Atlassian, the company behind tools like Jira, Confluence and Trello, announced today that it is currently laying off about 500 employees after a restructuring a month ago. This represents approximately 5% of all employees.
Atlassian co-founders and co-CEOs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar said in today’s announcement that the move should not be viewed as a reflection of the company’s financial performance. (The company continues to report net losses in its quarterly earnings calls, even as its overall earnings have increased over the years.) Instead, the co-founders are positioning the move as a “rebalance” that will help the company prioritize areas where it’s growing.
“We have been pushing for less investment in certain areas in order to reinvest in others,” the co-founder wrote. “This is different from finance-driven cuts that consider making ‘broad cuts.’ For example, he is a 10% cut that is evenly distributed across all organizations within the company. It’s not what’s happening.”
Specifically, Atlassian will cut staff in areas such as talent acquisition, program management, and what it calls “research and insights.”
In the succinct words of the company’s SEC filings, the idea here is to “better position it to perform against its greatest growth opportunities.” , Moving to the Cloud, IT Service Management (ITSM), and Serving Enterprise Customers in the Cloud. It’s no secret that Atlassian has focused heavily on the cloud in recent years, and has invested in that as well as products such as his ITSM solution, his Jira Service Management, which he launched in 2021. seems to put
Atlassian expects to incur costs of approximately $70 million to $75 million in connection with these layoffs, according to Atlassian filings.
Layoffs are never easy, but the company will provide affected employees with 15 weeks of severance pay, plus one additional week of work per year, and unused paid vacation. Atlassian will provide accelerated vesting and employer-sponsored healthcare and visa support for the next six months. Employees can also keep their work laptops (which is becoming more common).
In an odd move, laid-off employees will continue to have access to company communication tools throughout the week. Other previously registered devices give him access to tools like Confluence, Slack, Zoom, Gmail, etc.).
