[HN Gopher] Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable
___________________________________________________________________
Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable
Author : zillionize
Score : 520 points
Date : 2022-06-30 08:17 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smartcompany.com.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smartcompany.com.au)
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >But as we've since discovered, markets often get it badly wrong
| and the tech sector has rapidly corrected,
|
| gee, the markets were wrong but now they're right! Lucky that.
|
| - not that I think tech stocks aren't overvalued, just addressing
| the poor logic.
| [deleted]
| nickjj wrote:
| Somehow I'm not surprised.
|
| A few days ago[0] I was writing a Jira ticket after hitting the
| "Create" button and I wrote the description (the body of the
| ticket) for ~30 minutes. I switched the ticket type from A to B
| (no epics involved) and it wiped out the entire description. All
| I did was select a different item in a select drop down box
| provided by the form's UI.
|
| There was no warning it would clear the description and no draft
| saved. I lost 30 minutes of work.
|
| I normally manually copy textareas every few minutes on any
| Atlassian page because I don't trust their site (to be fair I do
| this for most sites too) but in the above case I had just copied
| a link reference which overwrote my clipboard. At the time I also
| didn't have a multi-clipboard tool installed since it was using a
| company issued machine that I don't have tricked out yet.
|
| [0]: https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis/status/1540353527859466246
| felixnm wrote:
| I can understand your frustration, and there should be some
| warning, but this is not a bug.
|
| Every issue type is configured with its associated issue-create
| screen and that screen has its fields. When you change the
| issue type during issue creation you're replacing one set of
| fields with another which results in the information loss you
| experienced. This just doesn't affect the description field,
| but all other system fields and custom fields.
| [deleted]
| pertymcpert wrote:
| It's a UI bug. It should warn you if there are non-trivial
| amounts of text in fields that would be overwritten by a
| state change.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Still a bug of unexpected behavior for a user. The easiest
| fix is a warning pop-up that changing forms will clear all
| information currently typed.
| deergomoo wrote:
| Atlassian's WYSIWYG editors are some of the buggiest bits of UI
| I've ever had the misfortune of using. Writing anything in Jira
| or Confluence is an exercise in misery. Even basic stuff like
| hyperlinks often go wrong.
| pretdl wrote:
| https://bitbucket.org/nicklassandell/chrome-form-recovery/
|
| saved my sanity more than once regarding lost jira inputs
| bitexploder wrote:
| Just a thought, but a lot of Jira installs often have wacky
| addons and such. Maybe one of them created an undesirable
| interaction with Jira that caused this. Is that a reliably
| reproducible bug? Maybe something with how your team configured
| the other issue types? Very annoying bug regardless.
| nickjj wrote:
| I'm not sure, I didn't set up our Jira account but it looks
| like default behavior based on this screenshot:
| https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-
| id...
|
| That "Issue Type" dropdown box is what I changed a value for
| and it cleared the description below it (also seen in the
| screenshot).
|
| Our set up might be pretty basic because the A to B from my
| original comment was "New Feature" to "Improvement" which is
| included in that screenshot.
| drchopchop wrote:
| The problem with JIRA is that yes, everyone uses it, but most
| people hate it. In my experience, the only people that advocate
| for it are PM/PMO/TPM type people who need very specific and
| customizable workflows and reports. And even then, they
| continually run into quirks and bad UX everywhere.
|
| This leaves them very vulnerable to another company taking
| their market share, as soon as they create something better
| that is extensible enough to get management signoff. I know a
| lot of companies have tried and failed here, but someone's
| going to eventually do it.
| zac23or wrote:
| I never write anything in any web interface. I write in notepad
| and copy and paste. I had many bad surprises ... I can't trust
| web interfaces. And I use the Windows clipboard manager too.
| throwamon wrote:
| You mean literally Windows' Notepad? Because that's about the
| worst app to write on. Not even going to go into how it's
| almost devoid of useful commands.
|
| Make one mistake, you're good. Make two, tough luck, you can
| only undo once. Accidentally select some (or all) text and
| type over it then somewhere else? Today's really not your
| day. It's actually _worse_ than textboxes in this respect.
|
| This happened to me more times than I'd like to admit before
| I knew better.
| logicchains wrote:
| >You mean literally Windows' Notepad? Because that's about
| the worst app to write on.
|
| It's actually one of the best on Windows, because if you
| leave your computer for a moment and it randomly decides to
| restart to install a Windows Update, often a notepad with
| unsaved changes will block it from restarting, whilst
| unsaved work elsewhere won't.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Vs Notepad++ that simply autosaves in that case? Only
| problem there is when you realise you have 50 tabs of
| scratch data you were expecting to have been discarded by
| now but are all still loaded up next time it starts up...
| zac23or wrote:
| Notepad++. Or Vim. Or any editor.
| time0ut wrote:
| This is how I work as well, but Sublime is my preferred
| editor. Same on both Windows and MacOS. Autosaves
| everything. Super fast.
| wartijn_ wrote:
| I also prefer to write my stuff offline and than paste it to
| a web interface. That works great, until you write markdown
| and paste in into Confluence. Instead of just accepting
| markdown and formatting it in the same way it does when you
| type markdown, Confluence puts it between code tags..
|
| Jira does this better, but is still weird with their text
| formatting. There are two different kinds of input fields,
| one of them accepts markdown, the other one some other kind
| of markup language. Copying some formatted text from one of
| the inputs to the other doesn't work because of this.
| exyi wrote:
| It had never happened to me except for Confluence and
| Microsoft Teams. Firefox even preserves the typed text
| between reloads of the page - so unless the web app hacks the
| textarea somehow, the text will stay there.
| dalbasal wrote:
| This article's finger is on the right place, but IMO the analysis
| is off.
|
| Netflix, has recently excited the fundamental/rationalist
| investor camp. The huge valuations hot tech companies enjoy
| _must_ eventually be justified by a "Thiel Monopoly." That's the
| only way to earn the 20%-50% margins that Google/Apple/Meta can
| achieve. Netflix sells a cheap consumer product. One product
| among several similar options. Consumers are savvy, with many
| jumping between subscriptions for deals and variety. Content
| producers have market power, because multiple buyers.
|
| In short, textbook microeconomics is afoot. That means
| competition, efficiency and _low margins_. That means "startup
| economics" don't apply. The market is not going to let Netflix
| sit on massive margins and monopoly market share. Newschool tech
| investors see this as an abomination. Old schoolers see it as
| cosmic justice.
|
| Anyway.. those who desire market rationality love Netflix and are
| applying the Netflix analysis to everything.
|
| Atlassian is a different story entirely. They actually sell
| software. Enterprise software, really. There are no content
| producers squeezing them for a bigger cut. The companies who pay
| them aren't price sensitive, and they _are_ locked in enough.
| This is not the "microeconomic normality" monster that bit
| Netflix. Atlassian's _business model_ is fine. Competition isn 't
| the problem, and neither is consumer bargaining power.
|
| Atlassian's problem is that they haven't done good enough. The
| bar, set by both tech history and the $150bn peak valuation, is
| that Atlassian becomes a microsoft.. at least a SalesForce, IMB
| or somesuch. Where's Atlassian's challenge to AWS? When is
| Atlassian leading the WFH revolution. How will Atlassian become
| the organisational nervous system of the modern knowledge firm?
|
| It just doesn't look likely that Atlassian is going to achieve
| that kind of big-hairy-goal. The products have a crusty,
| uninspiring feel. The take over the world vibe is missing.
|
| So... Atlassian's valuation is down. I doubt the share price will
| ever approach "rational." Software companies have value, and the
| floor is set by opportunistic M&A. If stock markets don't want
| TEAM @ 10X revenue or more... someone will buy them.
| geodel wrote:
| > The companies who pay them aren't price sensitive, and they
| are locked in enough.
|
| I doubt this is true lately. I have seen even more critical
| ticketing system like ServiceNow/Cherwell/Remedy getting
| replaced. We replaced Slack with other chat software because of
| licensing cost. Big companies are not price sensitive seems
| like old theory. Because I am seeing in so many large companies
| increasing license fee is causing replacement of existing
| products.
| dalbasal wrote:
| I didn't mean that lock-in is absolute. I mean that this is
| not netflix. Customers don't hop around for fun.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| hnbad wrote:
| > Atlassian's prospectus noted that in 2015 the business grew by
| 48%, around double this year's growth.
|
| If Atlassian is 20 years old now, that means it was over 10 years
| old (~13) then. Atlassian was an enterprise service company at
| that point already. What kind of enterprise service company can
| be expected to maintain a 50% year-over-year growth for nearly a
| decade? If that's "around double this year's growth" that means
| they're still growing by 20-25%. That's impressive.
|
| I'm not saying the valuation correction is wrong or that the
| claims they're unprofitable are unfair, I'm wondering what made
| anyone think they'd perform better than they have in terms of
| growth if that growth is already impressive. They sell enterprise
| services ffs and they're the gold standard outside e.g.
| Sharepoint.
|
| Maybe the problem isn't their growth rate itself, but attempting
| to build the business model on an unrealistic growth rate.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| It is very fair to ask oneself - where will Atlassian be in
| 10-15-20 years? JIRA is slow as molasses, and ripe for
| disruption. It Atlassian themselves won't do it, others will try.
|
| In the end - if you're an investor that's exposed to Atlassian,
| these things do matter. And the article is being fair on that
| point - do you think Atlassian is worth what it's worth, and if
| so - why? If the answer is _" customer lock-in"_ and _" no real
| competitors yet"_ well, plenty of companies in the yesteryears
| were also in that spot.
| zeusk wrote:
| Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM they said.
|
| How is Oracle doing these days anyway?
| threeseed wrote:
| Oracle revenue is up 5% at $11.8 billion and they have a
| strong and growing presence in the Government Cloud market.
| So really not doing too badly at all.
|
| https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-
| details/2022/...
| zeusk wrote:
| That 5% is below annual inflation, so it shrank in real
| terms.
| asimpletune wrote:
| Just a random, semi-related thought, but maybe if there is a
| recession, then software as an industry will become more
| connected to business/engineering fundamentals? I see a few
| people mentioned Jira busy-work here... maybe the market will
| actually correct for all of that?
| vogt wrote:
| It's tough for me to square with the JIRA hate. I don't mean to
| simply be contrarian here, I have limited (<6 months) experience.
| But the alternative horrors I've been forced to use - like Rally
| or a couple internal tools that were highly neglected - I can't
| imagine it's really _that_ bad...
| gonzo41 wrote:
| It's not the worst at all, sometimes developers are like the
| cats that like to sleep in the box the new bed came in.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I just find most stuff works better via GitHub tickets. Let the
| managers use whatever tool they want and then put actual work
| on GitHub.
| vogt wrote:
| Yes, that would be great. We use gitlab, but the budgeting is
| so siloed that for the most part only developers ever get
| credentials
| jakub_g wrote:
| > While it is still used by many tech businesses (including the
| author's), it has no real network effect -- that is, users can
| switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com
| with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to
| a new system).
|
| Lol. At some companies, Jira workflows literally run the whole
| company. At my prev job, prod deployments were tightly linked to
| Jira.
| janee wrote:
| > users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp
| or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle
| of switching to a new system).
|
| My experience tells me the complete opposite of this statement.
| Regardless of the the workflows, automation and whatnot there
| are tons and tons of IP hidden in tickets and over a long
| enough period references to them end up scattered all over your
| tools, commits, documents, wikis, IM, email, etc. etc.
|
| When you move ticketing providers it's very likely you can't
| correctly migrate all of your existing data into the new system
| without breaking or losing some of it.
|
| I detest trying to figure out why a certain code change was
| made, looking at the commit message only to find a reference to
| link to a dead ticket.
|
| I'm not for or against Jira, but moving ticketing systems does
| not come at a "minimal cost" in my opinion and needs careful
| consideration and motivation.
| hoseja wrote:
| Funny how the network effect is rephrased in terms of cost of
| switching, instead of the more benign word of mouth etc.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Coupling, it's a constant scourge all over in software.
|
| Whilst I LOVE to crap on Jira, it has brought some magnitude of
| order and civility to the PMO's and at least created a familiar
| work environment for people.
|
| God help me If I ever have to go back to word docs and
| sharepoint to manage project work.
| chii wrote:
| > (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system).
|
| that's doing a lot of work in that sentence!
| rmbyrro wrote:
| > other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system
|
| Is like saying: "people can move overseas with minimal cost
| (other than shitloads of migration bureaucracy, frequent flying
| to meet family, put their entire furniture on top of a cargo
| ship)
| yen223 wrote:
| And, since this a thread about JIRA, a lot of bureaucracy
| threeseed wrote:
| More like trying to remove an invasive cancer that has spread
| to all parts of your body whilst you're still needing to move
| around, be productive and live your life.
| dx034 wrote:
| I'd say that for many large companies, Jira is better than
| the alterntive of having multiple systems that need to be
| kept in sync. Steering any large company will be a mess, no
| software will ever make that easy. And any software
| designed to be that flexible will end up being slow
| eventually.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I guess the cancer is analogous to JIRA itself, not to
| the migration of JIRA.
|
| Migrating out of JIRA is analogous to "trying to remove
| an invasive cancer".
| yellow_lead wrote:
| At my old company, they had two annoying jira workflows
| management wanted to tie in to the dev process
|
| 1) When the user wants to merge to master, at least one of the
| commit messages must reference a valid Jira ticket.
|
| 2) A Jira plugin was installed such that when tests were run in
| CI, a jira ticket was created to record the result (pass/fail).
| This somehow ticks a SOC compliance box
| wizofaus wrote:
| 1) sounds pretty reasonable and standard to me, though a
| backdoor is usually necessary for PRs that are just to fix a
| build-blocking issue due a bad merge e.g. Agree 2) is stupid,
| why would you need a ticket for a passing build? And unless
| you have a super stable CI system a decent % of failures are
| transitory and don't need tracking - but if your master
| branch fails to build on retry an auto created blocker ticket
| makes sense.
| zelos wrote:
| Yes - JIRA is almost a textbook example of lock in. Moving a
| large company's workflow would mean months of disruption.
| zeusk wrote:
| I helped a prior employer move to github and asana through
| JIRA's own APIs. It's actually not that hard and the entire
| engineering group was very cheerful of the change.
| threeseed wrote:
| Be curious what the size of the engineering team and
| company was.
|
| Asana is great for SMBs but for larger developer teams it
| lacks a lot of features and integrations.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| (Work at Asana so I might be biased)
|
| While Jira may have some unique features for developers,
| one of Asana's selling points is how it allows non-
| homogenous teams (incl whole companies) to work together
| (and by themselves within individual teams) on a variety
| of different kinds of work (projects, processes, loose
| day to day tasks etc). And as for scale we have many
| customers with thousands of users (one tech customer of
| ours has 100,000+ users on Asana - most of them I'm sure
| would be product teams).
| zelos wrote:
| Really? Was it easy enough to define mappings between all
| the various fields/ticket types etc? I guess you could do
| it per-team across an organisation.
|
| It always seems hard enough to get information out of JIRA
| _using JIRA_ when I watch our PO in planning meetings.
| zeusk wrote:
| Yup, there was some mess around inexact mapping so we had
| our own conflict resolution and definition of what and
| how to interpret respective fields.
|
| Honestly, JIRA easily has one of the most sluggish and
| horrid developer experience so the bar wasn't too high to
| begin with. Visual Studio Online / Azure DevOps is far
| better than JIRA ecosystem imo.
| maccard wrote:
| Any tool has lock in. How much work do you think would be
| involved in moving from perforce to git, or from Bamboo to
| CircleCI?
| hoseja wrote:
| Not if there is an open protocol with multiple conforming
| implementations.
| alxlaz wrote:
| I was (a very small, and only part-time) part of a team
| that did a migration from a Perforce-era VCS to git. It was
| about 6 weeks of 100% background work -- as in, we prepared
| cheat sheets, changed or rewrote relevant parts of the CI
| and deployment chain, while everyone in the company kept
| using the old VCS.
|
| Then it took about 36 hours to move the relevant code bases
| (a few dozen repositories, some of them 20+ years old) over
| to git, including the entire commit history. This was
| pretty slow. It could have probably be done faster but we
| figured, since we only do it once, we don't need to invest
| too much time. We scheduled it on Saturday morning so it
| would be done by Sunday afternoon and we had some time to
| test it before Monday hit the earliest timezones.
|
| We had a backup plan in place in case it didn't work but it
| wasn't necessary.
|
| The two repos were automatically synced for a while, to
| allow people who had started work on something on, say,
| Friday morning, to commit their changes to the old repos,
| rather than have to replay their work on the new ones.
| After that the old repos remained read-only, but we
| preserved them because, obviously, our issue tracker had
| twenty years' worth of references to old VCS revision
| numbers.
|
| So it took about 6 weeks of indulgently part-time work (our
| infra team worked several hours a day on this, I worked...
| about an hour or so a week?) to plot this daring plan, and
| about two days to make it happen. The total amount of work
| disruption was likely non-zero but certainly small enough
| that most people didn't complain of anything other than
| having to learn git.
|
| I can't say about Bamboo to CircleCI but, having gone
| through one of these, I can say with 100% confidence that
| _if_ you start out right -- that is, your existing
| repository is not a mess of stale branches and weird merges
| -- and you don 't go about moving fast and breaking things,
| moving from even an ancient revision control system to git
| is not really apocalyptic.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your experience. Migrating from
| software A to B is part of life, Jira does not hold a
| special technical place. Politically, that's a different
| conversation...
| geodel wrote:
| You are right. I'd say politically it is equally likely
| to have Jira replaced some places as it is not replaced
| in other places.
| alxlaz wrote:
| Oh, yeah, politically that took like four years to
| happen, if not more.
| threeseed wrote:
| The thought of running a 10,000+ development team using
| Basecamp is hilarious in its insanity.
|
| Because that is where Jira primarily plays. In enterprise
| companies where it's rolled out across the organisation with
| tentacles firmly embedded into almost every process and system.
|
| And whilst people continue to criticise Jira it continues to
| grow because in reality it competes with products like Rally
| not Asana. And there really isn't anything out there that can
| offer the same level of customisability and flexibility.
| Juliate wrote:
| Indeed Jira scales a lot (although being slow) and is well
| customisable and flexible. Its plugin system is also great
| (although a better documentation of how to develop/maintain
| one, and of their APIs would grealy help).
|
| But in the meantime, it requires increasing discipline and
| regular revampings of internal processes across dev, product,
| market teams, and that's a lot of energy to burn to make it
| "work" across an org.
