Since there’s a lot of assumptions on personality here, I’ll toss my perspective here.
Worked at Atlassian for 5 years, had plenty of interactions with Mike. I wouldn’t categorize him as a jerk. I have plenty of disagreements about decisions he’s made, and I think he heavily over-hired (and is paying for it now), but a jerk he is not.
The reality is Atlassian has mechanisms, for better or for worse, that reward social discontent - Hello (their internal Confluence instance which has Reddit-like upvoting on blogs) and their karma bot on slack. Both of which tend to result in people gamifying these to boost their social status, which as you’ve seen with Reddit, often results in a subset of people realizing negative comments get more attention than positive ones. This got out of hand and they’ve been trying to dial it back, leading to cuts like these. It’s been a problem at Atlassian for a while.
The employee didn't call him a jerk. That was a straw-man from Atlassian. Now we're arguing over whether he's a jerk or not.
A opposed to what actually happened: Mike (CEO) fired 19,000 people. Then Mike held a video AMA regarding the firings. Mike took the meeting from the headquarters of the NBA team he owns.
The employee, Unterwurzacher, parodied the CEO on Slack, writing, “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
> The employee didn't call him a jerk. That was a straw-man from Atlassian.
We don't really have enough information to adjudicate either way, the article doesn't include a transcript of what she actually said or a transcript of what was being said in the courtroom with context (tribunalroom? boardroom? wherever the lawyer was talking).
It seems a bit pointless to hypothesise what might have happened then decide whether the imaginary actions were reasonable in the hypothetical scenario. If we're going to debate correctness there needs to be actual source material instead of this third-hand summary behind a paywall.
Reading this comment really shifted my perspective on this whole thing. I’m less upset about the firing and more upset that anyone ever has the ability to control the livelihoods of 19,000 people.
19k is a fairly small business. I mean it isn't "small business" but it is small relative to many others.
Large companies aren't anytime new. Ford had 100k in the 1920s. Then you have places like new York City government that has 309k people.
I would prefer to have many smaller companies than a could of big ones. But 19k isn't really that many people
does this particularly qualify him as a jerk? or just that the employee takes all the risk in employment, and capitalism does wrong by rewarding owners and management vs workers?
that he's showing off how rich he is as the result of throwing these people on the street is just part of the system weve built
He was a passionate climate activist, possibly still is.
He has since purchased a private jet under controversy.
His company now sponsors an F1 team.
He now seems to be a typical billionaire. You don’t get to be a billionaire without being ruthless.
He probably is now a rich jerk. When I worked at Atlassian and on boarded, one of the managers said if you are in a lift with Mike or Scott, and they asked what you do here, you better tell them what value you are bringing…
Mike was also very public he was proud Atlassian was not a high payer, he wouldn’t compete with Google etc on pay, at the time, yet people still wanted to work at Atlassian. Also didn’t hide the fact they absolutely utilised lack of local market knowledge for visa holders when nearly have the office was a temporary visa holder at the time.
Maybe he was a great guy. But people change. It seems as though having your brains marinated in money is highly neurotoxic, no matter how you started off.
(Anyway: the main offence is using the term "jerk" instead of "wanker").
Regardless of the fact that he probably is a jerk, it doesn't seem like appropriate workplace behavior to be calling anyone a jerk. Just because you have free speech doesn't mean that your speech should have no consequences. Maybe it's unfair and a double standard, but to me it seems like a no-brainer that you shouldn't be calling people names in your workplace.
Regardless of whether it is 'appropriate workplace behavior' to call a jerk a jerk, firing someone for it is so far outside the range of 'appropriate behavior' that it's hard to make a comparison.
Let's bring this close to home. You hire someone to mow your lawn. They come in every week and mow your lawn. And you pay them. One day you walk by and they're talking with your neighbor and you overhear them saying you're a rich a-hole and a jerk, and an idiot. I mean not appropriate workplace behavior. Are they going to still have a job or would you prefer that someone else mows your lawn? I mean they just said nasty things about you- nbd. not something that should affect their status as your "employee".
Several things severely wrong with this example. The employee didn't talk to an outsider, they didn't talk to someone the CEO would be likely to have known personally, and they're so far removed from the CEO nobody thinks they'd know them on a personal level.
You just can't talk about a CEO as if they're a person interacting and hiring people individually because they just don't.
In a small company a CEO may approve all hiring. In a larger company they delegate that. But they run the company. Everyone in the company including those hiring reports directly or indirectly to them.
