Atlassian

Amazing offices, free food and drinks, and great amenities.

Great pay, but the employee share scheme makes managing your tax obligations more difficult. Be sure to implement strategies to reduce your taxable income via voluntary super contributions, etc. Otherwise, expect to owe money to the ATO.

Work with very smart people and great tech.

International Togetherness Gatherings twice a year (used to be 4, slowly reducing, might be gone by now), paid by the company.

Regional Togetherness Gatherings, paid by the company.

Happiness, stress, and work-life balance are heavily team-dependent.

The culture is degrading, and the work-life balance is pretty poor due to the work culture shifting to being extremely high-performing in fear of losing your job every six months because of the APEX Performance Reviews, which employ stacked ranking. It has ruined the culture; the workplace feels like The Hunger Games. People are less likely to help you or support you if there is nothing in it for them.

Work-life balance is very poor. This could be team-dependent, but most colleagues from other teams I spoke to express the same issues.

If you fall below the bell curve, you are put on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) or offered a separation package, without consideration of personal circumstances or past achievements. The goalposts continuously move, and it is harder to reach them. Taking any extended period of annual leave, sick leave, or carer's leave can put your deliverables or overall project impact at risk, which in turn negatively impacts your performance. You are required to participate in the APEX cycle if you worked 50% of the half. If you were to take extended carer's leave or sick leave during the half and your manager tries to vouch for you to the committee reviewing your performance and explain your personal circumstances, HR shuts the conversation down; objective performance results only.

Seeking feedback or collaborating with colleagues from other teams or your team can negatively impact your performance review. Your manager might consider it a lack of leadership (personal experience).

The company is always hiring because they are constantly firing, mostly for the wrong reasons, giving you very little room or time to grow. Many engineers with long tenures of 5-20 years have recently left due to the issues described above and expressed by many other reviews (internal blogs).

One last thing: promotions are extremely difficult. They would rather hire someone new to take the higher role than promote someone skilled enough within the team who has been going for that promotion and has been in the company for five years.

Senior leadership and CEO, do you even read these reviews? Do you even care?

These issues have been expressed for years. When I first saw them before I joined, I thought, "Nah, just disgruntled employees." But then I worked for the company for nearly two years and realized it is true.