Atlassian

This place, particularly in Australia, is like no other. Scott’s personal mission seems to be to ensure that your experience with Atlassian is so great that everything else is ruined by comparison. I disagree. The experience at Atlassian was so good that I want to take some of that magic and sprinkle it over all future roles.

I’m not saying it was perfect; it wasn’t, but in some ways that was also part of its magic. It’s owned its mistakes and empowered everyone within to do the same.

Yes, the perks are amazing (particularly the equity), but beyond the free food and booze, the family events, and the incredible experience team, the biggest perk by far is the values.

Positive cultural values have to be driven from the very top, and Scott and Mike embody these. There is nothing disingenuous about them, and everything that the company does is driven by them. It’s life-changing.

Also, they’re not afraid to be on the right side of the argument on progressive social good. When they shone a rainbow over 341 George St during the postal survey, that was probably the proudest I’ve ever felt to be part of something truly wonderful. And Atlassian are.

They’ve struggled with scale, as any company would with the massive growth like they have had. The IPO led to a huge loss of key talent, which exacerbated some of those issues. However, transparency and openness meant that we all knew what was happening, and everyone was empowered to keep the ship afloat.

It took them too long to realize that people in leadership roles need to be good managers, not necessarily great coders, when they got to 2000 employees. It wasn’t until I left that they even began to put in the frameworks necessary for leaders to properly lead.

After a certain point, there’s a career wall with nowhere left to go. I’d still be there now if you didn’t need to be there for a decade, or American, to get to the next level. There’s too much reliance on SF being the boilerplate of how to do things, and it’s lacking empathy for local culture and people based in Sydney.

Last thing is advice to grads: drop the sense of entitlement. You don’t realize how amazing this place is.

Grow from within. You have some incredible people in those beautiful buildings that could be trusted to do more.

Be careful that the amazing culture scales. It was beginning to show signs of fracture when I was going.

Keep leaders accountable, not just for delivery but for morale.

The founders are less visible these days, but the CTO is even less so.