When an employee communicates broadly inside a company, even if it's not directly to outsiders, that is essentially public. As we can see in this thread some random person chimed in with the details. But s/neighbor/your wife/ if that helps the analogy and insider vs. outsider is the issue. It's an imperfect one as they all tend to be.
This is why for example quarterly results are not generally communicated to all insiders in a company before they are released, because they are going to leak.
I think my analogy, though imperfect, demonstrates that when you have some sort of employment or other relationship, "bad mouthing" the other party, either in public or in private, is expected to be damaging to this relationship. The CEO of your company is the closest thing to the single person employing you. He runs the entity that employs you.
What a wild cultural difference. Where do you live?
Over here in the USA, I don't think any customer service worker expects to be able to openly mock a customer and still have a job. I struggle to imagine the idea of calling my boss a wanker to his face and still expecting to have a job. To insult the CEO seems like it might as well be a resignation - if you have that little respect for leadership, why are you working at that company?
Over there in the USA there's a culture of extreme deference to corporate leadership, probably stemming from the slavery and servitude past. It's very similar in Brazil as well, sharing from the same past.
It's funny that such a cognitive dissonance between freedoms and rights vs the absolutist tyranny of corporate life making a mockery of those freedoms can coexist in the same society with the same staying power.
You aren’t wrong, but having worked in China as well as the states (and a short stint in Switzerland), I think east Asia (china, Japan, Korea) has that even worse, probably due to Confucius. As China is looking more and more like the future, I fear that this gets worse before it gets better.
> if you have that little respect for leadership, why are you working at that company?
What an astoundingly dumb question. Most people work somewhere to get paid, and If you think its unusual to hate the boss, oh boy, do I have news for you!
> … It was an irrelevant personal attack and insult directed at a colleague, essentially calling him a ‘rich jerk’.
> Unterwurzacher reportedly parodied the CEO on Slack, writing, “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
Wow. I mean, come on, thats like the least offensive thing ever. At the most, maybe tell the manager to tell them thats not the “spirit” of the workplace, but firing for this is a step too far.
If the CEO wasn’t a jerk before he certainly is now.
There's no "free speech" at work [-places] in the USA. That's not what free speech means anyways. You can and will be absolutely be fired for saying things at work that are incompatible with your employer's opinions. I can't think of a faster way to get fired anywhere than insulting the person running the company you work for, private or public company, definitely in public.
The US has less free speech than some other countries. Especially now, but this was always true at corporations. In the US you can be fired for anything, including speech.
Generally people in power will surround themselves with yes-men. It takes a good amount of humility and sincerity to look beyond this and deliberately choose people with a spine to listen to.
The most charitable interpretation is that most rich/powerful people are just as flawed as everyone else. Obviously, their power/wealth makes them less deserving of that charity ultimately.
> Generally people in power will surround themselves with yes-men.
It's probably a CEO thing too - you have some vision for the company so you're going to hire people that enable that vision, not people that will question your every move.
> The most charitable interpretation is that most rich/powerful people are just as flawed as everyone else.
I can't believe that. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps at their private schools and then had to claw and fight as a legacy admission to the school their parents attended. From there they lived hand to mouth destitute with barely a million dollar loan from their parents!
Then there was the existential crisis of meeting with their college roommates' parents and their own parents' bridge buddies to secure millions in loans. It was their flawless vision and skill that let them be at the right place and the right time. If they wouldn't have had the foresight to fall out of a lucky vagina we would all be worse off.
You see they're scrappy go getters that started from the absolute bottom. They're infallible supermen whose greatest assets are their humility and unerring genius.
CEO is one of the least meritocratic jobs ever. It’s all just vibes, and the vibes are based off of what school you went to, who your parents know, where you grew up. Deep down they probably know this hence the insecurity. If it were a meritocracy they’d be toppled fast.
Can we agree that you are exaggerating? Not that you are totally wrong, but the flip side is, that ceos do need a different skillset. Workers who excel at the bureaucratic grind might not make the best leaders for lack of vision and empathy. Then again the concept of an empathic leader also seems to be foreign to many. It's hard to see anything with all the bullshit covering everything.
Eh, you don't hear about the ones who are well adjusted.
Usually nobody cares if you're a poor jerk. At least unless you do something phenomenal you don't get wide attention.
"New" rich people, especially those with power over other people, can develop plenty of complexes and insecurities that come out as weakness... like firing somebody for mocking them.
"Old" rich, generational wealth tend to develop a set of manners and habits where they don't get noticed or embarrass themselves quite so much by displaying such weakness.
You don't stay rich for a long time if you act like a fool.