|
| Even more when you have people that are for very strict and
| precise adherence to processes.
|
| Whereas a less flexible, good enough system could help funnel
| the same energy towards something more productive than just
| internal compliance for the sake of it.
| threeseed wrote:
| Which is why Jira continues to sell so well.
|
| You simply can't force one way of working on larger
| companies even if that way is undisputedly the right way.
| Because a lot of people will need to sign off on which tool
| to purchase and each of them are special geniuses with
| their own special genius way of working.
| raverbashing wrote:
| For real, I don't think it's all about "each special
| snowflake's way of working" but there are legitimate
| needs that change
|
| Each team can have a different workflow with Jira
|
| Jira works for non-software-development tasks as well
|
| I've seen it used on companies having 4/5 levels of
| stories deep (think
| Initiatives/Epic/Stories/Subtasks/etc. Different
| companies split this different ways.
|
| The plugins sound inconsequential but they are very
| useful (almost a must) in several occasions.
| Juliate wrote:
| Well, time will tell.
|
| I'm not opposing a single Jira methodology to a myriad of
| other ones (tools or processes).
|
| I'm saying that Jira, without being constantly challenged
| for what it is[1] creates its own growing and tiring
| bureaucracy because companies (even large ones) cannot
| agree on a right way to work (but will add piles over
| piles of bureaucracy).
|
| [1] exactly like what Agile methodologies, or some
| certifications are; where now it feels like almost no one
| remembers/knows how to organize teams _without_ resorting
| to anything that Agile-thinking has tainted.
|
| It somehow relates to the fact that, in some companies,
| more energy and money is burnt over how to organize the
| work rather than doing the work itself. And it definitely
| shows.
| rglullis wrote:
| > Because that is where Jira primarily plays.
|
| Is there a breakout of company size vs revenue for Jira?
| Because for the past 10 years I've worked only on smaller
| companies and they all, no exceptions, used Jira as well.
| pmontra wrote:
| That should be the usual environment for Jira. However the
| only company I saw using it was a two people company with
| less than a dozen of consultants. That was in the early '10s.
| I was definitely not impressed by the UX, inconsistent, slow,
| apparently designed to make it hard to learn. Other companies
| I worked with later on (no more than a couple of dozen of
| people) use Kanbanize, Asana, TeamCity + YouTrack and yes,
| also Basecamp. On the development side, anything among GitHub
| (but no Actions yet), Bitbucket (plus Pipelines), Travis and
| custom stuff with a fair dose of Good Luck /s.
| Hallucinaut wrote:
| Every bank I have worked on in any capacity has had Jira in
| some form. So perhaps it's a little more industry specific
| than one might think.
| goodpoint wrote:
| The thought of running a 10,000+ development team using Jira
| is horrific.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| The thought of running a 10000+ development team is
| horrific.
| vasco wrote:
| The thought of running is horrific.
| square_usual wrote:
| Think of how much human effort is being wasted on _Jira_!
| jnwatson wrote:
| It is just a ticketing system with a very robust business
| process engine.
|
| Most complaints I've heard about Jira boil down to the
| horrible processes people choose to implement in it.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Thats the rub too. Jira setup in a simple way is what
| most people need. Yet you get process people in there and
| suddenly you have 50+ fields to fill out before you can
| even start working on something. Then another 20+ fields
| to fill out to close out a ticket. I went from taking 2-3
| hours total to plan out a sprint, to it taking 3-4 days
| and many meetings. And _no_ _one_ can tell me how these
| fields are used day to day, what are they trying to
| solve, and how it was better than what we had. If I
| wanted to do waterfall I would not be having 2 week
| sprints and this process would be wildly different.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Feudal-like political jockeying for power produces this
| nonsense. I've been beleaguered with such nonsense for
| most of my 28-year career, working in 3 Fortune 250's. It
| certainly doesn't help that JIRA is designed to be
| flexible enough to be all things to all people for all
| purposes. And that's why CIO's love to buy it.
| bombcar wrote:
| The same thing happens to orgs using Salesforce, custom
| fields get added and ignored ad infinititum.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| My (cynical) experience is that those fields are simply
| there to generate arbitrary metrics for the process
| people to show to higher-ups to demonstrate that they are
| "managing" the project.
| goodpoint wrote:
| People really underestimate the loss of productivity and
| morale of using slow web-based tools. Now multiply it for
| 10k.
| yunohn wrote:
| >> with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of
| switching to a new system)
|
| The first part does not realistically connect to the second
| part. Surely the author is aware that switching to new systems
| is actually quite expensive monetarily and operationally -
| definitely not "minimal"?
| gomox wrote:
| I was about to write the exact same comment - quote the bit
| where they say Jira has no network effects and add "LOL" after
| it.
|
| How out of touch can you be with the stickiness of enterprise
| SaaS, and still write financial commentary?
| MarkMarine wrote:
| How's that working when Jira is down for almost a week and
| there is next to no feedback about the outage
| ArnoVW wrote:
| While it is true that Jira is "sticky", the statement was that
| it did not have a network effect.
|
| MS Word, Facebook, WhatsApp, Visa, they all have network
| effects: every user you add makes your product more compelling,
| thus creating a virtuous circle. You need to buy their product
| because _other_ people have their product.
| rjsw wrote:
| Jira can have a network effect.
|
| ISO (the standards body) has started using it, I'm sure in
| part because large companies who contribute to standards were
| already using it. The committee that I am a member of
| switched from Bugzilla to it.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| JIRA's network effect is the amount of plugins and third
| party integrations that work with JIRA.
|
| The author points at monday.com: I used it a few years ago
| and it only has basic and useless integrations out of the
| box, even for a service like Gitlab. You either develop what
| you need youreslf of try to so something with Zapier.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| The network effect of Jira is obviously at the department
| level; dept. head A mandates Jira. User B gets moved to new
| dept. C, we need some sort of project management tool - hey B
| what did you use when you were working for A, oh A likes
| using Jira, I didn't like it much but it's ok I guess.
|
| Ok folks, let's use Jira!
|
| Dept. Head A moves to Dept. D, hey everyone we are going to
| start using Jira.
|
| Dept D. is being merged with Dept. E, Dept and new Dept. Head
| J is joining. E is using some open source Kanban solution
| based on CouchDB, hmm, let's go to Jira - other departments
| are also using it and then we can get rid of the CouchDB
| thing!
|
| In point of fact where network effects of Jira is concerned,
| I have put some effort into learning JQL and setting up my
| own dashboards, so when you give me one of the competitors I
| get grouchy. I prefer Jira or Trello - also owned by
| Atlassian iirc?
| baud147258 wrote:
| another network effect of Jira is that it's usually set up
| using AD, so once it's installed and configured, anyone in
| that org can go and look around without having to create an
| account.
| codeyperson wrote:
| What network effects does MSWord have?
| iddan wrote:
| You couldn't open a MSWord file without MSWord.
| [deleted]
| angrygoat wrote:
| Everyone else is using it to write documents, email around
| drafts, collaboratively edit via OneDrive; sure you can use
| an alternative, but nobody will want to see a format but
| .docx, so your alternative is almost guaranteed to be worse
| than or equivalent to Word. If your alternative stuffs up
| the document's formatting you become seen as a pain in the
| neck. So it's just easier to use Word.
| matwood wrote:
| Every contract I've received or sent for red-lining uses
| Word and change tracking. I'm sure exceptions exist, but
| every lawyer I've dealt with uses Word as the defacto
| standard for contract negotiations.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| No wonder, given the "quality" of the software they deliver.
|
| They claimed to support Markdown in Confluence - It does not work
| as good as any decent Markdown parser you can install in any
| mainstream programming language and does not understand, that
| within Markdown there can be HTML, for example for heading link
| targets and TOC. Same for Bitbucket. What are they doing? Letting
| interns code incomplete Markdown parsers and deploying them for
| everyone to haunt them with subpar quality parsing? The thing
| cannot even render a readme.md file correctly in Bitbucket.
|
| Everything is slow to no end, downloading 20+ megabytes (no joke,
| no exaggeration!) for displaying a friggin git repo and the files
| list.
|
| Wiki pages that the search function lists suddenly become
| unreachable.
|
| WYSIWYG editor on Confluence is still a joke and annoying to no
| end.
|
| Any technical person, who has ever used any decent alternative
| will run for the hills, before using that unholy combination of
| software, that is Atlassian. Jira is probably still the best
| among the bunch of utterly bad experiences and its UI is just
| terrible. Cannot find anything easily there.
| zac23or wrote:
| > That is, CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian's revolutionary Jira
| product so much, it was able to grow virally and organically
| without the business having to spend millions of dollars on an
| enterprise sales team.
|
| Here people talk a lot about creating a good product, code
| quality, etc. It doesn't matter. You don't need to build a great
| product: you need to find the market and exploit it faster than
| you can. The quality of your product is not important.
|
| How is Atlassian with so many bad products is valued at $52
| billion? Jira is one of the worst products in the eyes of
| developers. But it does not matter. Managers love Jira because
| with Jira it's "very easy" to create a workflow and micromanage
| everything. And managers decide what's good for the company, they
| have the power to buy Jira.
|
| But Jira is not Vilain. The villain is the school of management
| through fear, micromanagement, etc. I worked at a company that
| created an internal JIRA. It's worse than Jira. It was too
| complex to fill everything, we create a script to do this.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > That is, CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian's revolutionary Jira
| product so much, it was able to grow virally and organically
|
| > Here people talk a lot about creating a good product, code
| quality, etc. It doesn't matter. You don't need to build a
| great product
|
| You really haven't disproven that CTOs and CPOS loved the
| product initially, which I believe to be true.
|
| So yes, you do need to build a great product at the beginning.
| Then at enough scale, your product can become shit in some
| ways, and you can focus on sales.
|
| But the article's thesis is that Jira did not start as a shit
| product.
| zac23or wrote:
| I have no idea what Jira was like in the beginning. But today
| Jira is a very bad product (in the opinion of developers),
| but managers still love Jira because Jira has found a market
| (managers, CTOS, CPOS, etc). Jira being a very slow and buggy
| application is not important.
|
| As an example of a tool that found a market in the area of
| developers is Docker. I used docker in some companies and my
| God, Docker is buggy as hell, sometimes I pull new code in
| git and Docker doesn't see it, I have a lot of network
| problems, etc. And have no idea what Docker was like in the
| beginning, but when I used it, it was horrible experience,
| and developers continue to use it. I'm very happy that my
| current employee does not use Docker.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I didn't realize that they were unprofitable; not good.
|
| I don't think they should be valued as a pre-profit/pre-revenue
| growth stock - as the article says - the product doesn't really
| have network effects or strong lock-in.
| taurath wrote:
| JIRA has huge feature creep lockin along the likes of sales
| force. It costs huge amounts of money on consultants to move
| off of it.
|
| Any new company probably wouldn't use it though, it's just
| overkill.
| threeseed wrote:
| Actually new companies do use it.
|
| It's very affordable for growing startups and its
| customisability is really useful.
| maccard wrote:
| > JIRA has huge feature creep lockin along the likes of sales
| force.
|
| Sure Jira has lockin, but so does any tool with any features.
| Git has lockin, but you don't hear of people avoiding
| branches in case they need to move to perforce.
|
| > Any new company probably wouldn't use it though, it's just
| overkill.
|
| So what should they use instead? The thing about jira is it
| does the basics well, far better than any of the competitors
| we evaluated. Sure it's not perfect, but no tool is.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Git has lockin, but you don't hear of people avoiding
| branches in case they need to move to perforce.
|
| Replace Git with SVN in the comment above.
|
| Also replace Perforce with Git in the comment above.
|
| Then you have a viable argument and a story of mine that
| actually is a case of exactly that - back when project
| management for certain projects was done primarily in SVN,
| there was the expectation to stick to the popular way of
| laying out repositories, with folders for trunk, branches
| and tags, a bit like the example here:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2611237/subversion-
| repos...
|
| Of course, you didn't really need to do it that way and
| certain other projects explored other options, such as
| having features under the root of the repository, like
| "/ISSUE123" or something like that.
|
| Well, as time passed, it became apparent that SVN just
| wouldn't cut it (TortoiseSVN was such nice software,
| though) and that the projects would need to be migrated off
| of SVN and into Git, to import them into GitLab/GitHub or
| elsewhere. Those projects all still being in development
| and having the need to be trace back changes to particular
| feature requests/issues meant that all of the revision
| history would also need to be moved over.
|
| The problem with most of the migration scripts, however,
| was that they broke when you had a non-standard layout and
| as a consequence of that, you simply couldn't finish the
| import process and were stuck on SVN. Back then I actually
| resolved it by rewriting the history of those repositories
| into the standard format, but it was just a massive waste
| of time and a headache.
|
| Alas, a sentence like this would absolutely be false:
|
| > SVN has lockin, but you don't hear of people avoiding
| non-standard repo layouts in case they need to move to Git.
|
| So yes, despite there being certain features and the
| ability to do something, that doesn't immediately mean that
| you should jump right in and use them! I might also have a
| few horror stories about Git submodules, or maybe even
| using Git LFS with synchronized Git repositories across
| GitHub and GitLab (of course, the LFS contents weren't sent
| properly, so no binary assets were mirrored), as well as
| other such problems.
|
| If you can, stick to a stable, boring and predictable set
| of core features in any software package.
| dvh wrote:
| Isn't "unprofitable" just a newspeak for "managed to carefully
| adjust financials to not pay any taxes"
| Aachen wrote:
| This is what I'm reading the comment thread for. Unprofitable
| on paper, or unprofitable as in a shareholder is footing the
| bill personally for no apparent reason all these years?
|
| Because at this size and age company, that seems unlikely,
| you'd have to be very rich already to be able to fund such a
| thing for so long, and have very strong belief ("any day
| now!") to not cut your losses all this time.
| LeonB wrote:
| Bingo
| albertopv wrote:
| 8000 people and still a 3 years old useful feature like [0] is
| still in 'gathering interest' status.
|
| [0] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-20097
| mbesto wrote:
| Ugh, the "unprofitable" trope in B2B SaaS...here we go again...
|
| FCF: 2019 - $420M 2020 - $538M
| 2021 - $808M
|
| 30% CAGR (just for the last 4 years alone)
|
| 2021 Numbers: $1.3B Revenue $372M S&M
| Spend $973M R&D Spend
|
| These are all super healthy numbers and if the company stopped
| growing, then it would easily become profitable.
|
| The author needs a finance course.
| gjvc wrote:
| the sooner this shit heap of a company fails the better
| gw67 wrote:
| The author is predicting a -80% crash (37$ as fair value vs 189$
| current)
| ronhav3 wrote:
| Only 'unprofitable' in GAAP terms.It has a very healthy Free Cash
| Flow margin. And it still a 7x return from IPO.
|
| All-in-all, a great success story. (Whatever one thinks of Jira
| the product)
| altdataseller wrote:
| Thats the only measure of real profitability - GAAP.
|
| Free cash flow includes stock based compensation. Thats a real
| expanse and turns negative cashflow to positive. But it dilutes
| existing shareholders, you would like to see positive cashflow
| EXCLUDING stock based compensation
| ronhav3 wrote:
| If GAAP is the only measure, then Amazon and Salesforce have
| been utter failures for 20+ years, only returning 120,000%
| and 4000% returns to shareholders.
|
| In fact, if an investor went by GAAP, he would have missed
| the entire massive SaaS boom of the past decade.
| altdataseller wrote:
| Did i say these companies were failures? I simply said they
| were not profitable.
| wrongotron wrote:
| It seems clear to me that they are a company that no longer cares
| about strategic investment.
|
| Their forays (acquisitions) into version control have been so
| amazingly weak. Stash was devoid of even basic features. Now they
| have Bitbucket:
|
| - they still can't get it to perform adequately after years - it
| lacks syntax highlighting in PR views - it took them years to get
| side-by-side diffs into PR views - it integrates with third party
| tools poorly
|
| I thought maybe the Github acquisition would spur them into
| recognizing it as a important product category, but I guess not.
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| > that is, users can switch to a competitor product like Asana,
| Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial
| hassle of switching to a new system).
|
| I can tell the reporter has never used or operated something as
| integral as a ticketing system at scale. These systems are
| integrated everywhere to automate operations flows. They're used
| to continuously enforce compliance. The list goes on. Ripping
| them out at an enterprise company is very painful. Then on top of
| all that, you have to re-train everyone on how to use a new
| system.
| fbanon wrote:
| I thought Jira and Confluence were bad, until I started using the
| Facebook internal wiki and task tools...
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| yea I actually miss JIRA too
| axg11 wrote:
| Same for Amazon.
| aviramha wrote:
| >instead relying on 'product-led growth'. That is, CTOs and CPOs
| loved Atlassian's revolutionary Jira product so much
|
| Does anyone like any Atlassian product nowadays?
| EGreg wrote:
| I don't see why this is a problem for society. Things rise and
| they fall. That's markets. The guys who have created it are
| billionaires, they helped a lot of people. Now it's time to move
| on to more modern things.
|
| Similarly with decentralized projects like Bitcoin. I have come
| to appreciate Moxie's stance on decentralized systems moving more
| slowly. It's a trade-off. Can any Bitcoin maxis please tell us
| why we can't look to newer projects for solving whatever it is
| Bitcoin was supposed to do but failed to achieve - be a peer to
| peer cash system for example? How about other applications like
| voting... why always and only Bitcoin, a 13-year-old project that
| barely evolves?
| gaff33 wrote:
| Does anyone actually like using JIRA? Or Confluence? Or any of
| the Atlassian products?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I don't mind Jira. We're using Github Projects (because for OSS
| project where people report issues to the repo) and while new
| Projects has gotten significantly better, I do still miss some
| of the planning views that Jira gives you.
| j45 wrote:
| I have learned a lot of the hate towards jira including my own
| is the difference between a well setup config vs a bad one or
| where many people are, using it out of the bud.
| perlgeek wrote:
| I use Jira at work with a workflow that is highly customized to
| our development workflow, and I like using it.
|
| There are some annoying aspects, but it's way better for our
| workflow than anything else I've tried (which includes github
| issues, gitlab issues, OTRS, RT, trac and a few others I've
| forgotten by now).
| digitalsushi wrote:
| Anyone using these products has no choice, so, I would say that
| these products having any API at all that can cobble together
| automation is a huge blessing.
|
| We have wrapper functions that allow us to automate all the
| painful interactions with atlassian software. None of them are
| clever in any way; they're rote. But without them, we weren't
| using the services fully, which is sophomoric since we don't
| have freedom to use other services.
|
| I can't defend the slowness though!
| ecmascript wrote:
| Confluence has always confused me. Every aspect of the product
| sucked when I used it several years ago.
|
| There was little to no discoverability, it was slow as shit and
| the editing tools weren't that good. The integrations to their
| other products were at the time pretty much non-existing as
| well. Always felt like it was really basic which made me wonder
| how it could be so slow.
|
| Any other wiki software were probably better. Mediawiki is free
| but people still paid for Confluence.
|
| I don't get why people used it and still use it to this day. I
| dislike pretty much every of their products though, they all
| suck in my opinion and I have written several JIRA plugins so I
| had extensive experience with it.
| sideeffffect wrote:
| I really liked, when I used them, how well integrated all the
| tools were: BitBucket, JIRA, Confluence...
|
| You could see PRs related to a given ticket, see tickets in
| wiki, I'm sure it integrates well with CI (Bamboo/Pipelines?),
| etc. It might seem small, but such integration makes work more
| pleasant and comfortable.
| iasay wrote:
| No. I'd rather go land skiing on concrete in my birthday suit.
| keyle wrote:
| That is oddly specific and rather appealing.
| iasay wrote:
| It comes from sitting in an Atlassian sales pitch meeting
| where I was thinking of less painful things to do with my
| time.
| Avalaxy wrote:
| Yes, I like Trello. Although that was acquired.
| OJFord wrote:
| I think for the purposes of this question, your answer's more
| like 'no, I prefer that competitor'.
|
| (Hence the acquisition presumably, probably gained them not
| just the talent but a lot of mindshare and extant SME/startup
| business.)
