Atlassian

• Working with smart people. However, the new culture promotes individualism, and it's infrequent to pair program, as this is becoming perceived as incompetence.
• Working on software that millions of people use. However, despite the privilege it is to work on this software, it comes with cons listed below.
• Breakfast and lunch are provided each day.
• Pay is okay, but not great.

Executive engineering management have disregarded our values, and the culture is suffering. Atlassian was something special, but it feels like a new company with new policies, like tracking PR counts and introducing a performance management system that essentially encourages churn through PIPs and biannual performance reviews, but annual salary reviews.

The irony is the new policies have put individualism ahead of teamwork, so it's now significantly harder to work with or pair program with colleagues. You're considered incompetent if you need help from or want to pair program with others to get work done.

Again, owing entirely to the new policies introduced by executive management, work-life balance is a lot worse now. Sprint retros which raise burnout and tired employees get no action items, and you're paid lip service.

No job security, so people are afraid to speak out.

Managing up by having to document everything you do for 1-1s with managers. This was previously done for promotion packs, but now it's required just to keep your job. And it takes a lot of time to do this (hours-days), which detracts from spending time becoming a better engineer, which is what should be incentivized.

As a shareholder, it's not in my interest to talk poorly of Atlassian, and it honestly hurts to write this. But management has done such a great job at disregarding and neglecting our values that you've fundamentally changed the culture for the worse.

The culture was one of the best things about Atlassian and what it was known for amongst those in tech. Our values were a huge point of difference to other traditional tech companies like MSFT and Meta. Very sadly, this is no more.

My advice is to remove these unsustainable policies and listen to who's left from existing Atlassian leadership on how to build a world-class engineering culture.

I used to struggle to think of another company I'd rather work at than Atlassian. But these new policies have completely changed the company.

It was said internally that culture doesn't come from the top; I respectfully disagree. Look at the number of anonymous questions and the types of questions being asked in our Town Halls. Look at these Glassdoor reviews. Look at our best tenured employees leaving. Do you honestly think we're better with these policies than without them?

For those working on the ground, the answer is crystal clear. I have hope for Atlassian, but policy and/or executive leadership change is required.