does."
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/atlassian-ceo-cites-ai-shift-220933887.html
Rovo keeps humping my leg (Score:1)
by stickman393 ( 166734 )
In the last 24 months Atlassian has gone from one of my favorite software companies to possibly the worst, and it is all the fault of the AI hype train
Jira has been shitty for almost 20 years (Score:3)
by Somervillain ( 4719341 )
For starters this is AI washing. There is a huge backlog of issues and missing features across their product family and markets for them to expand to. If your developers are 10x, you can don't cut by 10%, you boost your workload by 5x or more...expand to new markets or fix all those issues that were too expensive or minor to fix back in the 1x developer days. This needs to be prosecuted as it's obvious fraud to investors.
Fuck I'm old, I remember starting using Jira over 20 years ago. It started out co
Smells like "AI washing" (Score:3, Insightful)
If AI made your company more productive, you wouldn't typically cut staff but take on more work , getting projects done at a faster rate with the same number of employees, becoming more profitable. Thus, this smells like mostly a sales slump , which can't typically be blamed on AI.
Re: Smells like "AI washing" (Score:3)
To be fair they haven't got anything that there isn't a better offering available now. Used to have a generous free tier that made me start paying for their service when I outgrew it. Now they've wildly restricted that free tier. Hardly surprising they're on their way out.
Re: (Score:2)
> Thus, this smells like mostly a sales slump , which can't typically be blamed on AI.
Not yet, anyways. When AI has reduced product quality enough, then that will look different. Well, AWS may already have lost sales and customers due to AI caused outages.