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| I liked it when I first switched to it from whatever was I was
| using ~2010 (Intervals, I think...). It still is somewhat
| better than a lot of task management/workflow software that you
| commonly find in enterprise. But it's kinda just become another
| version of the thing it was supposed to destroy. The huge,
| complicated, bureaucracy management system.
| darrenf wrote:
| Over the past few years I've gone from despising Confluence to
| really, genuinely enjoying authoring in it. I find the syntax
| and shortcuts easy to remember and the UI pleasant. Hell, I
| even like the iOS app.
|
| Jira and Bitbucket, OTOH, the less said about them the better.
| dmitriid wrote:
| I like Confluence. And I've seen really good self-hosted
| deployments where there was a dedicated JIRA guys setting
| everything up.
| 734129837261 wrote:
| I hate it. Being forced to document crap in a pile of tens of
| thousands of documented things is insanity. Nobody reads that
| stuff, but because it's documented, you can always say: "Wait,
| did you not read the documentation?"
|
| Work goes faster if you keep it in small teams and let them
| self-organise.
| gabrielgio wrote:
| I love this approach the team can pick which tooling they
| want to use, github wiki, readthedocs, docx on FTP, whatever
| works best for them. Each teams has its requirements. I don't
| see PMs using git/markdown to write their documentation, the
| same way don't make me write an API documentation on
| Confluence.
| jnwatson wrote:
| That's not Jira's fault. That's like blaming PowerPoint when
| you don't like making presentations.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I hate Confluence, but I still feel it is not worst possible
| thing for handling some documentation.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| I like both JIRA and Confluence. I think many bad feelings
| towards JIRA are actually related to bad configuration. Like
| customizing the issues to add too many mandatory fields or
| creating a process that does not really match how people are
| working in practise.
|
| JIRA configuration is pain. Unless you are large enough to
| afford a dedicated JIRA admin, it would likely make sense to
| just pay for somebody once in a while to implement the stuff
| you want.
| spion wrote:
| I was keeping a list at a previous company:
|
| - default text size is too small, text block widths are often
| not constrained enough getting the "slashdot unreadability
| effect"
|
| - 0.5s+ lag when clicking _any_ textbox
|
| - 1s+ lag when clicking _any_ dropdown
|
| - 1s+ lag delay when grabbing and trying to drag-and-drop to
| reorder items in the backlog
|
| - 2s delay when clicking in an issue in the backlog _before_
| the loading starts (add about 2s more for the loading itself)
|
| - "Link issue" using a hyperlink icon. The whole idea of
| using the word "link" to talk about related issues without
| spending some time to think whether that's really confusing
| with hyperlinking
|
| - Error messages about what "might" be wrong with things
| rather than what is actually wrong: "We couldn't save your
| comment, it might be empty or have invalid formatting". Well
| which one is it? Did you really have trouble deciding whether
| my comment is empty or not? Be specific and tell me what
| exactly is wrong, or do you want me to binary-search / bisect
| myself?
|
| I _think_ most of the issues can be fixed by completely
| rewriting the frontend.
| adwww wrote:
| You've missed my main one, which is really hard to copy and
| paste issue numbers.
|
| Normally have to ctrl+click to open an issue in a new
| window, then select the key from the browser's URL field.
| aniforprez wrote:
| All my bad feelings are almost completely related to the
| horrible search, terrible UI and the hilariously bad
| performance of the app. The web app has two completely
| different markdown adjacent formats that are not compatible
| with each other so you get text rendered one way when you
| create a ticket and another when you edit it later. Search is
| almost never helpful beyond finding recent tickets. Multiple
| pages take so long to load abs the new UI is so laggy and
| busted
| adwww wrote:
| > bad configuration
|
| I briefly worked at a company with 1,000+ devs. They all used
| a single locked down Jira configuration.
|
| It had something like 30 columns - it was almost totally
| unreadable.
| netmare wrote:
| The only thing I used from them was their Mercurial hosting.
| That didn't go well...
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Like many, I would rejoice to see Jira die in a fire.
|
| But the fact is that if that happened, another tool would be
| used instead, and the same dysfunctional management processes
| would just re-emerge. Jira makes micromanagy bureaucratic
| process easy, but does not in itself cause it.
| itronitron wrote:
| No. I've always found the UI to be absolutely convoluted and
| horrible. I put it in the same class as Continuus/CM.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| I love JIRA. It's versatile, as simple or complex as we need,
| integrates with many things and drives processes in the org.
| People have many objections to using JIRA but often these are
| not about the tool but about the management procedures the tool
| serves.
| Majestic121 wrote:
| I don't know anybody that likes using JIRA, but to be fair I
| don't know anybody that likes to use Asana either.
|
| I might be wrong, but I think those tools are dedicated to
| something people don't like to do by default (planning, going
| through bureaucratic processes), so they don't like the tool
| either.
|
| But for some reason, they convince themselves that they don't
| like to go through Bureaucratic Processes because of
| JIRA/Asana/etc... and that if only the tool was better it would
| be a breeze, when in my experience the process is the real
| issue, rarely the tooling (even though it surely can be
| improved)
| jkukul wrote:
| Asana shows a flying unicorn when you complete a task. Makes
| my day every time.
|
| A bit more seriously - it's not only about Bureaucratic
| Processes. UX matters. If you need to deal with "Bureaucratic
| Processes" using a terrible UI, it makes things worse.
|
| Jira's UI is notoriously bad. Very slow. And the worst of all
| are the UX inconsistencies in Atlassian's products. Things
| behaving differently in Jira vs Confluence or even within
| Jira itself. For example, being able to use markdown when
| creating an issue but not when editing it (or vice versa, I
| don't remember).
| gabrielgio wrote:
| I tolerate Jira (even though it is too slow and clunky to me).
| But I despise everything else from Atlassian. I don't
| understand how people can stand using Confluence or Bitbucket.
| gempir wrote:
| Jira? Yes! Properly self hosted with skilled SysAdmins which
| don't allow every employee to install their favorite plugin.
| Then it runs fast and reliably.
|
| The UI is very configurable and has many power user tools, like
| their search is very good and has so many features.
|
| The Language for writing text is bad and sadly not even the
| same on other Atlassian products. Please just let me write
| markdown.
|
| Confluence is another story. It is one of the better tools for
| documentation, but it's generally slow no matter who runs it.
| It has very quirky drawbacks like a page needing to have a
| unique name in a space even if it is in a completely different
| tree structure.
|
| The editor itself from confluence hangs so much and has
| destroyed pages multiple times for me, thankfully the history
| is decent and you can recover usually.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I just checked and self hosted Jira is $42k/year. Not cheap.
| slyall wrote:
| I like Confluence. It does the job and is simple to use. I use
| it at home for general household stuff and projects.
|
| At work we are using a combination of notion and gitlab wiki
| and are probably going to move to confluence. Gitlab wiki is
| especially hard to use and thus stuff is under-documented. eg
| I'm a little project right now, we could use about 20 pages to
| document bits of it, this is such a pain in gitlab wiki.
|
| I use Jira, it is okay. I think a lot of people here hate it
| because they associate it with Enterprise paperwork and rules.
| digitalsushi wrote:
| Jira is a mirror. You're a corporation with policies. When
| you look into the mirror you see yourself.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| That also ate a lot of small healthy business pie in the market.
| I have mixed feeling about this. Do you think a company's R&D
| worth sucking a chuck of opportunity for small companies? I don't
| believe the niche vs. mass is less overlap. Imagine the market
| where there were no excel/spreadsheet/word. The customers of the
| market is spoiled by cheap/free/network-effect-koolaid plans just
| for sake of growth.
| iasay wrote:
| Well their old slogan of "because you've got issues" is looking
| ironic now.
| jansan wrote:
| I am by no means an expert in the valuation of companies, but I
| understand primary school level math.
|
| If Atalssian has a revenue (not profit, revenue) of $2.95
| billion, how on earth can the stock market capitalization be $162
| billion? If that was the profit, there would be a yearly interest
| rate of 2% on the stock value, which is pretty good in today's
| financial market conditions, but it is the revenue of a 20 years
| old company that never had a positive PE. What is the expectation
| of the market? A new killer product? Total dominantion of the
| issue tracker market (which btw also includes Github"? I do not
| get it.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I don't think it's crazy. You're valuing the company as a
| mature dividend paying company - one that is paying out to
| share holders the profits it makes, not investing further to
| grow. But that's not a reasonable way to value Atlassian,
| they're a growth company.
|
| I think the expectation of the market is pretty simple,
| Atlassian grow by 30%+ YoY for the foreseeable future, which
| isn't totally unreasonable, and that their costs aren't going
| to scale with that growth because they're a software business.
|
| If they grow 30% YoY for the next 5 years they'll be pulling in
| $10Bn in revenue, and maybe sales scale proportionally so call
| that 25% of revenue, R&D stays more or less flat at $1Bn -
| let's double it to $2Bn to be generous, Administrative stays
| fairly nominal at 500m. Hey presto, you've got a company with a
| tidy $5Bn annual profit. Discount that back to todays prices
| and that doesn't sound crazy. And all that is assuming is that
| Atlassian is fully matured in 5 years and not still growing.
|
| To be clear, this is all just very hand wavey numbers, but it's
| not totally incredible.
| BFLpL0QNek wrote:
| > Atlassian has somehow become the Benjamin Button of the tech
| sector -- profitable as a startup and loss making as it has
| matured.
|
| They where profitable, they didn't need funding the only funding
| they took was for staff to sell some of the equity.
|
| Them now making a loss I think is more a deliberate choice, not a
| business failure. They could of continued as they where making
| $$$ but instead choose to go from 700 people at ipo to near 7k
| today for pretty much the same product suite.
|
| Those 7k people have to be working on a lot of stuff behind the
| scenes, building on existing products and maybe yet to be
| released products. Atlassian always said they where big on long
| term investment. I'm sure they could be profitable if they wanted
| but then would need to massively cut the long term investment.
|
| I'm not to worried about Atlassian. Every large org I worked at
| is run off Jira. I do regret not selling a small parcel of TEAM
| at the end of last year though when it was over $440usd a share
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > Them now making a loss I think is more a deliberate choice,
| not a business failure. They could of continued as they where
| making $$$ but instead choose to go from 700 people at ipo to
| near 7k today for pretty much the same product suite.
|
| But this is exactly the kind of thing that makes a market
| analyst yell "FIRE!" during a bear market. Nobody trading
| stocks is going to look at a 10x headcount increase without
| meaningful additions to the product offering as a good thing.
| vasco wrote:
| Is your understanding of software companies that you add
| people and magically new good products appear right away?
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| They IPO'd 7 years ago, which looks even worse. They've had
| all this time and hired all of these people and largely
| kept the same product offering with no obvious improvements
| to performance or stability. Again, that's a market
| analyst's nightmare.
| jschumacher wrote:
| The product suite differs significantly from 2015. Put aside
| new and acquired products like Trello and OpsGenie, the
| existing products have significantly expanded their
| capabilities and added Premium and Enterprise tiers.
|
| Revenue in 2015 was $320M, In 2021 it was $2B. That kind of
| growth requires growth in Supporting functions and
| infrastructure teams, not just in product.
| upupandup wrote:
| There's very low chance of IPO in 2022 and nil in 2023. They
| missed the bus. We are in 1970s again.
| binbag wrote:
| The amount of basic grammar errors in the article forced me to
| stop reading. Can't take it seriously.
| dboreham wrote:
| imho Atlassian's problem is that they failed to capture a
| critical mass of SaaS services for software development. Everyone
| uses GitHub, which provides a (crappy) bug management system.
| Everyone uses Google Docs which is arguably better than
| Confluence for most purposes. Perhaps not coincidentally both
| these services are owned by companies that make their money from
| other things so they can afford to dump endless investment in
| making them better.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > so they can afford to dump endless investment in making them
| better.
|
| Which is so necessary when your product is very reliant on
| integrations because maintaining that kind of software gets so
| cumbersome over time. The testing alone can sink a team's
| productivity.
|
| I work for a Confluence competitor and we've based our go-to-
| market strategy around executing one problem very well as
| opposed to trying to build a set of products to sell as a suite
| and it's worked relatively well so far. Business people love
| the idea of integrations and some of them do act as a force-
| multiplier in productivity. But they also create tons of
| headaches for end users and can be very expensive.
| ab_testing wrote:
| The high growth without generating a profit has worked fine for
| them for the last decade. But it seems that their stock price is
| in risky territory. They were valued at 113B at their peak and
| are now close to 48B. But their annual revenue is just around 2B.
| So that is still 24x revenue with no profits. It looks like they
| would fall a lot more if that revenue growth slows down due to a
| recession or companies just cutting back a litte bit.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| We have tried many things and jira is just the most future proof.
| The others all fall short of with this 'do one thing and do it
| well'; that is great but life is dynamic so that one thing
| doesn't fit growing companies or small companies (depending on
| what you use). Like someone said before, you can run small teams
| with basecamp, but when you go into the 1000s of devs and other
| skills that all need to be managed on different levels over
| different skills and departments, it won't work while in jira it
| does. Some people will say; use basecamp for the small teams and
| other solutions for managing; sure but then people have to switch
| environments or you are making custom stuff on top. Why if jira
| already does that? And you can also build those custom things on
| the jira rest api by the way.
|
| It is not great but the rest is just not any better (as far as I
| have seen that is!).
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Does your company have 1000s devs?
|
| Aren't you "prematurely optimising"?
|
| One thing done well is exactly what I want of the software I
| buy.
| smcleod wrote:
| Not to mention that pretty much everyone universally hates
| Atlassian products.
| mnkypete wrote:
| I am: a) a dev myself b) head of a small dev/SAAS company/team c)
| Atlassian Marketplace vendor
|
| Jira is fine. Atlassian will be around for quite a bit, imho.
| They have a somewhat decent ecosystem, which helps a lot with the
| stickiness.
|
| Jira could see a lot of improvement product wise, but at least it
| has been getting faster in the last year (still slow, though, but
| not as bad). Their new stuff seems to be a hit or miss, but I
| especially like their new Jira thing (Jira Product Management),
| mostly because it comes very opinionated.
|
| I think Jira/Atlassian would benefit a lot from actually
| providing more guidance on how to properly use their product(s)
| depending on team size (e.g. moving from 5 to 50 to 500 person
| teams). Most other tools don't do this as well, but I think that
| would improve the experience for everyone, dev & mgmt alike..
| belter wrote:
| Based on data from 2021 and maybe I make a mistake on one or
| two...List of unprofitable companies. Unprofitable is the new
| black....
|
| | Unprofitable Companies 2021-2022
|
| | Airbnb | Dropbox | Uber | Lyft
|
| | Zillow | Peloton | Pinterest | Snap
|
| | Cloudflare | MongoDB | Slack | Spotify
|
| | Elastic | Okta | Fastly
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Yet all of them have minted millionaires and billionaires. This
| is the new game. Nobody cares about profits. Money has been
| made.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| One of the things I've found really interesting is how little
| development ecosystem there is around Atlassian's tools. They
| have a pretty rich API for most of their products, but nobody
| really uses them. There's some very cool CLI tools just starting
| to evolve for Jira and Confluence, which can completely transform
| the complaints people have (automating common concerns,
| eliminating UI slowness). I think Atlassian should have done more
| to build a community for people to ramp up on their technology.
| sien wrote:
| So with Slack there is Mattermost and Zulip.
|
| What are the equivalents for Jira ?
|
| Is there an openish source piece of similar software ?
|
| Jira cops a lot of hate on HN, but really to paraphrase Churchill
| on Democracy - "Jira is the worst issue tracking software, except
| for all the others".
|
| The comparison on Wikipedia has so many of them :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_s...
|
| Are any of them any better?
| Ancalagon wrote:
| ClickUp
| dzikimarian wrote:
| Anybody uses youtrack? Seems quite nice and has self hosted
| option, which is sadly rare trait.
| njsubedi wrote:
| Featurewise, Taiga is the closest competitor. The only missing
| bit is mobile apps and real-time notification. Other than that,
| there's almost nothing that Taiga doesn't do.
| stonecharioteer wrote:
| A company I worked for before used Redmine. It was easy to use,
| had a great API and was quite fast. Open source as well, unless
| you wanted to pay for a custom installation, which went by the
| name of EasyRedmine.
|
| I use Linear these days, and that's great too. But for a small
| company? I'd recommend Redmine.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> Are any of them any better?
|
| Not in my experience, at least not enough of an impact to make
| me really care. Azure DevOps was far worse in my experience,
| and many of the ones SW Devs promote can't roll up to the
| portfolio level which is where the strategic and purchasing
| decisions are made.
| dimgl wrote:
| I used Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) for a while. It was a huge
| breath of fresh air coming from Jira. But I'm not sure how much
| of that was that I despised Jira more-so than I loved
| Clubhouse.
|
| I started using Linear recently and I can never go back to
| Jira. Linear is that good.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Linear and Asana are far better.
|
| I refuse to work on any project using Jira. It's the first
| question I ask in interviews.
