Atlassian

• Total compensation in Sydney only.
• Work-life balance (in most teams).

• Toxic middle management
• Broken culture (nothing like what is advertised on the marketing pages)
• No career progression prospects in software development.
• Sweatshop
• No innovation and heaps of red tape
• TCO outside of Sydney is uncompetitive

Here's a truthful review of how Atlassian looks in 2020/2021.

1. Toxicity

After the IPO in 2015, the company underwent restructuring. The founders seem to have been sidelined, and new management structures were put in place. The top priority for shareholders and top management became growth at all costs. By growth, the company means revenues and number of employees.

This meant the number of employees in offices like Sydney ballooned from a few hundred to thousands. With that, new layers of management were hastily added to control the growing number of teams and contributors. In my opinion, the hiring bar for developers, and especially management, dropped through the floor, with hordes of new middle managers and line managers joining the company. These managers ranged from underqualified, inexperienced, and uninterested to borderline sociopathic.

If you join Atlassian, depending on your luck, you might have a slim chance of landing in a team with a qualified, passionate, likable, and caring manager who will help you grow while ensuring your team succeeds. Unfortunately, in most cases nowadays, you will land with a direct manager who only cares about their own performance review and looking good in their structure. You will also likely have multiple middle managers above you who only care about the growth numbers in their spreadsheets, are quick to associate team successes with their names, and range from unapproachable to toxic, hostile, and dangerous.

The management structure is completely separate from the contributors – there's no review process or complaint path about managers. If you attempt to go through HR, your complaint or feedback lands on the manager's desk the next day. You will never win.

I personally went through months of directed pressure, culminating in direct harassment and more procedural pressure until I burned out so much that it horribly affected me and my family. As in many big corporations, HR was anything but helpful in my requests for help. Long story short, I've been pushed out, broken, and needing therapy, and the perpetrators have not seen any consequences.

1. There is no career progression.

If you join straight from university or as an entry-level contributor, and you work hard and know whom to please, in 3-5 years you can reach "senior developer" level. This is 90% of the workforce, and it's close to impossible to get promoted further or get any raise from there on. Over several years, the salaries have been "adjusted" to be the same or similar level; there's no negotiation, virtually no performance bonuses or raises. The only salary adjusting event is a "market adjustment" that happens every 1-3 years and is irrelevant of one's performance. Getting a new manager every 6-12 months or getting teams restructured every year doesn't help either, but is a common occurrence (I've had more than a dozen managers in 4 years).

If you really, really want to attain higher levels above "senior," there is a broken promotion system that can be summarized as: stay close to your middle manager, laugh at their jokes, compliment them, volunteer for projects, and go to lunches together, and you will get promoted in a few years. Few have attempted the "work harder than anyone" method; most have burned out and have not been able to get anywhere because it's a biased, social-status, and favoritism-based system.

1. Sweatshop

Due to the aforementioned hiring spree and unsustainable growth, there are too many teams, too many decision-makers, owners, and interdependencies to be effective. Most of my time was spent in meetings, RFCs, finding stakeholders, and trying to convince individuals or teams to change a line of code or two. It's not unusual for changes to never ship or to become deprecated before you finish. It has become almost a ritual that teams get restructured every 6-12 months (disbanded, merged, split, managers rotated, etc.).

There's so much noise and mismanagement that it has become a sweatshop with little recognition or sense of purpose.

1. Lack of innovation

The few major product lines are what the company maintains and where most of the effort is. There's no innovation outside or inside the company, there's no risk-taking, no plans for new products, and even acquisitions are awkwardly merged into existing money-making products, with original products killed and teams dissolved. Most likely, you'll be working in the engine room, refactoring the same thing for years, or working on small adjustments, or maybe, if you're lucky, working on a minor feature that might never ship.

• If you still care...
• Restructure the management; weed out the sociopaths.
• Make managers accountable. Monitor them. Allow others to rate/score them routinely (not only direct managers).
• Adopt a sustainable growth methodology. Make sure your backbone of senior developer workforce is happy.
• Revamp the incentive system for management. Make them care about people, or get rid of them.
• In the IC world, add more levels, revamp the promotion system. Reward high-achievers and those who really care.