Image: © MichaelVi/Stock.adobe.com
Founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar said Atlassian needs to ‘run faster at our company priorities’.
Atlassian, the global software giant behind tools such as Jira and Confluence, is laying off 500 employees after a company reorganisation last month.
The Sydney-headquartered company said the reorganisation was prompted by a “changing and difficult macroeconomic environment” that required them to prioritise only the “most critical work for our current and future customers”.
“While it helped us streamline work, we need to go further in rebalancing the skills we require to run faster at our company priorities,” Atlassian founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar wrote in a blogpost yesterday (6 March).
The company confirmed that the job cuts – which affect approximately 5pc of its workforce – will impact the talent acquisition, programme management and research and insights teams the most.
“We want to be clear these decisions are not a reflection of our teammates’ work. Every single person has made contributions that have changed our company for the better and will leave a lasting impact on their peers and teams,” the founders wrote.
“This is about rebalancing the roles we need across Atlassian first and foremost.”
Founded more than two decades ago, Atlassian is a publicly-traded company that develops products for software developers and project managers. While the company’s global base is in Sydney, San Francisco is home to its US headquarters.
“We’ve written 134 Founder blogs since 2011, but this one comes with the heaviest of hearts knowing we are saying goodbye to great teammates and friends,” the founders went on.
“We came to this decision as an executive team and with our board, but ultimately the final call is on us as co-founders. To those who are leaving us: we are deeply sorry.”
Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar clarified that the latest layoffs should not be seen as “a reflection of Atlassian’s own financial performance” because the company will be reinvesting in “roles that better support our priorities”.
“As a company, we have massive growth opportunities in front of us, particularly across cloud migrations, ITSM and serving our enterprise customers in the cloud. Although hard, this rebalancing will help us put more wood behind these arrows,” they said.
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