| ProAm wrote:
| Asana is hot garbage. As much as I dislike Jira, Asana could
| be argued as worse.
| dreadlordbone wrote:
| As someone who's thinking about moving my company from
| Clubhouse/Shortcut to Asana, can you tell me why it's bad?
| ProAm wrote:
| We tried to implement it 3 times and performance was
| horrid. Bad enough to have us give up and move to a
| different platform. I have not used Clubhouse or
| Shortcut.
| joegahona wrote:
| No ticket numbers in Asana is a deal-breaker. Guessing that's
| not important to your team?
| parkingrift wrote:
| Why does a competitor need to be open source? ClickUp, Asana,
| and Shortcut/Clubhouse are all competing in this space. I
| consider Jira to be far and away the worst one of that bunch,
| but beauty is always in the eye of the beholder.
|
| My personal preference is ClickUp or Asana as they offer
| flexibility to bolt on routine task management in a much more
| flexible way.
| swilliamsio wrote:
| Recently found out about ClickUp. It's not quite as feature-
| rich as JIRA, but nowhere near as simplistic as Trello, and
| its fairly jank-free so I'm a fan.
| bluGill wrote:
| A competitor probably shouldn't be. The only people who need
| a competitor to Jira are large companies who have a budget.
| There are lots of small companies and open source companies,
| but they have no need for the complexities of Jira and should
| avoid it.
| acdha wrote:
| GitLab issues are better for all but very large projects. Jira
| will win on features, of course, but unless you have 50+ people
| working on the same thing, multiple dedicated PMs, etc. you're
| almost certainly not seeing enough value to be worth the
| frictional cost and temptation to divert time away from the
| product to build Potemkin project plans in Jira.
|
| (This is the same failure mode as many Agile-as-practiced
| projects have: once the incentive structure is decoupled from
| results, someone will have a full time job moving tickets
| around in a way which is considered productive even if the
| project is foundering.)
| Aeolun wrote:
| Oddly enough, if your team is small enough that it doesn't
| need a dedicated PM, you generally have no issues with Jira
| either.
|
| It's almost as if the PM is the problem instead of the
| solution.
| acdha wrote:
| You have fewer problems with Jira. You're still paying more
| for a slower application with a clumsy UI.
|
| I also wouldn't be so quick to condemn the PM. I've seen
| plenty of developers insist on complex workflows and custom
| fields because they think they can automate everything,
| only later to realize they've created a second job. The
| problem is basically the lack of a functioning feedback
| mechanism to ask "do we need this enough to pay for its
| care and feeding?", and I've seen people from every role on
| either side of that, although it's certainly more common to
| see business people underestimate the complexity of what
| they're asking for.
| heiki wrote:
| Linear is one of the best software products I have used in the
| last 5 years. I strongly recommend giving it a try instead of
| jira.
| 015a wrote:
| Linear & Shortcut are both significantly better. Linear isn't
| even in the same realm as Jira in quality and productivity; its
| like comparing Excel to Jira, yeah you can make Excel work but
| you'd be out of your mind to use it for something like project
| management. Similarly, with the advent of Linear; you'd be out
| of your mind to greenfield on Jira. Why not spin up OracleSQL
| and write your app in C++ while you're at it?
|
| Gitlab & Github issues is also pretty solid. Lightweight, but
| it works for what it does.
|
| Asana is another decent competitor, though I don't tend to
| recommend them for project management. Its there though.
|
| I've organized some small software teams using Notion. Its
| surprisingly functional. The big downside is the lack of
| universal structure or a decent API to even build your own
| analytics against; great for the ICs, but not great for
| managers.
| briandear wrote:
| Pivotal Tracker.
| mr90210 wrote:
| As a programmer, I actually like Jira. It works.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Yeah. I mean it has enough management options for projects
| and I really don't have any complaints. Not sure what
| everyone's hating about.
| matwood wrote:
| The functionality of JIRA is great. It's the UI that feels
| slow and clunky.
| square_usual wrote:
| The functionality of Jira is great because it's basically
| turing complete at this point. A dedicated enough force
| of middle managers can warp it however they want to.
| matwood wrote:
| In the worst case sure. It also lets a small team start
| easily and modify it as they grow.
|
| In many ways it's like Excel. Everyone says making an
| Excel killer should be easy because people only use 10
| features. Problem is, everyone is using a different 10
| features.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| As another comment rightly pointed out, Atlassian has
| some recession "insurance," because JIRA tends to be
| bought by big, slow companies. Big, slow companies
| implement JIRA with the same agility and cleverness as
| they do their AD implementation, which is to say: it
| tends to be a nightmare of permission complexity caused
| by internal political machinations. That winds up making
| the UI slow and clunky, and driving the end users crazy.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Mainly it's slow and the UX makes everything painful.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| I'm using Jira, too, and I don't think its slow. It
| actually works quite well and has loading animations for
| longer tasks, so it never feels laggy. Sure, it's not vi-
| levels of navigation speed, but it never bothered me. The
| UX works for me, too (although it took me a bit to learn
| it, to be fair).
| acdha wrote:
| My main annoyances with the Atlassian suite are mostly the
| bugs: for example, they have 3 different parsers for their
| wiki markup which aren't fully compatible, and none of them
| are as good as Markdown. They've had years to do QA but...
|
| The only thing I see in Jira as an actual gap is the
| inexplicable lack of a standard view for showing all of the
| tickets in a particular sprint. You can make custom queries,
| of course, but it's such a common need which everyone else on
| the market solved in 1.0.
| crucialfelix wrote:
| The official VSCode Jira extension is much faster than the
| web UI. Fast to search, see your own issues, create, jql,
| integrated git. Highly recommend
| mr90210 wrote:
| Wow, I didn't know that there was such extension. Thx.
| Philadelphia wrote:
| I've never been at a company where users could get the
| right permissions to use it, unfortunately
| mrelliot wrote:
| Considering the amount of money you pay to have it, "it
| works" is not even the bare minimum. Lot of things work.
|
| The problem with Jira is the total disregard for UX. Very
| simple tasks like moving tickets out of a story take way too
| many steps when it should take one click.
|
| They don't seem to want to improve it because of legacy
| customer or reasons....
| mr90210 wrote:
| I've tried YouTrack from JetBrains, and I've found its UX
| quite bad. I've used Asana, Trello, Microsoft (they had/have
| a tool for project management), Github Project. None of them
| seemed to work as well as Jira. (My opinion).
| s-lambert wrote:
| Microsoft's project management tool is Azure Dev Ops (used
| to be called Visual Studio Team Services), I found it
| pretty comparable to JIRA for the most part.
| lelandfe wrote:
| I used Azure Dev Ops at my last job! I thought it was
| fine - though I think some aspects of it weren't
| intuitive (maybe an unsolvable problem for a PM tool).
| Our team standups occasionally included someone
| discovering a useful Dev Ops feature that was simply
| hidden too well.
|
| But the tool felt fairly fast and did it's core job
| pretty well.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Anyone know why they called it that though? Much of its
| key functionality has nothing specifically to do with
| DevOps, and I somewhat doubt it really supports
| everything DevOps (in an Azure world) requires...
| pmontra wrote:
| I remember that Jira had a kanban board or something like
| that. It was almost 10 years ago. If it still exists and
| you're using it, give a try to Kanbanize. It's something
| that I almost really liked to use. The team bootstrap was
| done by a guy that really knew it well and kept managing
| and coaching for months. No idea what it would look like to
| start using it from scratch.
| iddan wrote:
| For us Linear (https://linear.app/) was much much better
| than all the competition
| livinglist wrote:
| Two startups I've worked for uses Linear as well, but is
| it really scalable though? Like is there any big company
| (200+) using Linear?
| mr90210 wrote:
| That's a very good point. First time I've used Jira was
| in a company with 500+ employees, things such as hiring
| were managed through Jira as well.
| julian_digital wrote:
| [I work for Linear] Yes, we have multiple scale-
| up/enterprise customers with 200+ users
| formula1_sw wrote:
| new_here wrote:
| Linear.app is awesome. We switched from Jira and our team's
| participation on issues went through the roof. It's fast,
| clean, has keyboard shortcuts and replaces agile terminology
| with simpler, familiar paradigms. We activated Slack, Sentry
| and GitLab integrations too. It's a beautiful piece of software
| to use and part of the reason we chose it was to inspire
| ourselves to try build something of similar quality in our own
| domain. Seriously, it's that good.
|
| I've also used Redmine a few years ago. It gets the job done
| but nowhere near as slick and fun to use.
| tacitusarc wrote:
| I hate how the elegant simplicity behind the agile
| development principles was so thoroughly co-opted by scrum,
| so now when people think "agile" they actually mean scrum but
| have no idea that's what's happening.
| wronglyprepaid wrote:
| I hate how when people say scrum they really mean something
| which is not well defined and you end up with some weird
| system that only some "scrum master" understands and that
| they seem to be making up as they go along.
| exyi wrote:
| It depends on how you define "better". I'd say that anything
| else I used (github/gitlab issues, asana, trello, even a
| spreadsheet) works better *for me* - i.e. it is faster and
| easier to find things in a small team. I only add things or
| focus on one issue and then remove it. I still don't understand
| why mid managers love it, but I guess they have different use
| cases than me...
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Trello is also an Atlassian product.
| exyi wrote:
| I know, but it was usable when I last used it. (and it was
| not designed by Atlassian AFAIK... and even if it would, I
| don't have anything against Atlassian except that they make
| really terrible software which I was quazi-forced to use)
| tacitusarc wrote:
| Trello was founded by Joel Spolsky, the guy who made
| stackoverflow, and was sold to atlassian
| jpindar wrote:
| He also made Fogbugz, which apparently still exists
| although I never hear anyone talk about it.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| There are lots of alternatives out there looking for
| marksetshare. I've not personally used ClickUp but it looks
| fantastic just from their screenshots:
| https://clickup.com/features
|
| https://clickup.com/blog/jira-alternatives/
| pm wrote:
| ClickUp is a confusing mess. It tries to be the centre of
| your universe without doing anything particularly well. It
| copies features verbatim from other software and then slams
| it in as a new "view". The coding doesn't seem to be up to
| scratch either, e.g., updating a value won't always update it
| everywhere it's displayed. It's very hit-and-miss.
|
| I had a look at Asana again for non-software project
| management after dismissing it 8 years ago when trying to use
| it, and was pleasantly surprised: it's much more opinionated
| than it used to be, a lot slicker, and it integrates with
| everything I use.
|
| I also use Linear for software development, and won't ever
| look back.
| mikeywazowski wrote:
| I agree. We used ClickUp at my old work, and I felt like I
| was the only person who found it extremely unintuitive and
| confusing. It was about the 5th project management app they
| switched to, and the worst for me by far. Unfortunately
| they stuck with it until I left.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| ClickUp is the first piece of software to confuse me before I
| even used it.
|
| Their intentionally obtuse marketing all over NYC would drive
| me insane. Then one day I had a natural reason to stumble
| upon it, it was had literally nothing to do with what the
| advertising implied, and the interface was so deeply
| overwhelming that I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
|
| Like an almost anxiety inducing level of overload from the
| moment I tried to use it.
|
| Maybe it's great if you live in GANTT Chart Burndown Land,
| but generally you want something that everyone can use, not
| just your PMs.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Anything really.
|
| If the issue in your company is tracking software, your company
| is probably full of anal PMs and a nightmare to work in.
|
| We used to use zenhub, nowadays we use github projects
| kenan_ wrote:
| This. Github projects or a tool like linear.app should be
| more than enough for most teams.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > What are the equivalents for Jira?
|
| Something that gets "close enough", like Mattermost/Rocket.Chat
| can get to Slack? Probably nothing, given how huge the surface
| attempt for Jira is.
|
| But for project management and issue tracking in general, there
| are quite a few alternatives: - OpenProject:
| https://www.openproject.org/ mentioning this first, because
| it's what I use for my personal needs and feels pretty decent
| (issue tracking, time tracking, references, comments, files,
| Wiki, cost reports and so on), though is definitely not nearly
| as popular - Redmine: https://www.redmine.org/ is
| probably also a really good alternative to mention, while the
| original UI is dated a while ago there was a project to create
| something more modern and most of the times when someone is
| using an alternative to Jira, I've seen it be Redmine in
| particular - Odoo: https://www.odoo.com/ is a more
| modular system that I haven't really used much personally, but
| have heard about being talked at the occasional conference in
| my country, the idea seems nice at least
|
| Also, there are probably a few more lightweight and Trello-like
| systems for Kanban boards: - Nextcloud: also
| has some apps, like https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/tasks and
| https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/deck that, while basic, can be
| really easy to get started with if you already have Nextcloud
| - Kanboard: https://kanboard.org/ is perhaps the best Kanban
| board that I have personally used, just because of how snappy
| and lightweight it is (at the expense of the features it has,
| admittedly)
|
| I've also heard of projects like Taiga and Wekan, though can't
| comment on those due to limited familiarity.
|
| Oh, I also probably should mention GitLab, which has lots of
| project management features built right into it nowadays, as
| well as stuff as release management and whatnot:
| https://about.gitlab.com/features/?stage=plan
| bitexploder wrote:
| We use GitLab internally. It has plenty of project management
| features these days and just seems to work for us. The team
| universally dislikes Jira and adopted GitLab instead.
| jasonblais wrote:
| For Kanban board-like tools, there is also Focalboard [1],
| from the makers of Mattermost.
|
| [1] https://www.focalboard.com/
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| We use Redmine since 2007, and I'm absolutely happy with it.
| I don't understand all this 'jira is a lock in' vibe.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Phabricator is quite great, many FLOSS projects rely on it.
| sebmellen wrote:
| Unfortunately Phabricator is no longer actively maintained.
| prmoustache wrote:
| >What are the equivalents for Jira ?
|
| One equivalent that does everything and is as flexible as jira,
| I don't know.
|
| There are however a multitude of software that provide some of
| the functionnalites or can do many things jira does but in a
| more opinionated way.
|
| It depends if one's company want a tool flexible enough to suit
| gazillons of different workflows with integration with many
| other tools or not. If the goal is only to have tickets and
| kanban boards I think there are many alternatives.
| prmoustache wrote:
| >What are the equivalents for Jira ?
|
| One equivalent that does everything and is as flexible as jira,
| I don't know.
|
| There are however a multitude of software that provide some of
| the functionnalites or can do many things jira does but in a
| more opinionated way.
|
| It depends if one's company want a tool flexible enough to suit
| gazillons of different workflows with integration with many
| other tools or not. If the goal is only to have issues and
| kanban boards I think there are many alternatives.
|
| Funny thing is jira is such a mess Atlassian introduced jira
| service desk more focused on tickets while the former can also
| do that.
| jschumacher wrote:
| > Funny thing is jira is such a mess Atlassian introduced
| jira service desk more focused on tickets while the former
| can also do that.
|
| Not quite. Service Desk (aka Service Management today) has a
| number of capabilities that differ quite significantly from
| Jira Software. The most obvious is the end-user facing help
| portal. But how users are managed is quite different, it has
| SLAs, different reporting, a knowledge base, etc. Just like
| Jira Software is flexible but tailored to software teams with
| boards, backlogs and sprints, Jira Service Management is
| tailored to IT teams and requirements specific to that
| market.
| thayne wrote:
| > it now needs to spend a lot of money on marketing to achieve
| that growth.
|
| I think focusing on improving their products would be more
| prudent. There's only so much marketing can do when users hate
| your product.
| joshenders wrote:
| *and crappy
|
| Forgot that part
| aetherspawn wrote:
| I wish they never took away the self-hosted option. That's the
| only reason we're not using it at the moment.
| ryanackley wrote:
| Worked there from 2008-2013. So early-ish employee here. I still
| have a chunk of shares from the original ESOP program. Saying
| that for full disclosure because I'm biased and this feels like a
| hit piece to me.
|
| When I worked there, they disclosed all financials in our
| internal Confluence site. There was a policy of full transparency
| with the employees. The owners (Mike and Scott) had impressive
| business discipline. They were profitable every quarter. They had
| many many opportunities to get vc money and go wild. When they
| finally took VC money, It was a modest amount ($60M I think) and
| the purpose was explained to us as setting up an ESOP program and
| putting Atlassian on the path to go public.
|
| A year or two later, Doug Berman, the founder of Great Plains
| software became chairman of the Atlassian board. He gave a
| presentation to all of the employees at the Sydney office. One
| thing that stood out was that he said, it's actually bad to be
| profitable when you're growing. I'm paraphrasing here but he
| essentially said, you're leaving growth on the table. His thesis
| was growth is more important than profits.
|
| So whether you agree with that or not, that is obviously the idea
| they are operating on rather than uncontrolled spending and
| helicopter dropping stock on employees heads out of desperation.
| nemo44x wrote:
| The character Russ Hanneman on the TV show "Silicon Valley"
| took it a step further stating that having no revenue to speak
| of makes a company more valuable. It's satire...but is it?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| It matters what portion of the cycle we are in. We used to be
| in the voting portion, now we are in the weighing machine
| portion and things are very different.
|
| "In other words, the market is not a weighing machine, on
| which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact and
| impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific
| qualities. Rather should we say that the market is a voting
| machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which
| are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion."
| -Security Analysis 1934
| arcturus17 wrote:
| In a way it isn't because no revenue at all can excite the
| imagination infinitely more than underwhelming revenue.
| maccard wrote:
| > It's satire...but is it?
|
| Depends on your definition of value. If a companies max
| revenue is $X, the farther away from $X they are the more of
| a return you can hope to get!
| HNDen21 wrote:
| This was the Masayoshi Son/Adam Neumann playbook for
| WeWork... growth above all
| robbiep wrote:
| A company with no revenue can potentially raise at a higher
| valuation with a company of $1 of revenue - because now it's
| real and investors will start making their mind up about the
| actual possiblities of the investment
| foobiekr wrote:
| Directly experienced this - having actual _profit_ makes it
| hard to encourage fantastical storytelling about how big
| the upside is. It's the company future equivalent of mark-
| to-market.
|
| Revenue .. well, if you can get huge revenue with huge
| losses and convincingly demonstrate (mostly by spending)
| that more losses (= more capital) means more revenue can
| actually take you a long way. Almost all of the "unicorns"
| and "decacorns" embraced this model - lose $2-5 per $ of
| revenue but able to demonstrate almost unlimited market.
| Most of those companies can never, ever be profitable
| entities.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| I've heard this time and time again in SV circles. It
| probably is for the right founder who is able to paint a rosy
| picture and a nice story. I'm not that kind of person, so
| it's bonkers to me.
