Atlassian

Extremely talented co-workers to learn from. Very effective hiring policies maintain that.

Super-energetic environment, can-do culture, high level of trust, opportunities to go and build something useful outside your normal work stream.

The company's strong values got it this far; strong focus on maintaining and evolving an effective culture despite rapid hiring.

Great level of passion and enthusiasm for what we build and what we deliver to our customers. It's useful, worthwhile software that makes a difference to our customer's ability to get things done, and we don't forget that!

Strong technical and quality focus. We don't tend to get stuck on doing things the same way just because that's how it's been in the past; new hires have a good chance of bringing new knowledge/ideas and changing things.

It's chaotic, both technically and organizationally, as it deals with aggressive modernization of legacy platforms and architectures into a more modern approach.

It grows and evolves from a high-individual-freedom, low-oversight small-company culture to one with a little bit more forethought and management that is able to scale. So far, the balance is working very well though.

Arriving as a new developer working on any of the main products (vs. new infrastructure, which is different), there's a lot of complexity and legacyness, large teams, and an awful lot to learn, both technically and organizationally. This can be overwhelming. Expect 6-9 months before you feel able to effectively contribute to gnarly stuff on the large products. You'll need to have initiative and be willing to reach out, ask questions, and make things happen.

Pour more resources into nuking the legacy stuff; it's the only way to maintain dev speed.

Be careful the current annual review system doesn't move in the direction of notoriously harmful stack-ranking systems. Effective delivery is from teams, not individuals. Our talk and our acqui-hiring reflect this, but our annual review system is too much all about individuals, and that will eventually lead to destructive politics and self-promotion.

You need to find a way to more formally rate the effectiveness of teams, distribute rewards across teams, and especially to send a strong message that people will be rated on team effectiveness, not on individual contribution. The overall performance of a team is rarely down to one or two individuals.