I've been in positions to hire/fire before and never, ever would I fire someone over a kindergarten insult. How pathetic do you have to be to pull rank over "you rich jerk"
excellent case btw why you should never let these tech bros have power over your life, they're super charged angry little school boys with worse fantasies than a Soviet commissar
This is maybe beside the point but it annoys me how many CEOs wax poetic about "locking in" and "grindset" but then seem to have infinite time for bullshit side projects like owning an NBA team.
Has there ever been a positive story or product out of this wretched company; which has possibly destroyed billions in value across the US software sector by forcing everyone to use their disgustingly bad project management tool? When I interviewed there (and anecdotally from the people I know that worked there), at least they seemed like a nice place to work at. But alas even that had to be destroyed.
Nobody is forced to use it, they use it because it aligns with managers' incentives. Which are not related to ensuring technical work is completed effectively. Or having good visibility. Everything being obscure and hard to use allows you to paint the picture with your own words rather than the picture being painted right there on the computer screen plain as day.
lol the only atlassian engineer I knew spent 3 months 4 times a year "working remotely" from various resorts across Europe, I'm sure the 4-hour review of javascript she did per month was really worth that plus the apartment in brooklyn.. absolutely insane
Since there’s a lot of assumptions on personality here, I’ll toss my perspective here.
Worked at Atlassian for 5 years, had plenty of interactions with Mike. I wouldn’t categorize him as a jerk. I have plenty of disagreements about decisions he’s made, and I think he heavily over-hired (and is paying for it now), but a jerk he is not.
The reality is Atlassian has mechanisms, for better or for worse, that reward social discontent - Hello (their internal Confluence instance which has Reddit-like upvoting on blogs) and their karma bot on slack. Both of which tend to result in people gamifying these to boost their social status, which as you’ve seen with Reddit, often results in a subset of people realizing negative comments get more attention than positive ones. This got out of hand and they’ve been trying to dial it back, leading to cuts like these. It’s been a problem at Atlassian for a while.
The employee didn't call him a jerk. That was a straw-man from Atlassian. Now we're arguing over whether he's a jerk or not.
A opposed to what actually happened: Mike (CEO) fired 19,000 people. Then Mike held a video AMA regarding the firings. Mike took the meeting from the headquarters of the NBA team he owns.
The employee, Unterwurzacher, parodied the CEO on Slack, writing, “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
Then that employee was fired.
Correct, but as of writing this the two top comments were:
> Regardless of the fact that he probably is a jerk
and
> Does Atlassian's CEO realize that we all now know that he really is a rich jerk?
My comment was just meant to provide an insider perspective as a foil to those who had given theirs.
[dead]
> The employee didn't call him a jerk. That was a straw-man from Atlassian.
We don't really have enough information to adjudicate either way, the article doesn't include a transcript of what she actually said or a transcript of what was being said in the courtroom with context (tribunalroom? boardroom? wherever the lawyer was talking).
It seems a bit pointless to hypothesise what might have happened then decide whether the imaginary actions were reasonable in the hypothetical scenario. If we're going to debate correctness there needs to be actual source material instead of this third-hand summary behind a paywall.
Reading this comment really shifted my perspective on this whole thing. I’m less upset about the firing and more upset that anyone ever has the ability to control the livelihoods of 19,000 people.
Maybe businesses shouldn’t get that big.
19k is a fairly small business. I mean it isn't "small business" but it is small relative to many others. Large companies aren't anytime new. Ford had 100k in the 1920s. Then you have places like new York City government that has 309k people. I would prefer to have many smaller companies than a could of big ones. But 19k isn't really that many people
does this particularly qualify him as a jerk? or just that the employee takes all the risk in employment, and capitalism does wrong by rewarding owners and management vs workers?
that he's showing off how rich he is as the result of throwing these people on the street is just part of the system weve built
He was a passionate climate activist, possibly still is.
He has since purchased a private jet under controversy.
His company now sponsors an F1 team.
He now seems to be a typical billionaire. You don’t get to be a billionaire without being ruthless.
He probably is now a rich jerk. When I worked at Atlassian and on boarded, one of the managers said if you are in a lift with Mike or Scott, and they asked what you do here, you better tell them what value you are bringing…
Mike was also very public he was proud Atlassian was not a high payer, he wouldn’t compete with Google etc on pay, at the time, yet people still wanted to work at Atlassian. Also didn’t hide the fact they absolutely utilised lack of local market knowledge for visa holders when nearly have the office was a temporary visa holder at the time.
[flagged]
Maybe he was a great guy. But people change. It seems as though having your brains marinated in money is highly neurotoxic, no matter how you started off.