| papito wrote:
| Like Adam Nuemann. You have to be tall and loud. Doesn't
| matter if you are making sense or not. Sometimes VCs act
| like gullible women on a date who are enamored by a
| douchebag, I swear.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Doug Berman, the founder of Great Plains software
|
| I believe that's Doug Burgum (now governor of North Dakota).
| ryanackley wrote:
| Yes, you're right! I realized my mistake and tried to go back
| and edit it at some point but I guess there is a time limit
| on edits.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > it's actually bad to be profitable when you're growing
|
| VCs love risk. They will want to dramatically reduce your
| chances of a small positive outcome if it means a increase on
| your (always small) chances of a huge positive outcome.
| foobiekr wrote:
| VCs love _technical_ risk. Outside of the very unusual
| circumstances of the Zero to One capital-funded-monopoly-
| theory era, they have considered _business_ risk quite toxic.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... Quickly investing all your money into product
| development creates what kind of risk? I'm having a hard
| time separating them.
|
| Anyway, that can quite possibly be perfectly aligned with
| your company's goals. It's not a bad or good thing. It's
| just a thing.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > I'm paraphrasing here but he essentially said, you're leaving
| growth on the table. His thesis was growth is more important
| than profits.
|
| But, you can't grow forever. At some point you hit things like
| the maximum market size and there's no longer any way to invest
| your profits back into growth.
|
| Or, to hit a lot closer to home: As a stockholder, your stock
| won't appreciate in value forever. Software companies very
| rarely turn into Microsofts and Googles. You need to sell at
| some point in order to realize the value of your investment.
| (Unless you're getting dividends.)
| naravara wrote:
| > But, you can't grow forever. At some point you hit things
| like the maximum market size and there's no longer any way to
| invest your profits back into growth.
|
| Atlassian is probably a fair bit away from that. Amazon is
| much closer to that mark today but they got there after
| following exactly this strategy since the 90s.
| zerkten wrote:
| >> Atlassian is probably a fair bit away from that.
|
| How do you justify that?
|
| One way Atlassian's market size gets limited is by being
| viewed as a competitor to Microsoft (or other large
| incumbent's) products. Some customers can choose both, but
| not everyone can. The feature and experience differences
| don't matter much to the buyers (procurement), so if
| something is cheaper elsewhere, then it's a harder sell. It
| also increases risk in a potential recession where
| Atlassian is viewed as a luxury option. I feel like
| JetBrains play a smarter game here.
|
| It feels like folks have forgotten how bad a niche
| developer tools have been. Circumstances have meant that
| VCs have been throwing money at developer tools and
| developer experience has been in vogue. Things will
| probably be better in this wave than previous ones, but
| it's still much riskier than other markets. Developers may
| rule the world, but the software powering their day-to-day
| is very different between software companies and the
| majority building line-of-business software.
| mbesto wrote:
| > How do you justify that?
|
| I don't think people, even here, understand how simply
| large and growing the market is for software development
| tools.
|
| https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-
| releases/2022-04-0...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Amazon is a bit of a unicorn in this regard though. They've
| been able to consistently pivot profits into expanding
| services into new (but highly related) areas. Most
| companies are overly aggressive in trying to chase
| exponential growth, they end up outgrowing their
| competence.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| The article talks about this. The problem is that growth is not
| there.
|
| What you're left is a company with 8000 employees and a system
| to problematic to change.
|
| With the recession incoming, the time for free money is over
| and tech startups are bound for a correction. I'd sell or get
| ready to wait 10-20 years.
|
| Even in the wait scenario, you're basically hoping that a huge
| corporation will transform itself and rediscover their startup
| roots - which is not likely to happen.
|
| It happened with Mashape (sold their unprofitable marketplace
| to the RapidAPI people - geez, what a bad deal, it was painful
| to watch) and they managed to reinvent themselves with Kong.
|
| They literally did a bunch of experiments and went on with what
| succeeded, ignoring their main, flawed, business model.
|
| That's what companies should do to chase success, they need to
| act like venture incubator, don't bother their teams with
| corporate BS and hope one of their teams will succeed. If they
| behave like mammoth corporations they're doomed to fail.
| threeseed wrote:
| Atlassian grew 30% last quarter compared to previous year.
|
| https://investors.atlassian.com/news/news-
| details/2022/Atlas...
|
| And their typical customers are the least exposed to
| recessions i.e. medium to large companies who are making
| software purchasing decisions for the long term.
| pluc wrote:
| Given their recent outage (that was this quarter right?)
| that is bonkers.
| calebj0seph wrote:
| The outage was pretty bad but it only affected 0.4% of
| customers. Not surprising that it didn't materially
| impact revenue.
| pluc wrote:
| It didn't scare new customers away is what I find
| surprising. That outage lasted over a week and data was
| lost/inaccessible..
| astrange wrote:
| Atlassian isn't a US company, and if the US is going to have
| a recession (which I think is doubtful), Australia certainly
| has a good record on avoiding them.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| Atlassian's largest source of income is almost certainly
| the US.
|
| And even if Australia is unaffected by an American
| recession, much of Europe, and much of Asia won't be
| (especially with China's growth slowing down).
|
| Which brings me to my second point, which is the only
| reason Australia was able to avoid a US recession was
| selling itself to China, something which it is politically
| unlikely to do so anymore (although I'm not up to date on
| the new PM's China policy) and anyways, China may not have
| the capacity or willingness to support Australia anymore.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Seems like a US recession is 1/3 chance based on current
| estimates.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Australia recessions are uncorrelated with US due to mining
| and other raw materials exports being a huge share of their
| economy... especially selling those materials to China.
|
| I doubt miners are big Jira users. US tech companies who
| are cratering right now though...
| geodel wrote:
| Ah, thats a big opportunity for some Agile consultants
| there.
|
| I see if few of those end up mines that would be epic for
| consultants but just another story for miners.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Sometimes I think software engineers are the only people
| passive enough to allow ourselves to be managed by agile
| tyrants.
|
| Most other industries you'd probably have the workers
| unionize or murder the agile coaches, lol.
| dgb23 wrote:
| They are just bureaucrats. So there's precedence for
| both.
| dalbasal wrote:
| The idea that growth is better than profits was in-built into
| Atlassian's proposition to shareholders, ultimately.
|
| The slow and steady mentality is fine, but we see over and over
| that it isn't what the market wants. A private company or a
| high risk growth company, those are the two options for a
| software company.
|
| Either that or they'll be taken over. They're revenue _now_ is
| just a $2bn, so that "grow grow" mindset from 10 years ago did
| not work out. In theory, a steady CEO could try to steady at
| that size with a nice margin. But, actually declaring and
| pursuing that would mean halving the companies market cap to a
| "normal" P/E of 20-30X.
|
| At that price (say $20bn) one of the big software companies
| would just buy them... for their own growth targets.
|
| Moderation has no place in the public markets as a software
| company. It's remarkable how unstable a stable condition is.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > revenue now is just a $2bn
|
| "only" $2bn ? this is bizarre to see discussed without
| question
| jshen wrote:
| It makes perfect sense when we're talking about a public
| company. It would be a completely different conversation if
| they were private.
| forgingahead wrote:
| Probably because the valuation is currently 10x revenue,
| and was previously more like 70x. "Only" is probably
| because the parent still feels like Atlassian is highly
| over-valued.
| mbesto wrote:
| > They're revenue now is just a $2bn
|
| And has been growing 30% YoY for the last 3~4 years alone.
| This is unheard of in any other industry/market.
|
| Their FCF is also impressive.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > And has been growing 30% YoY for the last 3~4 years
| alone.
|
| Growing revenue while still not making a profit is not
| impressive. If you give me $100 today I can go out a buy
| $100 a pair of new shoes, and sell it for $70. Give me $200
| and I'll go out and by _two_ pairs of shoes and sell them
| for both $84 (total)! Keep giving me money and you 'll
| continue to see this growth I promise!
|
| > This is unheard of in any other industry/market
|
| Given my example above, that should be a warning, not a
| sign of success.
|
| I find it mind-boggling that people can really not even
| grasp that growing revenue with out demonstrating you can
| transform that revenue into profit doesn't mean all the
| much.
|
| Grow profits every year by 30% and I'll be impressed.
| adventured wrote:
| > growing 30% YoY for the last 3~4 years alone. This is
| unheard of in any other industry/market.
|
| It has been common for the leaders in every other market
| throughout commercial history, as it pertains to
| corporations of large size. What you're looking at are
| presently old industries and comparing them to newer,
| that's where your mistake rests.
|
| Walmart did it. Sears did it. Kmart did it. Best Buy did
| it. US Steel and its components did it. The various
| automobile majors did it. Standard Oil and the other oil
| majors did it. General Electric did it. Caterpillar did it.
| Pan Am did it. Many of the railroad companies did it during
| their time. McDonald's, Starbucks and most large chains do
| it during their expansion->saturation phase. Coca Cola did
| it.
|
| It's exceedingly rare to find a large corporation that
| didn't bang out 30% growth years for a decade or more to
| get as big as they got.
|
| One day, decades from now, "cloud" will look like a big
| dead industry too, and people will talk about how it never
| grows fast. Just ask the people that used to make business
| software you install onto PCs.
| dalbasal wrote:
| True, but it is not unheard of for a software company. In
| fact, it's expected. Hence the valuations for software
| vendors compared to manufacturing, retail, etc.
| mbesto wrote:
| I think we're in agreement here then, the valuations
| follow the fact that these companies can operationally
| grow much quicker than others.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Sure, they have. So, they certainly can. The question for
| Atlassian is how fast.
|
| 20-30% doesn't get you to a justification for Atlassian's
| peak value. It doesn't inspire "the next Microsoft"
| vibes.
|
| Maybe after 10-15 years of growth at this rate, it
| would... but the market's not paying these prices for
| that.
|
| Atlassian becomes an acquisition target if stock prices
| reflect a 20% rate of growth.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Fundamentally, why would someone buy a stock of a company
| that doesn't eventually make a profit or offer some sort of
| dividend? Seems like Atlassian traded profit for staying
| power, but can they leverage that staying power to bring
| value to their investors?
| dangerboysteve wrote:
| Amazon comes to mind.
| bombcar wrote:
| People buy growth stocks because they can sell them for
| more tomorrow, it's often a bit of greater-fool theory in
| play.
|
| For the successful companies that _do_ grow into a dividend
| company, they often have valuations that far outstrip their
| eventual settling location at some point in the trajectory.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| The idea is they'll eventually get purchased, or have a
| profit and dividends. But if you're growing so fast it
| makes sense to focus on that over profitablity. Most
| investors would rather have a 1.40, next year than a dollar
| today.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Directly related to that, if the expert they hired to the
| board that led them in this direction was from Great
| Plains it useful to note that Great Plains exited by
| being bought by Microsoft.
| ibeckermayer wrote:
| Hmm, good analysis.
|
| This phenomenon might to some degree be a function of the
| board's veto power over the CEO. A primary reason you
| typically go public is to grow, so by default at IPO you're a
| "growth stock". But from that point on, its difficult to ever
| make a transition to a steady, sustainable "dividend stock",
| especially as a tech company. If you try to, the stock will
| tank, all the "growth" investors will get mad and you (the
| CEO) will probably get fired by the board, and they'll bring
| in a new "growth" CEO.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| What's wrong with having a small or medium company? Why must
| a company sell its soul for the chance of becoming a money-
| printing behemoth in the future?
|
| I understand that being small leaves you vulnerable to the
| predatory tactics of big players, but I see that as a
| consequence of lax regulation. There are too many
| mono/duopolies already, and the bigger they get, the harder
| it will be to split them apart.
| [deleted]
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _I understand that being small leaves you vulnerable to
| the predatory tactics of big players_
|
| This, I think, is the core of why. It's not that being a
| medium sized publicly traded company is immoral or
| unprofitable - it's that in a public market your stock is
| priced on future earnings and choosing to be smaller than
| possible means your tech can be bought for cheap. If you
| choose to stay smaller than maybe you could be - you're
| leaving ROI on the table in a lot of peoples' eyes (even if
| you're right and you'd lose money trying to get huge). So,
| as your stock price drops off to reflect the expectation
| that you're not going to get super impressive earning
| growth, you start to look appealing as an alternative to
| developing technology for an industry giant. Why spend $5bn
| over 10 years to develop competing services when you can
| borrow $5bn today, buy atlassian, get a tax break on the
| debt and start making a play for market dominance with the
| atlassian tech?
|
| If you want a small or medium company, staying private is a
| more sustainable approach.
| lmm wrote:
| > What's wrong with having a small or medium company? Why
| must a company sell its soul for the chance of becoming a
| money-printing behemoth in the future?
|
| If you don't go the unsustainable blitzscaling route you'll
| be outcompeted by those who do, just as Atlassian did to
| plenty of smaller, more sustainable competitors.
|
| > I understand that being small leaves you vulnerable to
| the predatory tactics of big players, but I see that as a
| consequence of lax regulation.
|
| That's nice, but that doesn't make it go away. Do you have
| a plan to make the regulation non-lax?
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Well, it _is_ fine to be a small enterprise, but unless you
| have a huge moat, you run the risk of a _different_ growth-
| at-all-costs competitor (not necessarily a giant) coming in
| and vacuuming up all your customers.
|
| Salesforce vs. Siebel being a great example of exactly
| that.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > Salesforce vs. Siebel being a great example of exactly
| that.
|
| While I agree with your statement, I had to look that up
| because it sounds interesting. In 1999, the year
| Salesforce was founded, Siebel was the dominant player in
| the CRM field, holding 45% of the market, so not
| precisely a small company.
|
| More than a budget war against a deal-with-the-devil
| startup, what killed Siebel was its inertia. Siebel sold
| expensive in-your-premises software, while Salesforce
| sold SAAS, and emphasized a cheaper cloud model. Siebel
| didn't react until 2003(!), when it released its first
| cloud version. By tht time, the expertise of cloud
| solutions of Salesforce made Siebel look like an amateur.
|
| Siebel surpassed 1 billion revenue in 2000, while
| Salesforce did it until 2009. They had their chance.
|
| I still agree that even if a small company did everything
| right, another one with more money and no fear of heavy
| losses would eat their lunch even if their product was
| inferior.
| UkrainianJew wrote:
| It's not just that. The job of the companies is to make the
| most money using the legally available means, and the job
| of the government is to create regulation that makes "good"
| behavior profitable and imposes heavy penalties for
| disruptive things.
|
| Except the government got addicted to printing money and
| throwing it around to boost GDP (and taxes) through
| bullshit business models and bullshit investments. They
| literally created framework where being an overstaffed
| money-bleeding behemoth creates higher returns for the
| shareholders than being a lean-and-mean niche business.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Nothing is wrong with it, I'm just predicting that this
| isn't a sustainable state for a publicly traded company. I
| don't think aggressive antitrust is likely and I don't
| think it would change the above regardless.
|
| Markets pull towards potential, and the potential of
| Atlassian is valued higher than it's stable state.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > but we see over and over that it isn't what the market
| wants.
|
| What the market wants is short term growth and I firmly
| believe that is what is destroying our economy and the
| market.
|
| Instead of building pillars and companies that outlive the
| founders, we have short term cash grabs. We have VC firms
| buying up our existing pillars, gutting them of any valuable
| assets, saddling them with debt, and then selling off the
| carcass. We have firms buying up real estate and creating or
| exacerbating scarcity to drive up demand and prices. We have
| shifts towards subscriptions and quarterly profits.
|
| It's not healthy and it's destroying us.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Perhaps, but I think on this instance... this short-termist
| mindset has a basis.
|
| What kind of a 100 year future does Atlassian have? Jira
| certainly isn't a 100 year product. Software is so fast...
| IDK. The pox is not just a product of greed and malice and
| nothing.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > What kind of a 100 year future does Atlassian have?
|
| We're talking about a company that produces products that
| are widely used. JIRA is not the issue, but the company
| that produced it. 100 years is stretching it, but I would
| believe that Atlassian outlasts yahoo.
| zeruch wrote:
| "What the market wants is short term growth and I firmly
| believe that is what is destroying our economy and the
| market."
|
| Agreed, and its now a pox on the overall system.
| tarsinge wrote:
| The problem is that choosing to be unprofitable is a strategy
| that maybe worked (or just was fashionable) the past decade
| under very specific circumstances (lot of free money chasing
| higher returns in a context of very low rates), but otherwise
| obviously makes no sense, it's antithetic to the very idea of a
| business. It's not to be confused with the sane version that is
| reinvesting profits for growth instead of distributing them as
| dividends.
| serial_dev wrote:
| In the space Atlassian is in, choosing to be unprofitable
| while quickly growing could make sense.
|
| It is not necessarily true for other sectors (e-scooters,
| different delivery services, maybe even Uber), as there is no
| stickiness in those areas. Whenever a cheaper Uber would come
| to my city, I'd drop them within a second. They are usually
| cheap while they can burn VC money.
|
| If Atlassian can keep their system for a couple of years in a
| big, slow legacy company, the company will end up with tens
| of thousands of tickets and pages.
|
| Then, no matter how everyone thinks that all the products of
| Atlassian is terrible (there is a thread about it every
| second month here), the company will never leave Atlassian
| because nobody wants to spend the time on migrating all that
| stuff and everybody is afraid to say that "we will probably
| not going to need poorly written user stories from three
| years ago", and they don't want to risk that the new system
| doesn't cover everything that e.g Jira does.
|
| Once a company is locked in, it will keep paying because
| paying any amount is easier for them then migrating, training
| the employees to use the new system, broken links, missing
| features, etc.
| ced wrote:
| _Whenever a cheaper Uber would come to my city, I 'd drop
| them within a second._
|
| Isn't the stickiness that drivers will only switch if
| customers use it, and customers will only switch if drivers
| use it?
| dismantlethesun wrote:
| No because drivers use multiple apps at once. So they are
| willing to try out new apps for the chance of extra
| money.
|
| Consumers switch because prices are low since the
| rideshare company is artificially subsidized.
| legulere wrote:
| If you are actually producing e-scooters it could make
| sense as well when you have plans for reducing your costs
| long term through economy of scale so you reach the minimum
| efficient scale.
| xbar wrote:
| You have it nailed: they offer low-churn products.
|
| Atlassian is well-managed. Their revenue is fine. Their
| cash flow management is good. Their compensation plan is
| effective at retaining employees--the stock employees
| receive is likely to be more valuable at the end dof the
| vesting cycle than it is today.
