Please don't tell me that Jira is about to get even worse...

I don't understand the AI layoffs; there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done. Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors.

Presumably all their competitors also know about Claude as well, and a lot of these 1600 people will go work for them and use Claude.

Unless this is just regular layoffs, but they know if they brand it as "AI" their investors will eat it up.

If everyone else is downsizing and using AI as an excuse, it's both a pretty good cover for any firing you might have wanted to do for a while, and you can reasonably assume you can hire back in the future because everyone else is firing too. Maybe you can even depress their wages a little?

> there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done

I distinctly remember a discussion where someone says "Man, I wish JIRA would add this feature/fix this bug"

Someone else pipes in: "I bet there is already a ticket on the JIRA bugtracker/feature board for this, it's not done and it's from 9 years ago" and lo and behold there was.

It is just regular layoffs, and doing so admits they don't know what to do with the 1,600 people anyway, and probably didn't know what to do with them for years.

AI isn't going to help, but it bandaids over the issue so the investors aren't spooked.

I think with fewer people working on it, the rate at which it gets worse will now decline!

> there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done

I definitely buy this for the software sector or the economy as a whole, but for an individual company? Seems one would be bottlenecked by various factors quickly.

Perhaps better to let people go so that they can be productive elsewhere?

I don't think it can get worse. In fact, it'd probably be better if Atlassian just stopped touching it.

> Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors.

Alternative take: I can't speak for BitBucket because I've never used it, but I've had enough time with JIRA and Confluence to last a lifetime, and these products are so bad - so clunky, so slow, so much friction in the UI - that I can't really see what useful value adding work Atlassian's 16,000 employees have actually been delivering. From that perspective losing 1600 of them seems like it's not likely to make much difference since, from my perspective as a user, they didn't appear to be doing anything useful in the first place.

I'm sorry if that comes across as a particularly savage take but Atlassian have wilfully been churning out absolute garbage for at least 15 years now (there was a time, in around 2006/7, when I thought JIRA was quite good - genuinely) and their products have made me miserable throughout a good chunk of my career, so my sympathy is pretty limited. If they can be bothered to make the products better, faster, more usable, and remove friction ruthlessly at every turn in their workflows, then I might well change my point of view.

The comments hit at some, but not all, of the underlying drivers. I'll add a more comprehensive view and let you draw your own conclusions:

* Their balance sheet paints a messy picture. Their gross profit per quarter doubled from 23Q1 ($668mn) to 26Q2 ($1.35bn), but their net income has been a consistent loss - from -$13mn in 23Q1, to -$42.6mn in 26Q2. The company has generally failed to turn a meaningful profit after considering operating expenses, reflecting misaligned priorities of leadership.

* Their headcount similarly whipsaws of late. In 2021, it was 8.8k; by 2025, it was 13.8k; in the middle of COVID, it was as low as 6.4k. Even after these job cuts, their headcount remains roughly flat from 2025.

* Cutting jobs to invest in AI when you're already slowly bleeding cash isn't exactly a winning strategy. Atlassian's products have the benefit of organizational "stickiness", and their push to a cloud-only SaaS model hasn't gone all that well if you read the IT rags (lots of uniquely complicated migrations that don't transition well 1:1 to SaaS).

* That said, pointing to AI while cutting jobs isn't a bad play when you're courting investors, many of whom doubt the long-term viability of the XaaS model when AI can slop up boilerplate and internal-only solutions on the fly. If they're doing it to genuinely cut costs and try and right the ship, fingering AI isn't a bad cover.

* Except the reality is most of Atlassian's leadership gets their comp in equity, which has taken a serious hit of late on the markets just as vesting schedules wind down and leadership is changing over. I'd be on the lookout for SEC Form 4's from insiders in the coming weeks to confirm whether or not this was the case.

The reality is that the "AI layoffs" ploy is almost exclusively a cover story for corporations reasserting dominance and power over workers after a few (comparatively) good years (WFH, higher pay increases, wage gains, flex-time, etc). Every single one of these entities obviously has more work than people to do it, but if they can squeeze 90% of the workforce for 110% of the hours, that's a net gain for the corporation and a net loss for workers.

Efficiency, over-hiring, right-sizing, AI; it's all bullshit smokescreens for greed, plain and simple. Don't be fooled by narratives to the contrary.

It's likely not all this, but i expect an element is: there is a meaningful number of people essentially refusing to work with AI.

Antidotal but I have spoken to friends at Google who are telling me many co-workers say "I tried it didn't work, ill do it myself" when really they just didn't try very hard at all.

It’s not that their employees are no longer needed, it’s that their product (jira) is no longer needed. When you’ve got AI agents taking bigger and bigger steps, you don’t need to micromanage people through jira as much anymore. Companies will likely switch to something lighter.

Jira regularly makes it to the top of lists of the most hated enterprise software, there’s definitely appetite in the market for a replacement.

Their stock has been taking a huge hit over the last few months because of this: https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/ai-is-eating-softw...

It's regular layoffs because of AI

I mean, if they are using more AI and less of the devs who made it what it is... it might be better? A little tongue-in-cheek, but I find jira and confluence much less annoying now that I just made a claude skill for each of them and now I don't have to interact with their UI very often anymore

This is a tacit acceptance that AI maybe isn't as great as they make it out to be.

And since the fact that claude code is an electron app and not AI generated optimized binary per platform, it's abundantly clear that perhaps AI is not all they hype it up to be.