(Anyway: the main offence is using the term "jerk" instead of "wanker").
He might have been a top bloke then but in recent years he has had irreconcilable relationship breakdowns with his co-founder https://www.reddit.com/r/australian/comments/1m3ilhy/inside_... , wife and CFO https://www.afr.com/technology/mike-cannon-brookes-wins-inju... and most recently CTO https://www.afr.com/technology/atlassian-slashes-1600-jobs-a...
"Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals."
It's not the marination in money, it's the loss of constraint that fear brings.Most of us aren't good people at heart.
> karma bot on slack
What the actual fuck. I would not work at a place with something like that.
Regardless of the fact that he probably is a jerk, it doesn't seem like appropriate workplace behavior to be calling anyone a jerk. Just because you have free speech doesn't mean that your speech should have no consequences. Maybe it's unfair and a double standard, but to me it seems like a no-brainer that you shouldn't be calling people names in your workplace.
Regardless of whether it is 'appropriate workplace behavior' to call a jerk a jerk, firing someone for it is so far outside the range of 'appropriate behavior' that it's hard to make a comparison.
Let's bring this close to home. You hire someone to mow your lawn. They come in every week and mow your lawn. And you pay them. One day you walk by and they're talking with your neighbor and you overhear them saying you're a rich a-hole and a jerk, and an idiot. I mean not appropriate workplace behavior. Are they going to still have a job or would you prefer that someone else mows your lawn? I mean they just said nasty things about you- nbd. not something that should affect their status as your "employee".
Several things severely wrong with this example. The employee didn't talk to an outsider, they didn't talk to someone the CEO would be likely to have known personally, and they're so far removed from the CEO nobody thinks they'd know them on a personal level.
You just can't talk about a CEO as if they're a person interacting and hiring people individually because they just don't.
In a small company a CEO may approve all hiring. In a larger company they delegate that. But they run the company. Everyone in the company including those hiring reports directly or indirectly to them.
When an employee communicates broadly inside a company, even if it's not directly to outsiders, that is essentially public. As we can see in this thread some random person chimed in with the details. But s/neighbor/your wife/ if that helps the analogy and insider vs. outsider is the issue. It's an imperfect one as they all tend to be.
This is why for example quarterly results are not generally communicated to all insiders in a company before they are released, because they are going to leak.
I think my analogy, though imperfect, demonstrates that when you have some sort of employment or other relationship, "bad mouthing" the other party, either in public or in private, is expected to be damaging to this relationship. The CEO of your company is the closest thing to the single person employing you. He runs the entity that employs you.
What a wild cultural difference. Where do you live?
Over here in the USA, I don't think any customer service worker expects to be able to openly mock a customer and still have a job. I struggle to imagine the idea of calling my boss a wanker to his face and still expecting to have a job. To insult the CEO seems like it might as well be a resignation - if you have that little respect for leadership, why are you working at that company?
Over there in the USA there's a culture of extreme deference to corporate leadership, probably stemming from the slavery and servitude past. It's very similar in Brazil as well, sharing from the same past.
It's funny that such a cognitive dissonance between freedoms and rights vs the absolutist tyranny of corporate life making a mockery of those freedoms can coexist in the same society with the same staying power.
You aren’t wrong, but having worked in China as well as the states (and a short stint in Switzerland), I think east Asia (china, Japan, Korea) has that even worse, probably due to Confucius. As China is looking more and more like the future, I fear that this gets worse before it gets better.
> if you have that little respect for leadership, why are you working at that company?
What an astoundingly dumb question. Most people work somewhere to get paid, and If you think its unusual to hate the boss, oh boy, do I have news for you!
I was going to write a similar comment, but it turns out that isn’t what she said but rather what Atlassian has said she suggested he is.
https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2026/ex-atlassian-engineer-fig...
> … It was an irrelevant personal attack and insult directed at a colleague, essentially calling him a ‘rich jerk’.
> Unterwurzacher reportedly parodied the CEO on Slack, writing, “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
My sides can't handle this much freedom. This can be hardly called an ad hominem.
Wow. I mean, come on, thats like the least offensive thing ever. At the most, maybe tell the manager to tell them thats not the “spirit” of the workplace, but firing for this is a step too far.
If the CEO wasn’t a jerk before he certainly is now.
Making powerful people feel bad usually gets a negative response from them.
Even just generally, if you make someone lose face publicly, they're prone to lash out at you since they often feel they can't back down.
Yeah this should have been a quiet word from HR to not say stuff like that.
Still too far
With the one caveat that Australia doesn't have free speech. It's the one thing that sets the US apart and ahead of others.