|
| Atlassian has got a collection of offerings that are
| industry standard. When used at large companies, they
| become quickly entrenched, with very low churn.
|
| It is also a collection of offerings that is chosen by
| startups. Last quarter through a year from now, I expect
| that stream to be dry. But they are on 3-year contracts at
| an awful lot of got-my-Series A startups that will have to
| tighten their belts in other ways before trying to rotate
| off of Atlassian.
| duped wrote:
| You could rephrase "choosing to be unprofitable" as "spending
| revenue on more staff and/or higher salaries to retain them"
| for software businesses. Or in the case of Atlassian,
| acquisition.
| slap_shot wrote:
| > but otherwise obviously makes no sense, it's antithetic to
| the very idea of a business.
|
| How does it NOT make sense? The purpose of a business like
| this is not to generate some short term profit. These are
| winner-take-all markets - they're playing for complete and
| utter domination of an entire product category.
|
| Their Q1 revenue grew 37% YoY - how on earth would you care
| about profit over what they doing here? They should keep
| hitting that as hard as they can.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Yep, exactly what UBER is doing and what Tesla has found
| themselves doing with high spending on their Texas and
| Berlin Gigafactories. It's a short term pain for
| domination... expand fast and be the market leader in every
| country before someone else beats you to it. Then, soak in
| the profits.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Which works when the unit economics are good. You can
| take the profit from an operating business, and just
| inject it back in the business to grow. That sometimes
| looks like an unprofitable business, but the test is: "if
| the company freezes growth tomorrow" would it be
| profitable?
|
| Teslas are profitable, once you pay off the amortized
| cost of a factory. It isn't clear that uber is
| profitable. They had 5-10% gross margins pre-IPO, and it
| has gone negative since.
| thayne wrote:
| I think it can make sense temporarily trade profitability for
| growth, especially if you are using debt/funding to take
| advantage of certain circumstances. But it certainly isn't
| sustainable, and the purpose of the growth should be to
| increase profitability in the not too distant future.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| I think it depends on what you mean by "profitable".
|
| If that means profits available to, e.g. pay dividends with
| then sure. But I think it ought to always be the goal to have a
| profitable operation then you can plough the profits back into
| the business to push growth (which will mean reporting 0
| profits).
| anton_ai wrote:
| Doug Berman == Russ Hanneman
| virtualritz wrote:
| > When I worked there, they disclosed all financials in our
| internal Confluence site.
|
| I worked at Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) in SA 2005-2007 and the
| CEO at the time, Didier Elzinga, did the same.
|
| But what RSP did went even further. Didier and the CFO did a
| full disclosure presentation about the company's financials
| quarterly or bi-annually (can't remember).
|
| It was great. Not least to make everyone understand why they
| couldn't pay rates that VFX professionals who moved to AUS from
| the East coast or London where used to - at least at that time
| (it was early years for RSP then).
|
| RSP remains one of the best workplaces I ever had the luck to
| be employed at.
|
| Afair Didier was also in some role on the board of Atlassian at
| the time. Maybe not a coincidence.
| upupandup wrote:
| > it's actually bad to be profitable when you're growing.
|
| I've seen this happen so many times:
|
| - profitable, down to earth founders generating net profits
|
| - VC approaches said outfit and tries to gather as much info
|
| - VC realizes said outfit is difficult to emulate and break
| into market
|
| - VC invests and starts demanding they run at a loss to grow
| quickly
|
| This works well when interest rates are low, and VC is not
| under pressure to deliver returns. However, when capital
| suddenly becomes slightly expensive, the whole house of cards
| start to crumble taking down the good business with it.
|
| Neither strong prudence or optimism helps here. Once you start
| running at a loss post-VC money, you no longer control the
| destiny of your own company you started.
|
| Let this cyclical downturn (likely to last for 5 or more years)
| be a lesson that the previous generation learned. If you are
| not making growing net profit (Revenue - COGS), you are no
| making period. Not so while ago people were arguing that debt
| is an asset and cash is a liability. It's always amusing to me
| how quickly people denounce gravity are impacted by it.
|
| The good times are over for VC backed SaaS
| avisser wrote:
| Seems like he meant "It's bad for me (the VC) to be
| profitable when you're growing"
| gnicholas wrote:
| Bingo. The VC wants the grand slam that returns the entire
| fund. He'd rather have an x% chance of a grand slam than a
| 3x% chance of a double/triple. Founders have a very
| different calculus because their risk isn't spread across a
| portfolio of companies.
| ryanackley wrote:
| Few counterpoints:
|
| - Your entire theory relies on VCs having some power over
| decisions being made at Atlassian. That isn't the case. The
| founders of Atlassian have always been in control. After
| taking VC money and going public, they still have over 80% of
| the voting shares [0].
|
| - A downturn of 5+ years would be the longest downturn in the
| USA in the last 100 years [1]. Anything is possible but it's
| unlikely to be that bad.
|
| [0] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220527005335/en/
| Atl...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_U
| nit...
| idontpost wrote:
| I think you're using "downturn" differently.
|
| GDP contraction won't last five years. But it will be
| longer than the GDP contraction before VC money becomes as
| easy as it was for the last five years.
| mayama wrote:
| Easy money being available after five years is also
| uncertain. With covid shock, then global sanction
| following Russian invasion, and deglobalization following
| in the wake of these two events, global economy is faces
| serious uncertainty in coming years.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Also the low interest environment was unusual. We could
| have very easily have a booming market with much higher
| rates. Just look at the 90s.
| mbesto wrote:
| > The good times are over for VC backed SaaS
|
| Disagree. These companies absolutely pump out cash on a free
| cash flow basis:
|
| "It's the absolute dollar free cash flow per share that you
| want to maximize, and if you can do that by lowering margins,
| we would do that. So if you could take the free cash flow,
| that's something that investors can spend. Investors can't
| spend percentage margins." "What matters always is dollar
| margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not
| on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they
| actually make, and a multiple of that." "When forced to
| choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP
| accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash
| flows, we'll take the cash flows.""
|
| https://25iq.com/2014/04/26/a-dozen-things-i-have-learned-
| fr...
| milesskorpen wrote:
| You don't say it explicitly, but there's a bit of a garden-
| of-eden in this story: Founders were running this great
| wonderful profitable business and then those darn VCs come in
| and ruin everything.
|
| A founder isn't forced to take on investors. The same
| founders who were so "down to earth" and profitable are the
| ones making the decision to take on investors. The founders
| can't be responsible for profits and then suddenly get taken
| advantage of by investors. Everyone involved is eyes-wide-
| open.
|
| Lots of great businesses have been built, in partnership with
| investors, during higher interest rate periods and downturns.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's also a bit of "path not taken" - perhaps whatever
| choice _wasn 't_ made wouldn't have worked out great
| anyway, for various other reasons.
| papito wrote:
| It's like that scene from Silicon Valley (which is almost
| always accurate).
|
| Seriously, when did it become normal in _capitalism_ that you
| should not prove that your business can make money? That there
| a customers willing to pay for your product? That the promise
| of future maybe profit sells better than actual profit _now_?
| This is insane.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Wild speculation has been a feature in capitalism for
| _centuries_. There are any number of interesting historical
| schemes to read about where investors lost their shirts, or,
| sometime won big! Every new business venture has risk that it
| will fail, even in "stable" industries. We should celebrate
| trying new business that might not work. We just need to
| ensure we don't socialize the losses.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| We've been in a bubble so long that there were people who
| have worked only in the current tech bubble. People run
| companies now that think a stock market crashes ultimately
| means more money flows in from VCs. I once worked for a
| c-level that seriously thought he had discovered something
| amazing when he realized that a company that made more than
| it cost to run the business had unlimited runway... the very
| idea that a company could run without constantly running to
| investors begging for more cash was completely foreign to
| him.
|
| This has been the consequence of increasingly cheap money and
| investor money having nowhere to go after the real estate
| crash in 2008. To be fair, if money is basically free then it
| does make sense to grow without worrying about a profit. If
| you've had an entire career without every having to worry
| about more investor money coming it, it would start to seem
| wasteful to not spend it all.
|
| But that's why these current economic conditions have me very
| worried: money _can 't_ be cheap anymore. If interest rates
| continue to rise we'll see a massive contraction in tech.
| First it will be the smaller, direct to consumer startups,
| then it will be all of the companies that have those startups
| as a non-trivial portion of their revenue.
| fencepost wrote:
| If I have a company with good cash flow, all employees
| (including me) are compensated well, and I'm spending a chunk
| of that cash flow on R&D and growth but have only marginal
| profits if any am I doing something wrong? Should I cut R&D
| to pay dividends? How about if the company is privately held?
|
| There's a difference between 'not profitable' and 'losing
| money.'
| papito wrote:
| I worked for a company that rented a new expensive floor in
| the heart of NYC to show "growth" to other investors. We
| were supposed to spread out for the optics, when potential
| investors did a walk-through.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| If "profitable" is a switch you can flip, then what you're
| describing makes sense.
|
| The issue is that many of these companies have never
| demonstrated that if they want to they can be profitable.
| The big assumption in these growth models is that there is
| a point where you can just magically flip that profit
| switch.
|
| For example if I run a lemonade stand where I spend $3 to
| make a $1 glass of lemonade, even if I am able to use
| investor capital to keep growing my lemonade stand to be
| the only lemonade stand in town, or even the world, it's
| not clear that I can survive if I'm forced to make a
| profit.
| robmccoll wrote:
| To me, the problem with many of Atlassian's products is that they
| aren't tools. They are platforms on which you can build the tool
| you need. They are way too configurable and flexible and as a
| result, you spend a lot of time managing the tool or organizing
| the information and configuration within it. Tools should serve a
| specific usage, behave predictably, help you use them correctly,
| then get out of the way.
| jnwatson wrote:
| Large enterprises need platforms, not tools.
|
| It takes a few hours to get a basic process flow going in Jira.
| It really isn't hard. And I'm not even a fan of it.
| bborud wrote:
| Reading through the comments two things stand out:
|
| - People disagree on whether it is appropriate to focus on growth
| or profitability at this stage in Atlassian's lifecycle. - I
| suspect people project their misgivings with the products onto
| the company.
|
| So I didn't learn much from reading the comments.
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| Good riddance to bad software
| trasz wrote:
| >CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian's revolutionary Jira
|
| CTOs and CPOs affection to useless crap designed to impress
| clueless managers and hated by everyone who actually has to use
| it is kind of a common pattern.
| carlsborg wrote:
| I suspect the following is built into valuations of many software
| companies with subscription revenue models: they can reduce
| headcount dramatically and keep a relatively tiny headcount of
| staff around to sustain the existing recurring revenue and be
| highly profitable even in a slowing economy. For example how many
| people would MongoDB, with close to a billion dollars of annual
| revenue, need to keep the lights on, assuming zero new feature
| development, sales or marketing? The software is already sold and
| integral to the enterprise projects that use it, and in the
| enterprise migration to a new vendor is often a considerable
| project in itself.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I think this is not as straightforward as you make it sound.
|
| 1. Often the way companies are structured requires specific
| teams and processes to exist and unwinding that is not easy.
|
| 2. It can be very hard to identify which people are actually
| critical. If you get it wrong it's a big problem.
|
| 3. Additionally, firing a large percentage of employees will
| create a very negative feeling in the remainder so they might
| leave as well or their work quality will suffer.
|
| 4. Customers may lose faith in the business as a result and
| switch. Something like Atlassian has many competitors.
|
| Are there any specific examples of this being done
| successfully?
| stu2b50 wrote:
| AirBNB? They were flailing at the beginning of covid, taking
| a massive 2 billion loan at 10% APR to maintain cash flow.
| They laid off a substantial portion of their workforce,
| hunkered down, and it paid off - they went on to successfully
| IPO a year later, still in the pandemic.
| [deleted]
| cellar_door wrote:
| The thing is, a high growth company like MongoDB doesn't need
| to fire a single engineer to turn highly profitable. They
| grew revenue 57% YoY last quarter and spent 52.6% of revenue
| on sales & marketing.
| ratww wrote:
| I've worked (as in actively worked) in a couple restructuring
| efforts, and it went fine, but it wasn't on tech, it was on
| education. It went massively well. The universities were
| financially healthier afterwards, and all the remaining
| employees had safer (union!) jobs.
|
| The trick for this being successful is most of the time by
| challenging the processes themselves, rather than the
| employees. Employees aren't useless, but process are. The
| reason you need 500 people rather than 250 or 100 or 50 to do
| something might be simply because you said so somewhere or
| sometime.
|
| So, companies should review and change processes BEFORE
| reducing headcount. But alas, companies don't ever do it,
| because it requires introspection, egolessness and actual
| work, the sorta stuff that is rare in upper management.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > because it requires introspection, egolessness and actual
| work, the sorta stuff that is rare in upper management
|
| It also may reduce the need for middle and upper
| management.
|
| In fact, if you give people some confidence that they won't
| be fire and instead you will use their work on some more
| valuable action, ICs will line up on your door with ideas
| on how to cut their processes. But management won't.
| ratww wrote:
| Exactly. In the two restructurings I worked there were
| lots of people that everyone knew were fundamental to the
| workings of the institutions. Those people were confident
| they would stay, and ended up getting amazing raises
| afterwards so they could continue. Most of the complaints
| were from teachers who were there for years but were
| still working only 4-8 hours week, or people that had
| purely bureaucratic functions.
|
| Amusingly, the best "firing" in one of those was the Dean
| of the University that had a seven-figure salary. The
| board replaced him with an administrator and with someone
| else from the faculty, and both were more qualified, but
| costed 1/10 of the price (still a huge raise for them).
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Wouldn't companies switch to a one time purchase or open source
| model if mongo stopped developing new features? Why would they
| continue paying a subscription for a product that doesn't
| improve when money is tight? Especially when there are plenty
| of mongo competitors.
| omnibrain wrote:
| Just take a look at the portfolio of companies like Idera.
| That's their business model. Buy products "in the long tail"
| and squeeze them dry.
| upupandup wrote:
| I just don't see companies being able to justify subscription
| revenue models in the coming downturn. Many opt to acquire
| software for a fixed price if they are financially sound, those
| who cannot, aren't going to be able to keep paying subscription
| fees methinks, i could be wrong.
| thorw73m wrote:
| was it atleast profitable to founder. Say working as an employee
| in a top tech company vs 20 years of unprofitable company.
| stack_framer wrote:
| > revenue for the past nine months grew from US$1.5 billion to
| US$2.04 billion ($2.95 billion) (or around 24%).
|
| Forgive my math skills at 4:07 in the morning, but isn't that
| actually 36% growth?
|
| > Atlassian's legacy Jira product ... is no longer loved by
| developers.
|
| As a developer I prefer Jira over every alternative I've tried
| (Clubhouse, Trello, GitHub Issues, and Monday.com).
|
| > users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp
| or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of
| switching to a new system).
|
| That seems like a pretty big hassle though. My company is way too
| busy to undertake switching ticketing systems.
| rigelbm wrote:
| > As a developer I prefer Jira over every alternative I've
| tried (Clubhouse, Trello, GitHub Issues, and Monday.com).
|
| I also prefer JIRA, but that doesn't mean I love it. It just so
| happens to be the only available product with most of the
| features I need.
|
| That being said, its UX is beyond terrible. The moment
| something else appears that covers some significant portion of
| its feature set, I can see a lot of people making the switch.
|
| I think one of the biggest problems of competitors is to think
| that JIRA is bad because it's complex. Therefore they position
| their offerings as a simpler slim down version of JIRA.
|
| Big news: it is complex to manage complex projects. JIRA has, I
| think, the right level of complexity and flexibility to tackle
| that.
|
| If any competitor reads this message: please, go complex!
| fnord123 wrote:
| > Forgive my math skills at 4:07 in the morning, but isn't that
| actually 36% growth?
|
| Yes, (2.04-1.5) / 1.5 = 0.36
| muhaaa wrote:
| Author writes that Atlassian has no network effects. That is BS.
|
| Atlassian has massive network in its ecosystem. There are Jira
| Consultancies, 3rd party apps and plugins and deep integration
| into customers processes. If one element grows the whole
| ecosystem profits.
|
| Secondly, Atlassian is not a bad company just because it's stock
| is overpriced. It might be a bad investment!
|
| Over the short and midterm Atlassian is in some trouble because
| it has problems to scale the development while shifting from
| legacy to cloud. They will solve it. Still i expect some bad news
| to come.
|
| These bad news will beat down the stock and maybe create an
| opportunity to buy a great company at a great price.
|
| PS: The Atlassian invoice of my employer tripled over 1 year. You
| start cheap and simple and with every plugin and product you add
| the invoice grows. Thus to value Atlassian you have to look into
| revenue per customer over its life time, which is far greater
| than this year's revenue of the customer.
| gshulegaard wrote:
| I think you might be confusing upselling and cross selling with
| network effects. Upsell is when you convince a customer to
| purchase additional service, like offering different tiers of
| subscriptions. Cross selling is where you sell adjacent
| services related to (and that possibly integrate with) the
| original service.
|
| Network effects are where the direct value of a product grows
| simply because the number of users increases, causing the
| network itself to grow. The classic example are social
| networks. The more people on your social network, the more
| people are likely to join your network and less likely to join
| a smaller competitor. I am not sure there is anything in
| Atlassian's product offering that quite fits that description,
| but that isn't to say there isn't plenty of upsell and cross
| sell opportunity as you describe.
| muhaaa wrote:
| I disagree. A network effect does not need to be inherent to
| the product / service itself. It can originate from other
| sources. What is the network effect of eBay? As a seller I do
| not care how many other sellers are there. But I care how
| many buyers are there. For a buyer it's the reverse. Buyers
| attract sellers and vice versa. That's a network effect too.
| For Atlassian it's similar. Jira customer attract Jira
| consultants and vice versa.
|
| Ecosystem is the better word for sure. it's competitive
| advantage is still a network effect.
| yobbo wrote:
| > Combined with employing more than 8000 people, this means that
| Atlassian is unprofitable
|
| In 1991, Microsoft had 8000 employees. It was producing DOS,
| Windows 3*, Office, OS/2, tools and compilers. Windows NT was in
| development.
|
| They did not use Jira.
|
| I think the main feature of these tools is to make people, who
| would otherwise be unproductive, feel and look productive. Maybe
| those people are managers that should never have managed software
| development. Idk.
|
| (https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/microsoft_company....)
| ramraj07 wrote:
| The actual lines of code in an OS has balooned exponentially.
