Atlassian

• Humane employee policies (sick/maternity/COVID leave)
• Company culture promoting work-life-balance
• Engineers are generally nice people (not a toxic nor overly-competitive environment)

• Increasing trend of inexperienced managers.
• Lack of competitive compensation means lower-skilled senior talent.
• Workforce disproportionally skewed towards newly joined employees.
• Lack of new successful in-house products, still relying on the popularity and growth of Jira. An increasing number of competitive companies are shadowing Confluence, Bitbucket, and Jira.

Apply stricter assessment of managers, especially new and inexperienced ones. Assessment should not only be applied at hire/promotion, but needs to be ongoing over the course of that manager's role. Encourage and emphasize bottom-up feedback to get qualitative feedback on managers/leadership.

Official company messaging seems to promote innovation through ShipIt and innovation weeks. But in practice, these opportunities do not actually get used for innovation. Due to an over-importance of "normal" work and an under-emphasis on innovation opportunities, engineers do not get the time (and are sometimes indirectly discouraged) to utilize innovation time.