There's no "free speech" at work [-places] in the USA. That's not what free speech means anyways. You can and will be absolutely be fired for saying things at work that are incompatible with your employer's opinions. I can't think of a faster way to get fired anywhere than insulting the person running the company you work for, private or public company, definitely in public.
The US has less free speech than some other countries. Especially now, but this was always true at corporations. In the US you can be fired for anything, including speech.
I’ve noticed rich people seem to have the absolute thinnest skin. Maybe not enough bullying? Or too much? Unclear
Generally people in power will surround themselves with yes-men. It takes a good amount of humility and sincerity to look beyond this and deliberately choose people with a spine to listen to.
The most charitable interpretation is that most rich/powerful people are just as flawed as everyone else. Obviously, their power/wealth makes them less deserving of that charity ultimately.
> Generally people in power will surround themselves with yes-men.
It's probably a CEO thing too - you have some vision for the company so you're going to hire people that enable that vision, not people that will question your every move.
It’s not a CEO thing - just like Jerk employees exist, jerk CEOs exist too
> The most charitable interpretation is that most rich/powerful people are just as flawed as everyone else.
I can't believe that. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps at their private schools and then had to claw and fight as a legacy admission to the school their parents attended. From there they lived hand to mouth destitute with barely a million dollar loan from their parents!
Then there was the existential crisis of meeting with their college roommates' parents and their own parents' bridge buddies to secure millions in loans. It was their flawless vision and skill that let them be at the right place and the right time. If they wouldn't have had the foresight to fall out of a lucky vagina we would all be worse off.
You see they're scrappy go getters that started from the absolute bottom. They're infallible supermen whose greatest assets are their humility and unerring genius.
CEO is one of the least meritocratic jobs ever. It’s all just vibes, and the vibes are based off of what school you went to, who your parents know, where you grew up. Deep down they probably know this hence the insecurity. If it were a meritocracy they’d be toppled fast.
Can we agree that you are exaggerating? Not that you are totally wrong, but the flip side is, that ceos do need a different skillset. Workers who excel at the bureaucratic grind might not make the best leaders for lack of vision and empathy. Then again the concept of an empathic leader also seems to be foreign to many. It's hard to see anything with all the bullshit covering everything.
Eh, you don't hear about the ones who are well adjusted.
Usually nobody cares if you're a poor jerk. At least unless you do something phenomenal you don't get wide attention.
"New" rich people, especially those with power over other people, can develop plenty of complexes and insecurities that come out as weakness... like firing somebody for mocking them.
"Old" rich, generational wealth tend to develop a set of manners and habits where they don't get noticed or embarrass themselves quite so much by displaying such weakness.
You don't stay rich for a long time if you act like a fool.
They’re downvoting you, and proving your point in doing so.
I've been in positions to hire/fire before and never, ever would I fire someone over a kindergarten insult. How pathetic do you have to be to pull rank over "you rich jerk"
excellent case btw why you should never let these tech bros have power over your life, they're super charged angry little school boys with worse fantasies than a Soviet commissar
https://archive.is/nWTrk
Does Atlassian's CEO realize that we all now know that he really is a rich jerk?
I had no idea who he even was, but as a former user of several Atlassian products , pass me a pitchfork.
I’m surprised he’s not busier shutting down coal or gas plants in Australia.
March 16 story OP;
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47478579
This is maybe beside the point but it annoys me how many CEOs wax poetic about "locking in" and "grindset" but then seem to have infinite time for bullshit side projects like owning an NBA team.
Well, is he a rich jerk?
Has there ever been a positive story or product out of this wretched company; which has possibly destroyed billions in value across the US software sector by forcing everyone to use their disgustingly bad project management tool? When I interviewed there (and anecdotally from the people I know that worked there), at least they seemed like a nice place to work at. But alas even that had to be destroyed.
Nobody is forced to use it, they use it because it aligns with managers' incentives. Which are not related to ensuring technical work is completed effectively. Or having good visibility. Everything being obscure and hard to use allows you to paint the picture with your own words rather than the picture being painted right there on the computer screen plain as day.
lol the only atlassian engineer I knew spent 3 months 4 times a year "working remotely" from various resorts across Europe, I'm sure the 4-hour review of javascript she did per month was really worth that plus the apartment in brooklyn.. absolutely insane
I do think a sincere apology and a promise to behave himself or herself in the future should be acceptable.
So no way out since there is no way the CEO would be sincere here
Given the context (the CEO yelling at the employees), an apology from the CEO seems more appropriate.