| Of course we can't discount the abilities of the average
| software engineer in the 90s vs now. I'd guess back then you
| had to be fairly driven and smart to be employed there, which
| is not necessarily true anymore. If you have a pulse and can
| barely pass fizz buzz you're employed with 200k salary, so
| yeah.
| zeusk wrote:
| > If you have a pulse and can barely pass fizz buzz you're
| employed with 200k salary, so yeah.
|
| Tell us you don't have any experience with hiring, without
| telling us you don't.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I most definitely know more people than I would prefer who
| can only barely pass fizz buzz and make more than that. It
| is kinda interesting how dev compensation is in fact
| bimodal and the engineers (and the managers) in the second
| hump want to actively avoid any mention of the possibility
| that they're under compensated.
| yobbo wrote:
| > If you have a pulse and can barely pass fizz buzz you're
| employed with 200k salary
|
| If this was true; it is not an "efficient market" we are
| observing, neither in SaaS or developer employment. These
| companies would be outcompeted. The underlying mechanism that
| enables this is probably SaaS/etc lock-in.
|
| Will be interesting to see what/how overturns whatever
| paradigm this is.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Efficient market hypothesis doesn't work here, honestly not
| sure if it works anywhere. See https://danluu.com/nothing-
| works/
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Every once and then they buy a startup to inject themselves
| with new blood and maintain their dominance. They also need
| to have decent leadershipt to make the right decisions (eg.
| I'm sure Ballmer would have killed M$).
|
| They can afford all those useless employees because
| software allow you to get lots of profit with little work.
| Aachen wrote:
| They also built pyramids without excavators but that doesn't
| mean it's not helpful. Just because old systems could be built
| without specifically using jira, by itself, is not an argument.
| You could make the same argument that, clearly, we don't need
| Java or JavaScript because we also got by fine on Fortran and C
| in the past. Without doing an actual comparison, it's just as
| silly an argument as the claim that these tools' main function
| is to make you feel more productive than you are.
| yobbo wrote:
| > They also built pyramids without excavators but that
| doesn't mean it's not helpful
|
| False analogy. The point here is that productivity in old
| Microsoft was far higher, and that the failing piece in
| modern development might not be the ticket system.
| Aachen wrote:
| > The point here is that productivity in old Microsoft was
| far higher
|
| That sounds virtually impossible to prove between unequal
| situations, and especially "far" makes it seem like an
| exaggeration / tall order (productivity between people
| isn't like wealth or popularity: some things change by
| multiple orders of magnitude, but how hard you can work
| doesn't, especially when averaged across thousands of
| employees), but to be fair I didn't read the whole
| _fourteen thousand word_ source you added so I suppose I
| can 't say for sure.
| itomato wrote:
| They say it's overvalued - whose fault is that?
|
| Now the remote thing could be fantastic. I don't know what the
| building on Harrison St. cost, but between what they save on
| staff relocations and real estate, there should be some offset in
| two-three years, right?
|
| Salesforce is an Apple to Atlassian's orange. I would guess they
| make more money from Tableau than Atlassian do from Confluence
| and Jira Data Center combined.
|
| "Tableau Software generated $464 million as part of Salesforce
| for the quarter, up about 18% from the same quarter a year ago"
|
| What will be the total cost of maintaining a Java app (with deep
| dependencies) for five years? Will subscription costs increase
| YoY to match?
|
| Add to that the coupling of disparate products and their code and
| cultures.
| residualmind wrote:
| I was unprofitable when I was 20, too.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Jira is an interesting product everyone loves to hate. It has the
| do-whatever-you-want configurability to fit anyones SDLC. Really
| its a software product that allows you to mirror your
| organizational structure.
|
| That said, 99% of software projects I have been on could be
| managed with a simple Kanban board like Trello (which they now
| own).
|
| Unless your firm has staff who are full time Jira jockeys in the
| form of project managers, you'll never be able to leverage the
| more complicated workflows/linkages/planning features.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| While I miss the ability to create epics, I would say is an
| Asana otherwise wonderful replacement for Jira.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Jira almost has too many hierarchy options / flexibility.
| Epics, Milestones, Initiatives.
|
| No two firms, and often within a firm.. no two teams has a
| similar definition / system in how they are used.
|
| My last manager it was like a sniff test / definition of art
| thing. Constant arguments about epics being too granular or
| not granular enough. Bumping tickets up or down the hierarchy
| was hell and lead to many many hours of wasted efforts.
| ratww wrote:
| It's kind of amusing: I've seen a few times developers
| rebelling and moving to whatever other random tool (Atlassian's
| own Trello, Pivotal Tracker, Github's thing, stickers on the
| wall) as soon as a hardline PO/PM left the job. Only for JIRA
| to return when another PO/PM that "really really needs the
| reporting features" (but didn't really use them) was hired.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Why is it always on the Dev team to completely uplift
| whatever is working for them, and never that the
| PM/PO/DPO/Scrumwhatever has to do the heavy lifting
| themselves? Is it because they would actually have to do work
| instead of just attending meetings, slacking other people for
| updates, and sending out progress reports? (Sorry to all you
| good PMs out there, I am talking about the median case)
|
| If you are a PM and you come on a team that isn't using JIRA,
| and you want JIRA with all it's fancy bells and whistles,
| that's fine. Set up a board yourself, write all the tickets,
| capture all the work that's happening based on the dev's tool
| they are currently using, and update all the knobs and
| buttons to your heart's content.
|
| My guess is the infatuation with JIRA would quickly diminish
| if this was so.
| atom_arranger wrote:
| One of the best PMs I have had used to be a dev. The
| company we were working with used a terrible Jira like
| piece of software I don't remember the name of, but he had
| the devs just use Trello. He would go through and update
| the other thing for stakeholders. Worked great
| ratww wrote:
| Definitely.
|
| JIRA is the case of a product made for buyers/deciders
| rather than for final users, like the dreaded enterprise
| ERP.
|
| Atlassian's Product Managers believe their product is
| mostly used by other product managers, but they're dead
| wrong. Not that it matters, anyway. Atlassian could
| probably fire all PMs tomorrow and it would be the same, as
| long as the software ticks all the necessary boxes it will
| still sell the same. Just hire more marketing, sales and
| evangelists.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| heh, I was once on a dev team that some how got moved into
| the project management section of a company. The thought was
| we'd help out and fix the little stuff that the PMs needed
| done that they couldn't get other teams to prioritize.
|
| Obviously a bonkers idea, but they went for it. It was just
| jira all the way down. They wanted us to create separate
| tracking jiras for pages, before we worked the issue in the
| middle of the night. Nobody was actually doing anything,
| especially the devs I lasted a couple months before I moved.
| At the end of the year, everyone that stayed got promoted a
| level as a dev. I went back though git and couldn't find a
| single commit from any of them. Just bananas, they all got
| promoted to a higher level as devs for busy work, but jiras
| don't lie, right?
| steveBK123 wrote:
| My fave thing about Jira is how between the tool & it's
| plugins, you can roll up all sorts of views for management
| reporting purposes.
|
| Despite this, exactly zero shops I have worked do management
| believe their managers will understand those views.
|
| Therefore at a weekly/monthly/quarterly cadence, "someone"
| (dev leads) have to spend hours hand updating some horrific
| excel view of project statuses for big management to
| understand.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Absolute worse part of Jira.
|
| Twice now I've worked at places that used Jira, and all it
| takes is one corner of the company to leverage it for some
| random oddball purpose to make it painfully slow.
|
| One place started using it for managing thousands of
| assets, and eventually they were paying contractors tens of
| thousands to optimize their JIRA instance and untangle the
| mess.
|
| Same thing is happening at my current company, where even
| in the last few months it's gotten painfully slower.
| ratww wrote:
| Wow. I had erased this from my memory, but: in a company
| I worked previously, _every single string_ that had to be
| localised had to go into a JIRA task, after going into an
| internal localisation tool. Eventually they needed a
| separate JIRA instance with different logins because
| there were hundreds of new "strings" being created
| daily, some of those coming from user content.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Also this is "agile"
| ratww wrote:
| All I really see managers using is the burnup or burndown
| chart. They seem to choose between up/down based on their
| current mood. But it doesn't matter which one they choose,
| it always seem to bring everyone's mood down anyway.
|
| And yet when you ask if we can change from JIRA to
| something else they say "but my reporting".
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| I've never seen people use software like Jira and similar
| software _correctly_.
|
| I mean:
|
| - Actually caring about the difference between task and user
| story
|
| - Meaningful / accurate card descriptions
|
| - Keeping information up-to-date on TODO lists and comments
|
| - Projects and milestones that make sense
|
| - Task status and workflows that make sense (besides
| TODO/DOING/DONE)
|
| Nowadays, I would rather have project management software with
| the _minimal_ amount features that can 't be misused.
| djbusby wrote:
| GitLab is where we moved, they've got boards to visualize.
| Great replacement for Trello.
| leokennis wrote:
| Personally I think that, at least for larger/enterprise
| customers, JIRA is the option that for every major feature is
| at least not the shittiest.
|
| Other solutions might be better than JIRA in A, but absolutely
| suck in B. JIRA is "sort of shitty" in everything, but the
| worst in nothing.
| brycewray wrote:
| Other than the points raised here by others and in TFA's comments
| section which point out TFA's flaws, I would add only that there
| are worse things than Jira --- as I found out When my final
| employer converted from Jira to ServiceNow. If you think Jira is
| bad... jeez.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Jira is becoming Microsoft Word in terms of just piling on the
| features. Atlassian needs to learn to say no sometimes.
| dangus wrote:
| This thing reads like an uninformed hit piece.
|
| Let me go ahead and flex my MBA knowledge for all the engineers
| in the building who claim that MBAs don't know anything about
| business...
|
| First, I suggest you read Atlassian's balance sheet and income
| statement. They're a public company, so it's all publicly
| available information. [1]
|
| Look how fast those revenues are growing.
|
| Look at how Cost of revenues is declining against the revenue. In
| 2019, it was 33%, 2020 it was 28%, 2021 it was 25%. That means
| that as Atlassian's subscriber count increases, its cost per
| subscriber is decreasing, a direct contradiction to the claims
| made in this article.
|
| In the statements of cash flows, you'll see that Net cash
| provided by operating activities increases every year. Financing
| activities explain losses, not any sort of problem with the
| fundamentals of the business.
|
| And, when you're losing money, you don't pay taxes. Atlassian is
| doing a standard business/accounting play here: re-invest in the
| business and use financial activities in order to pay nothing to
| the Australian equivalent of Uncle Sam. Income tax expense is a
| negative number on the balance sheet each year.
|
| The worst claim in the article is that Atlassian represents a
| "legacy" product. No, not at all, especially if you've been on
| their cloud products anytime recently. The cloud products get
| rapid iterations and improvements, including performance.
|
| Atlassian's pricing is extremely competitive, acting as a
| "bundle" that competitors can't match. Jira in particular has
| basically no realistic competitor, and OpsGenie does the same
| thing as PagerDuty at a fraction of the cost.
|
| [1]
| https://s28.q4cdn.com/541786762/files/doc_financials/2021/ar...
|
| (Scroll to page F-5 about 105 pages in)
| the_duke wrote:
| > users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp
| or Monday.com with minimal cost
|
| That's just plain nonsense.
|
| I dislike using Jira as much as anyone, mainly because it's so
| excruciatingly slow.
|
| But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable
| functionality and provides the same long-term flexibilty. Many
| companies have built entire workflows (not just development
| related) around Jira, and have huge knowledge bases in
| Confluence. Switching would come with a lot of effort.
|
| I will say that most of the Atlassian products are ... not great.
|
| Bitbucket has completely stagnated and is way worse than Github
| and Gitlab. They actually had an opportunity there. Once upon a
| time Bitbucket was the only site to offer free private repos, and
| it attracted a decent number of users to also publish open source
| there. A good amount of companies adopted it. But they let it
| linger and didn't keep up with Github or even Gitlab. Just like
| Jira it's also slow and awkward to use. (never do large PRs ...).
|
| I see a lot of companies switching away from Bitbucket now
| because developers are not happy with it.
|
| Bamboo ... meh
|
| Opsgenie ... meh
|
| Confluence is actually fine. If only it had better search and
| wasn't so slow...
|
| And Jira is so complex, improving it is probably extremely
| cumbersome because so many features have to be considered and
| everything has to keep working.
|
| It might be advisable for Atlassian to start fresh with a new
| ticketing system.
|
| Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always drastically
| downsize and refocus, the company will be around for a while.
| qunabu wrote:
| > But there is no competing product (suite) that offers
| comparable functionality. Many companies have built entire
| workflows (not just development related) around Jira, and have
| huge knowledge bases in Confluence. Switching would come with a
| lot of effort.
|
| Exactly. Other products comes with opinionated workflow or are
| much easier (and simpler) to use. Once you setup Jira way you
| wanted (good luck with that) and able to maintain this setup
| for all of your projects you're stuck with Jira forever - you
| won't be able to export all of your content to another
| software. The whole process takes ages and its a nightmare of
| going thought totally different UX pages, unintuitive settings,
| slow UI, setting up extremely expensive plugins (why till today
| you need to buy tempo to get basic functionality like time
| tracking) etc.
|
| It's called vendor lock. Nobody ever got fired for buying Jira
|
| Other products are not for every business, have limited
| settings - but are quicker, saves you time and are able to be
| useful since day one.
|
| All of the companies are using Jira differently, even if you're
| familiar with this, and you have been using Jira in all you
| provious jobs for years you still need to have onboarding on
| how does Jira works in current company - as for instance I've
| worked with Asana in 3 totally different companies and workflow
| was the same.
| dx034 wrote:
| One could say Jira is like SAP. Theoretically it's just a
| software, but in the end there is so much customization that
| the business starts to revolve around its processes.
| pantulis wrote:
| True that, but it's not their fault, it's just their turf.
| They need to solve business needs for core processes in a
| sufficiently generic way to be applicable to any big
| enterprise. The only way to achieve this is through heavy
| configuration/parameterization.
| wooque wrote:
| >But there is no competing product (suite) that offers
| comparable functionality. Many companies have built entire
| workflows (not just development related) around Jira, and have
| huge knowledge bases in Confluence. Switching would come with a
| lot of effort.
|
| Most companies don't need "comparable functionality" and most
| did not built entire workflows around it, and those companies
| will leave for competitors. The few that locked themselves into
| Jira will face sharply rising prices in next years, that will
| make them reconsider their choice.
|
| They have bad products and they are losing 700 million a year,
| future for Atlassian is bleak.
| rob74 wrote:
| > _...and have huge knowledge bases in Confluence._
|
| I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery - in the huge
| datasets you have in mind, finding the page you are looking for
| is more a matter of luck than anything else. And once you found
| it, you can never be sure if it's still up to date.
|
| > _Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always
| drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around
| for a while._
|
| I'm actually wondering how they can _not_ make a profit with
| the huge corporate user base they have?
| rjzzleep wrote:
| I worked with an Atlassian consulting firm for a short period
| while at a big org. Needless to say the consulting firms
| recommend the big orgs to do things differently from what
| they do.
|
| Jira - Everyone has the performance issue, to avoid it they
| tell them to carefully choose extensions and not randomly
| litter it, especially with extensions that conflict each
| other.
|
| Confluence - They recommend to establish a proper structure
| in advance that everyone follows with templates that everyone
| can use(not the default ones), so that the cemetery issue
| doesn't happen.
|
| That said, I haven't seen any company who's confluence wasn't
| a knowledge cemetery. But regardless of how much I dislike
| Jira, I'd still pick confluence over google docs.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I remember loading it today and just cursing about it, it sat
| there for 5 seconds before anything happened...it's a
| freaking wiki...
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Agreed. Jira and Confluence search is easily the worst I've
| ever used and to your point it's more of a box to check for
| product people versus being useful to end users. It is
| absolutely where data goes to die.
|
| I've been using https://github.com/just-the-docs/just-the-
| docs and find it much easier, nicer looking, and people are
| excited to not use Confluence.
| virtualritz wrote:
| > I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery [...]
|
| Spot on from my experience using it in big orgs.
|
| The issue IMHO is that organization of knowledge is not
| following any system and/or no system that could be followed
| was ever set in place by the organization when they bought
| into Confluence.
|
| It's kinda like ordering an Airbus because they're a reliable
| plane. Then you sell tickets and everyone is board of course
| because ... Airbus. But you never hire a pilot.
|
| If organizations using Confluence had at least one full time
| "Wiki Master" position or the like (with resp. superpowers),
| this wouldn't have to be like that.
|
| I.e. I'm not sure the argument can be made that this is
| Atlasassian's fault.
| sbarre wrote:
| > If organizations using Confluence had at least one full
| time "Wiki Master" position or the like (with resp.
| superpowers), this wouldn't have to be like that.
|
| I think part of the challenge is finding and retaining this
| person. It takes a fairly unique kind of person to
| want/enjoy a (let's be honest) thankless job like managing
| and maintaining a huge corporate wiki.
|
| Finding good tech writers or information science
| professionals has always been a difficult task in any
| company I've been at.
|
| Documentation and wiki writing ends up being side-of-desk
| work for someone else, and so of course it never gets
| maintained.
