I’ve watched the video and work at Atlassian, that’s entirely not what the video is. The guy basically just goes over what he worked on and some things he learned. It’s basically a solid video resumé with a clickbait title. Nothing he says is new or scandalous - most of it’s open source.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Atlassin is such a weird company to me. Used bitbucket a decade ago and everything just kept changing, things bought, what I used didn't feel like it got better. Is it a good place to work?
The company claims good values and I would say mostly lives up to them, especially transparency. Though overall it is slowly becoming more corporate as it grows and especially leans in to AI hype.
The people and compensation and benefits are great, you get a lot of resources (can just spin up a fully hosted app via a terminal command if you want).
I am also lucky to be part of a small, internal-facing, chill, and yet important team so my experience on day-to-day work would definitely differ from a random Jira dev though.
I’ve not yet met anybody who has disliked working at the company — everybody dislikes the ‘APEX’ system used for measuring performance though lmao.
As someone who is using the Atlassian stack daily, Bitbucket (self hosted) is by far the best product from the stack. Jira is okay if you actually plan on using its features extensively. Confluence is... Well, it tries. I'd even prefer plain Mediawiki over it.
There's better wikis than mediawiki?
It's really good but not the first choice for casual users.
That’s funny, before I joined Atlassian my previous company also used their stack and Confluence was the only product I could stomach. All the products have rapidly evolved over the last few years though.
Jira is extremely configuration dependent. It can be good and it can be awful. Companies with bad processes will configure it in the same way and I believe that's where most of the hate comes from. Bitbucket is pretty decent by now. It's just not very feature rich. But that's not really a problem for this type of software if you hand over to other tools with the extensive web hooks. But confluence... It feels like it has been stuck in time while Mediawiki is continually closing the gap. Especially automatically updating pages is a pain with the weird and fragile code that represents the pages internally.
This is spot on, I've used four Jira system that if I didn't know they were all Jira, I would have though they were different products with similar "generic enterprise" styling. That being said, I've rather strongly disliked every instance of Jira I've used. It probably stems from the fact that I have maintained and built over a dozen ticketing systems over the years and some of the annoyances and rough edges just feel like solved problems to me.
Didn’t the name come from one of the founders being a huge Ayn Rand stan? That sounds like a red flag.
I would fire myself if I had to work there
showing how the company's entire tech works
Simple, it doesn't.
If anyone starting fresh and decided to copy atlassian, they're doing it wrong
I don't think so at all. Jira today is quite good. If you want something really shitty try Azure DevOps.
No shit right?
I'd pay you to shit my hand in a drawer if it meant I didn't have to use atlassian
I'd pay you to shit my hand in a drawer if it meant I didn't have to use atlassian
How would you get your hand into the drawer, and why wouldn’t we just do it over a toilet like civilized people?
Maicyn? Pronounced "Mason", I assume?
Exploiting your kids for views. Though it was funny if I ignore that.
No I think he has to fist you first, so you can then shit his hand into the drawer.
isn't it just k8s home-made?
Huh? One is a productivity, planning, and documentation platform, the other is a container orchestration platform. Neither are homemade.
i meant this guy's infrastructure provision system
it's like a bespoke terraform
Atlassian is as much an infrastructure company as a software company
free for anyone to copy
I don't think their system architecture is a secret. This kind of stuff is regularly discussed in interviews.
I think that is the rub though. If your interview pipeline has system design questions all based around your arch that someone just released a youtube vid dissecting, you're going to struggle to get signal out those interviews. False positive hires are arguably worse than false negatives.
Aw shit we use JIRA at work. Will it get worse now?
It... It can get worse?
Oh you sweet summer child. Have you seen Rational Team Concert?
Rational Team Concert
Is that a boy punk group?
You're the other person that used RTC?! I had heard there was another but I was starting to think it was just a legend.
I migrated an entire codebase from a combo of RCS, CVS, and Subversion. This was about 10 minutes before git started to hit in a big way.
I'd call it a dumpster fire but that really disrespects dumpster fires.
You mean it was worse than Microsoft Source Safe? The VCS that used to lose data?
Source Safe just attempted to be a useless source control system. RTC tried to add issue tracking, automation, and other crap. It wanted to be truly terrible at everything.
But Source Safe was fantastically bad. I especially liked that its database file was limited to like 2GB. It was so bad that Microslop didn't use it.
It's the best I've ever used, so take that for what you will Action Remedy System was...something.
Although ive found that Jira and Confluence Cloud madr dozens and dozens of bad decisions and regressions over the oon-prem version.
Bruh, have you used Jira recently? We tried GitHub recently and that was so much bloat, especially hated by our devs.
we (team of 15) use salesforce and a promise to include issue numbers in our (svn) commit msgs all on one dev branch so when we cherry pick merge later to qa we can “safely” assume we got it all. 30% of the time it works 10% of the time.
i can’t convince these guys code is not “self documenting” let alone use git or a tool for proper bug reporting.
I had a boss who wrote a script to automatically remove all comments from code for pull requests. Since nobody ever added meaningful comments to their commits (or made any contributions at all to the alleged documentation), the code base was a complete mystery to the people who were actually working on it. God knows what it seemed like to new developers added to the project. But hey, comments are a "code smell" (his exact words) so it was all good.
His primary justification of his "comments bad" philosophy was that if comments aren't kept up-to-date with the code, they can mislead and confuse future developers. This gets said a lot but it is something that I have literally never seen in 25 years of programming (I've witnessed -- and participated in -- a large number of project failures, and misleading comments have never been the cause of the failure). I pointed out that the same exact thing could be said about method and variable names but nobody ever advocates not using descriptive method and variable names; he had no response to this.
kinda depends how you set it up and run it, no?
i have some simple new projects that are clean and easy, and some 10+ year old monstrosities that are the spawn of satan.
need to use ublock to stop the insane 'pls bro buy our ai' pop-up though.
I inject an entire set of CSS rules into Jira and into Confluence 🫠
I use Atlassian products every day.
I'm good. 😒
The world needs to see how it works to learn from our past errors and move forward as a society
haven't watched the video yet, but the medium article sounds very much like llm slop
considering the human summaries here the slop isn't even close to correct, it based it all off the title
I hope someone at azure sees it 😅
I don't know if this is really effective revenge. An understanding of the software isn't why businesses outsource to a company like Atlassian. Its convenience. If Atlassian's product is good enough why build your own?
It’s not revenge. It’s a CV
Ha! I like it!
Hope he doesn't get sued to oblivion over this