The whole company is organized in a hierarchy of numerous levels. There is an official hierarchy throughout the company (everyone has a manager, who has a manger, who has a manager, ...), but also an unofficial pecking order within the teams. The pecking order is not openly communicated, but you will find out over time where you and others are positioned in it by experiencing whose opinions are listened to and whose are simply ignored. Many people who are higher up in the pecking order tend to communicate like politicians—on the surface, they act friendly and polite, but underneath their behaviour is full of competition, greed and dishonesty. Decisions are made in private by “leadership”, regular employees have no influence at all and their feedback and opinions are ignored. It is not clear who this “leadership” is, and even the decisions themselves are often not communicated (let alone the reasoning behind them), but rather mainly spread through rumours and word of mouth.
Atlassian doesn’t seem to have heard of the climate catastrophe and flies its people around the world as if there is no tomorrow. During my time at Atlassian my personal annual total CO2 emissions have increased by more than 50% through flying alone, and an average employee would probably emit even several times more than that. At comfortable spring temperatures outside, the AC in the office building is running at full power and people are sitting on their desks in jackets. Most employees seem to have never heard of bicycles, trains and buses and use airplanes, cars and taxis for every single journey. The “bike room” (which is a movable bike rack in the hallway) is used for storing boxes as everyone arrives by car anyways. Even for a simple failure of equipment that would require just replugging the battery, there is a policy of not doing any repairs and a new device is ordered instead.
Employees are forced to use super expensive but absolutely *censored by Glassdoor* equipment. The laptop that I was forced to use costs 4000 USD, but the battery lasts only 30 minutes. It doesn't even support standby, so when I transported it in my bag it got really hot and would just turn off after an hour or so. It was really bulky and heavy, the keyboard was lacking some essential keys, and it had a huge touchpad that was not centred in relation to the keyboard, so even after a year, my right hand would still touch it and cause accidental clicks. During hybrid meetings in the office someone had to stand in front of the TV and repeat everything someone said because the microphone was so bad that otherwise remote participants wouldn't understand a word. The physically present participants also couldn't understand the remotees because the AC was louder than the speakers of the TV. A lot of time is lost having to log in about 20–30 times on an average work day with the same account to different platforms or the VPN, which each time has to be confirmed on your smartphone and frequently doesn't work. When my laptop was broken and didn't turn on anymore, it took 3 days until I could even reach someone who could help me get a replacement. In total I would estimate that within one year I spent about 40% of my working hours either fixing problems with the *censored by Glassdoor* hardware and software that we are required to use or unable to work while waiting for someone else to fix them.
If you have been an Atlassian customer before, you will be aware how buggy and unreliable their software is and how unhelpful, incompetent, careless and dishonest their support is. Working there I was surprised that within the companies, the different teams are treating each other in that very same way. There are lots of technical interdependencies between the teams, and when other teams broke their software that we were relying on (which happened multiple times a week), they did not care about it and we had to find a workaround for ourselves. In general the company culture seems to be that we are not trying to make software that does what our customers (and other teams within the company) want and need, but we are trying to make software that makes our customers (and other teams) do what we want them to do. The actual developers at the bottom of the pecking order who are implementing the decisions made by leadership have no influence on this and are expected to implement what leadership tells them to instead of fixing errors or acknowledging customer feedback. This leads to software full of bugs that breaks all the time. There are no areas of expertise, no one knows the full picture nor is an expert in a certain area. If you find an error in a component that someone else has created, it is your responsibility instead of theirs to fix it, even if you have no knowledge about the component, and there will be no documentation and no one to help you. When people leave the company because they are kicked out or cannot handle it anymore, they are usually gone after 2 or 3 days, so there is no time at all for a handover. There are plenty of components where no one with any internal knowledge works at the company anymore. I would estimate that within one year at Atlassian I spent about 50% of my working hours implementing silly leadership decisions and dealing with problems in the software made by other teams and just 10% doing something that would actually benefit the customers.
The hiring process was very complicated and uncomfortable. You have to participate in a “background check” that is provided by some surveillance company. They forced me to get in contact with some of my former highschool teachers from 20 years ago and ask them to send a confirmation of my highschool diploma to the company, even though neither the diploma nor my grades were relevant for hiring me. This was really awkward. To work at Atlassian, you need to own a smartphone that can run the Duo app, which I was not told about beforehand. I was also surprised that no one checked whether I actually speak English, even though this is clearly the language of communication here. After I was hired, a person was assigned to help me with onboarding, but this person was not part of the team and could not assist me with any technical knowledge. Even though they claimed that our meetings were confidential, anything that I said was immediately forwarded to the team and the managers.
The company has a purely evil legal team that has influence on large parts of the daily work. When people started writing about works councils in reaction to a lot of people getting spontaneously kicked out, the legal team immediately deleted and prohibited that communication. While the company is attempting (not very successfully) to present itself as open-source-friendly in order to attract competent developers, the company policy is that it is forbidden to participate in open source projects unless it is proven in a lengthy process with manager approval that Atlassian would profit from the participation. This even applies to posting simple answers on Stack Overflow. On the other hand, Atlassian is not ashamed to heavily rely on open source software without giving anything back.
Due to all of this, working at Atlassian gave me the feeling of participating in the evil and unethical behaviour of this company and has really damaged my mental health. I have the impression that quite a lot of people working here cannot leave because it would cause them to be deported or homeless. If you are thinking about resettling to California to work for this company and have a choice, don’t do it!