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| >I.e. I'm not sure the argument can be made that this is
| Atlasassian's fault.
|
| As someone who spends a lot of his work life administering
| Jira and Confluence, I disagree. The problem is that these
| products try to be everything to everyone and as a result
| users have a massive degree of freedom with what to do and
| how to order things.
|
| With that amount of freedom you just have a bunch of end
| users, many of them non-technical, who have no idea how
| they are SUPPOSED to use it. Especially because they don't
| want to spend a lot of time learning the right way to use
| the tools. They have a bunch of other things to do and just
| need to interact with this tool to complete their current
| task and then move on.
|
| You are right, a sort of Wiki-Master would help. But, at
| least in my organization, we don't even have enough
| capacity to do all the basic administrative tasks required
| like setting up projects, workflows, custom fields,
| screens, etc. We can't also manage the content inside. The
| users are on their own in that regard.
|
| If you are not willing to hire stuff with the sole purpose
| of managing the content of your Jira and Confluence
| instances, a more opiniated, rigid product is probably a
| lot better for your organization.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I feel like the only benefit of Confluence over any other
| wiki-like product is the ability to tag users and link to
| Jira issues.
| prmoustache wrote:
| What is their fault is how slow it is.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Pre-coffee early morning spitballing so be kind...
|
| But what about storing documentation as flat files in version
| control?
|
| What about even storing tickets as flat files in version
| control?
| furry-worry wrote:
| If the entire company was just you and me, that'd be very
| tedious but otherwise fine. But even software companies
| have non-software people on their staff, who are less
| likely to know how Git works, but _can_ spot some problems
| we developer folks can 't see. We'd want them to tell us
| about it, but if we add too many hurdles they won't.
| williamcotton wrote:
| I routinely use the GitHub website to edit and commit
| Markdown files and I can imagine a ticketing UI that
| utilizes a git backend.
|
| I agree that any approach should not have many hurdles!
| mangamadaiyan wrote:
| Once upon a time, I was gainfully employed at a company
| that stored its tickets as flat files, using a homegrown
| ticketing system which was a bunch of perl scripts. Said
| system had the same name as the first name of the actor who
| played Jack Horner in Boogie Nights. It had all the good
| features of a text-based system ... simplicity and
| greppability being the biggest ones.
|
| It eventually got replaced by some JIRA-like monstrosity, I
| don't remember which. All the text-based goodness was lost.
| The excuse for the move to a different system was
| "performance", which was half true. I'm guessing that
| nobody wanted to go fix it.
|
| The point behind all this rambling is that yes - flat files
| can be made to work in the way you mention. It just isn't
| an approach that is cool enough.
| smcl wrote:
| Yeah Confluence is a black hole as far as I'm concerned.
| Search absolutely sucks, and it's made worse by how some
| teams store meeting minutes (and basically _everything_ )
| there, so searching for simple stuff turns up pages and pages
| of useless junk.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| "Knowledge cemetery" - that is a terrific turn of phrase.
|
| Of course it doesn't apply just to confluence, but to the
| whole paradigm of uncurated, informal knowledge dumps.
|
| Unless there is a real process around documentation, it just
| rots, and the key problem is you can tell what's fresh and
| what's rotten.
| tablet wrote:
| > I dislike using Jira as much as anyone, mainly because it's
| so excruciatingly slow.
|
| But there is no competing product (suite) that offers
| comparable functionality and provides the same long-term
| flexibilty.
|
| This is maybe true, but the future belongs to more flexible
| software. Eventually Notion [1] or Fibery [2] will replace
| Jira. They may do it now for smaller team already (10-500 ppl),
| it just takes time to enter large companies.
|
| [1] https://notion.so [2] https://fibery.io
| londons_explore wrote:
| > Switching would come with a lot of effort.
|
| I think you misunderstand the way some companies work... Some
| companies, a VP will send an email saying "As of next week, we
| will use Asana instead of Jira. Jira will be deleted, so copy
| anything important off it now. NO EXCEPTIONS!"
|
| Sure, there will be mayhem for a couple of weeks, but the
| migration will be successful. The VP will have one more thing
| to put on his 'done' checklist.
| geodel wrote:
| Agreed. To think Jira has reached to the level of Mainframes,
| effectively irreplaceable, would be hilarious.
| eafkuor wrote:
| > Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always
| drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around
| for a while.
|
| They want to hire 17000 more people:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-07/atlassian...
| msoad wrote:
| Maybe if they increase prices to satisfy Wall Street it will be
| replaceable.
| Juliate wrote:
| > It might be advisable for Atlassian to start fresh with a new
| ticketing system.
|
| That, kind of like Mozilla started fresh with Firefox, would
| indeed be a killer move (edit: provided they _can_ structurally
| do so).
| blntechie wrote:
| They need to go the way of Telegram and build parallel
| products themselves and let the better one prevail after some
| time. Basically build your own competitor in-house.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I am not convinced that would amount to anything useful.
| Their engineering culture does not seem to be up to the
| challenge, judging from the quality their products have for
| many years now. They would probably only produce an equally
| bloated piece of software, that does not work properly on all
| major browsers and gaslights you about your choice of
| browser, because they were not able to stick to standards.
| flurdy wrote:
| > Atlassian to start fresh with a new ticketing system
|
| They bought Trello for that
| lawgimenez wrote:
| I haven't touched Trello in years. Not sure if they stagnated
| or Atlassian did not put enough resources in it.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| While Trello is simpler and snappier (not snappy, but
| snappier) than anything Atlassian has to offer, it is quite
| limiting as well for task organization.
|
| One problem is, that not everyone is willing to educate
| themselves and people expect to be able to use things
| immediately. This causes the push to dumb down things into a
| limiting experience. If I were surrounded by only technical
| people, then a plaintext file like an org-mode file with
| predefined todo-labels, commited to a git repo would beat all
| of the Jiras, Trellos or whatever out there and it would cost
| not a cent and be safer to work with, as everything is stored
| in git.
| xienze wrote:
| > Confluence is actually fine, although also not exactly
| fast...
|
| It still doesn't have native Markdown editing, does it? Major
| issue IMO.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| And they will never have it!
|
| It has been years, since I wrote in their little feedback
| box, that it sucks and does not properly support Markdown.
| They do not give a damn and they are not going to fix their
| issues. Best to look elsewhere for an acceptable wiki
| experience.
| consp wrote:
| > Confluence is actually fine.
|
| Every time there is an update I wonder what feature they
| removed or is broken. I still cannot properly add images in
| lists or continue the numbering in a new list to work around
| this "feature".
|
| They also broke markup/down import which is another kind of
| hell.
| nikau wrote:
| Last update we had resulted in markdown only being imported
| if you paste it into the document using shift-insert, ctrl-v
| didn't work for some reason, can only assume they want to
| kill it off.
| guidedlight wrote:
| I agree that Jira is too complex, which makes it slow. It's
| also way too customisable at the project level, so moving to
| scaled agile is hard because of it. Honestly, it's easier to
| start again if you want to be successful with SAFe.
|
| If Atlassian wants to be profitable, they need to replace their
| founding CEO's. Mike and Scott have done well to grow the
| business, but the required skillset is different from this
| point on. Mike in particular seems to be very distracted these
| days.
| century19 wrote:
| I worked for a large department in a large bank that changed
| from Jira to MS Teams Scrum, as the new licence for Jira was
| too much. No way that it had as many features as Jira, but it
| worked fine, maybe was simpler.
|
| So it ain't nonsense, users do switch.
| rjgonza wrote:
| Intered to know more about "MS Teams Scrum", got a link or
| something?
| lodovic wrote:
| My client uses Azure DevOps for ticketing and scrum
| processes, and that integrates nicely with Teams
| (pipelines, bugs, user stories, etc). It works pretty well
| and can be customized.
| century19 wrote:
| Indeed, it was Azure DevOps. I had linked it with Teams
| as it was accessed through that, or so I remember.
| blntechie wrote:
| We used TFS in 2010 to create issues and stories and
| development workflows and i remember it worked fine with no
| major complaints. Especially as a full VS shop ,it even had
| very good integration for everything which can be done inside
| the Visual Studio itself. We eventually moved to JIRA though
| couple of years later.
|
| I believe that TFS product evolved to Azure DevOps now.
| calineczka wrote:
| Jira is slow and Confluence too. I 120% agree. It's the biggest
| issue for me. The longer the page in Confluence the worse it
| gets. I use it for weekly meeting notes and every 2 quarters I
| need to start a new document because editing the current one
| causes the CPU to go brrrrr.
| silon42 wrote:
| Why not use a page per meeting?
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| This could end up on the pile of complaints.
|
| https://ifuckinghatejira.com/
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>But there is no competing product (suite) that offers
| comparable functionality.
|
| But not everyone needs 'comparable' functionality - an awful
| lot of people use just some features and not others - because
| of the awful UI and terrible user experience, these people are
| ripe to be picked off by a competitor (existing or future). I
| agree, if a mega-corp is completely in bed with JIRA, its
| harder to switch, but for a company not making any money
| (Atlassian), having their small and medium sized customers
| peeled off bit-by-bit for better products is going to hurt.
| dx034 wrote:
| The alterntive for companies with many departments is usually
| using a variety of tools that all need to be in sync. Jira
| can be the one point that handles all workflows for all
| projects.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| even within one group I've seen some teams use gitlab
| issues rather than jira. It made a little extra work for
| someone I'm sure, but it worked fine. I think there are
| plenty of tools that do what a developer needs. Jira also
| does what the manager needs. If there were some good
| alternative for them, I think we'd see jiras hold slip.
| native_samples wrote:
| Latest versions of YouTrack come with a knowledge base and
| pretty flexible workflows support. I'm curious why YouTrack
| never seems to be listed as a Jira+Confluence competitor,
| given the similar target markets.
| smallerfish wrote:
| YouTrack can even (apparently) import from Confluence. I
| never got a chance to try the import to see if it works
| though.
| dangerface wrote:
| Lockin is still an issue at smaller businesses. The boss
| doesn't care if it works well just as long as it work well
| enough. Trying to make arguments for better software based on
| ui/ux goes no where the higher ups just don't feel the pain
| of us plebs that have to use it.
| smcleod wrote:
| Personally I much prefer GitLab with Issues + Kanban, it's
| super fast, lightweight but has enough features and it gets out
| of your way.
| subpixel wrote:
| GitLab's valuation is pinned on charging enterprise customers
| for a system that replaces Jira and is more closely aligned
| with devops.
|
| The problem is you can't much go ala carte - you have to go
| all-in.
| smcleod wrote:
| I agree licensing / costs have become less attractive
| especially at the lower end, VC funding ruins so many
| software companies - I hope they can overcome it.
| [deleted]
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| You don't need most of those comparable functionality AND you
| can get decent UX
|
| Simply put, Atlassian sucks at building products because their
| culture is not good. They got lucky they had the right idea
| when they were young and didn't have competition.
|
| Nowadays there are just better products out there.
| zxspectrum1982 wrote:
| I have never tried the JetBrains' alternatives (Youtrack,
| Space, etc) but considering everything from JetBrains is
| usually very good, I'd like to hear from someone who has.
| native_samples wrote:
| Used Jira at the last company. Use YouTrack now. YouTrack is
| better, hands down. Much faster UI, more keyboardable, better
| integrated into the IDE, integrating it with CI and mailboxes
| is easy.
|
| Caveats: new job is small so it's a small instance.
| JetBrain's own YT instance is pretty fast though, so I guess
| it can scale well. Also, we don't use the new KB/wiki feature
| so can't comment on that. It's probably got less features
| than Confluence. We don't use the scrum features.
|
| Biggest caveat - I speak as a developer. One of the biggest
| problems with Jira was the culture that surrounds it.
| Clueless PMs who had never written software in their life
| kept creating fixed workflows in which you couldn't
| transition tickets to arbitrary states (for no apparent
| reason, there seemed to be no benefit to these rules). So we
| were constantly being slowed down by the need to get the
| handful of people with Jira access to edit the workflows and
| add more transitions, which was pure makework, especially as
| even figuring out who the admins were was remarkably
| complicated. PMs also had a weird Jira fetish, they were
| like, if it's not in Jira it doesn't exist. So they forced
| the project to change from a more normal SW dev project early
| on to mandating that _every_ commit had a ticket associated,
| and that ticket had to be scheduled into a sprint etc. It was
| just rank stupidity. Want to do a quick refactoring, as part
| of your current task? Roll it all into one giant commit
| because otherwise you 'll need to file a ticket. New place
| doesn't work like that. YouTrack is used more simply, like a
| todo list. Git logs are the source of truth.
| ickyforce wrote:
| I haven't used them for real but (briefly) evaluated with the
| intention to maybe replace Jira, about a year ago.
|
| Space wasn't there yet. IIRC the main issue was lack of a way
| to set custom fields via API, or some weird restriction
| around that. My general impression was that it was promising
| but too immature at that time.
|
| For any Jira competitors reading this - start with providing
| 2-way sync between your product and Jira instance. It would
| make moving away from Jira soooo much easier! The current
| state is that even importing Jira data is below what I'd
| expect - e.g. Linear (last time I checked) didn't import
| comments at all and all issue IDs were changed to new ones.
| Really, if there's FOO-123 in Jira it's table stakes for it
| to be also called FOO-123 in the new tool.
|
| I wrote a tool to migrate an issue tracker to Jira which
| imported everything as expected and updated links in issue
| descriptions/comments to keep their integrity. It took few
| days for a one-time migration so I'd expect someone who
| builds a business in this area to just have that as a
| baseline. It's sad how bad the "import from Jira" journeys
| are.
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| YouTrack search bar compared to Jira endless clicking in
| filters is day and night.
|
| But I didn't use Jira for years. I hope I never will. To the
| degree, I'll need 20% more pay for comparable job if they use
| Jira.
| ickyforce wrote:
| Jira has a search bar which seems ok-ish. Except that I
| have to wait 10s after I open Jira for the search bar to
| start working because it's probably the last thing to
| become interactive after a page load :|
| avereveard wrote:
| Bitbucket pipelines are very nice tho
|
| And while Jira is clunky, but other enterprise grade solution
| I've used are worse
|
| Don't get me wrong I'd pick lean alternatives any day of the
| week, but for what it does there's few replacements
| bodge5000 wrote:
| > Confluence is actually fine
|
| My main problem with confluence is that it doesn't know what
| kind of text editor it wants to be. Sometimes its markdown (or
| rather its own undocumented flavour of markdown), sometimes its
| a rich-text editor, sometimes its just plain text, and you kind
| of figure out on the fly what to do. Also the codes boxes are
| absolutely massive and a bit of a pain to work with (which,
| like all of these problems, could be solved with just normal
| markdown).
|
| In the grand scheme of things though, its a minor annoyance.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > Confluence is actually fine
|
| Confluence is the single, worst Atlassian product, in my
| opinion. I describe it as a wiki written by someone who has
| never used a wiki. It seems like everything about it is wrong
| in some way, and it's painful to use.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I've been recently forced to use Confluence and I'm blown-
| away at how horrible the editor is. It feels like it's a
| beta-level product. For what it costs I'd expect it to be on-
| par with, say, Mediawiki and it's just not.
|
| Footnotes? Ha!
| https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-68553
| smallerfish wrote:
| It used to be fine. The absolute worst of the recent changes
| is that they got rid of the ability to make a link to a new
| page by creating [the link] in square brackets, and then
| clicking on the link once published. Now you can only create
| links through their menu (or a keyboard shortcut), and only
| to pages that exist already. IMO when that feature was
| removed it stopped being a wiki.
| adrr wrote:
| Have you used sharepoint?
| pdpi wrote:
| > Once upon a time Bitbucket was the only site to offer free
| private repos
|
| And mercurial too. I do miss mercurial.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I agree. Jira is here to stay. It is like Excel - love it or
| hate it, but it has its use cases other products do not cover
| in total, only for certain cases.
| bitwize wrote:
| If I never have to hear about JIRA and Confluence again, it'll be
| too soon.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Atlassian did well in replacing the barren world that consisted
| of Bugzilla/Trac/etc (yuck) and worse closed-sourced offenders
| like the "Rational suite" (the worse pile of crap I've ever had
| the displeasure of dealing with)
|
| But yeah, somebody should create a Jira ticket for their lack of
| profitability
| indoorskier wrote:
| "As an Atlassian founder, I would like to make money, so that I
| can sell and never look at a Jira ticket again"
|
| tag, estimate, assign, add to epic, put on next sprint
| captaincaveman wrote:
| Well its not a cheap product, I suspect its just a massive knot
| of complexity and thus massively expensive to maintain and
| manage.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Massive pile of garbage is more like it. As a developer, the
| only thing slowing me down from getting work done was waiting
| on JIRA and being told to use the crap they call Confluence
| to document things.
| yardstick wrote:
| What do you recommend instead?
|
| JIRA & Confluence seem to be the best of a bad bunch. I do
| miss the self-hosted option.
| lmm wrote:
| Trello was good, although it's quickly being run into the
| ground.
|
| Mediawiki is a pain to maintain but nothing else comes
| close.
| theteapot wrote:
| README.md
| mvonballmo wrote:
| Honestly, Azure DevOps is a solid replacement. The
| integration is really good and the "Boards" software
| really feels like they're eating their own dog food.
| Their Wiki software is Markdown stored in a Git repo
| (unlike Confluence's mess). It's fast, permissions are
| relatively intuitive and fast, etc.
|
| It's worth a look if you're evaluating.
|
| JetBrains Space is another alternative, but I have no
| experience with it.
| rusticpenn wrote:
| Confluence search has a lot of issues. Its almost
| impossible to search for documentation or anything there.
| Even Slack search is leagues better and can be used as a
| documentation/ help tool.
| ed_blackburn wrote:
| Treat it like a software problem, start with the simplest
| thing that'll work and then introduce more complexity or
| features when you need them. Chances are you'll start
| with GH issues or a shared doc in a productivity suite
| and where ever you land, it won't be JIRA.
| theteapot wrote:
| It's not great but it's not that bad. A business has to
| have documentation and has to have a standardized workflows
| around doc. Jira/Confluence is not what I would choose but
| it works OK.
| threeseed wrote:
| > Well its not a cheap product
|
| Jira is pretty cheap actually compared to Asana etc.
|
| Free up to 10 users, $14.5/month up to 20,000.
|
| https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing
| oaiey wrote:
| Do not forget TFS.
| itronitron wrote:
| I like Bugzilla and Trac's minimal functionality. It's enough
| to facilitate communicating and tracking on issues within a
| team.
| taylorbuley wrote:
| > Atlassian's legacy Jira product is clunky and has barely
| evolved in a decade -- it's essentially a ticket-based system
| which allows developers and product managers to communicate on
| tasks and is no longer loved by developers
|
| Developers "loving" any ticketing system is a bit of a stretch.
| To me it's more of a "least worst" preference.
| yrgulation wrote:
| Am i the only one who finds trello more than enough? Agile is
| meant to be lean, but instead its become a blob full of nonsense
| in part thanks to tools such as atlassian's jira. With basic
| tools like trello you define a slim scrumban workflow and focus
| on actual work. There are indeed use cases for stuff like jira
| but it feels like 99% of the time jira is not necessary.
| pikseladam wrote:
| We are using youtrack and we are loving it.
| dcdc123 wrote:
| Their software also gets worse with every update.
| dodgerdan wrote:
| Same headline was run about Amazon. Revenue and costs will give
| you more insights.
| stateableio wrote:
| Jira Data Center is an unbelievably powerful tool.
|
| It suffers from unknowledgable administrators.
|
| If you have a person who is running Jira Data Center that is
| familiar with its internal classes, API, Scriptrunner, Automation
| for Jira, and the enormous 3rd party plug-in environment, there
| is simply no comparison. It's not even close.
|
| To be fair, that's a pretty big ask, in terms of technical know-
| how and cost. Even just base Jira is quite complicated to
| configure well.
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