On Atlassian Outage, look from the inside

A lot has been said already about recent Atlassian outage:

You can’t be “cool as Atlassian” anymore, the reputation damage is so high:

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As a person who spent 2.5 years in the company, I’ll focus on factors that aren’t always visible from the outside.

Pay

Atlassian doesn’t pay engineers a lot. When I was joining back in 2019 I had to fight for the good numbers. Only with multiple competitive offers they agreed to pay the compensation I asked for.

I once asked my manager about the pay rate. He said Atlassian pays somewhere at 6 from the scale from 1 to 10. It explains a lot, and you’ll see why.

I’ve been working in the company for 2.5 years, and I’ve never had any salary raise.

Lack of talent

There is definitely some number of smart people inside the company. However, with the pay rate Atlassian offers it’s hard to retain the talent.

I once spoke to P6 (Staff) Software Engineer. There was a confusion about guid collision in the database, one insertion query failed because of duplicate GUIDs. There was a lot of investigation about why (”to prevent this from happening in the future”). However, they ended up with decision that two identical GUIDs were random, and there is no way there can be any bug in our code.

I spoke to P6 about probabilities, and the reply was “I doubt that we have people who can calculate the probability of this collision”.

The table had only few million records.

Feature factory

Teams are not focused on resilience, and reliability. Managers want only features and good looking numbers.

You must understand that in Atlassian utopian vision they see people as resource. They always measure people, it’s what their software is about. Measurements are everywhere. I remember we had a meeting in Statuspage, they even measured the length of comments engineers leave in BitBucket. Poor guy who was shamed for small comments in PRs, he just used a lot “LGTM”s.

Engineers are forced to deliver points. At the end of the year they see who is top performer only by the number of points. Nobody wants to work on something that was not in

Using post-it notes in meetings

KTLO