I acknowledge headline writing is hard, but man, there's gotta be a better way to frame this. I was prepared to take Atlassian's side here, you can't call your coworkers jerks. But the article says "rich jerk" is Atlassian's characterization of a sarcastic comment:
> What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled
And I just don't see how that can cross the line. It's clearly meant to stoke the fires, but it's also pretty close to a recitation of the facts. Perhaps if the CEO finds this insulting he shouldn't have dialed into a layoff AMA call from his NBA team's headquarters.
And this is why knowledge workers, professionals, and every kind of worker needs to unionize and potentially find a path to working for themselves or forming worker-owned co-ops to create more stable, long term stable, less toxic, and fairer profit sharing environments because corporate extraction machines treat owners like kings and employees like dirt. It doesn't have to be this way.
I think the cult of personality always backfires, pun intended. Our company biggest product was a celebrity making fun commercials for the actual product. Works wonders. Personally I don't have a problem with him, I enjoyed his movies in the past. But not everybody does. Internally, the company tried to push this cult so deeply that it was part of the hiring process, part of the onboarding, even obscured some of the CEOs messaging. And you wonder, what happens when you hire someone who doesn't like this celebrity?
Many of us are mature enough to follow the principle of, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything." But not so when you have young developers flowing in and out of the company. In one of the town halls, a 24 year old dev, was put on a mic, and simply said, "I don't like X, he is super annoying, why do we keep plastering his face everywhere."
I've never seen an entire company freeze before. There was no way forward, no way backwards. The script had been broken. The dev, thinking he wasn't heard properly, sent the same message in our townhall slack channel. I did what I believe 90% of other people did. I screenshoted it.
The kid got another job a few months after. For once we saw the emperor wore no clothes.
Edit: million typos
Edit 2: in case it wasn't clear, no was not fired, he just found another job.
The best email I ever received was a notification my company was moving off Jira. Atlassian’s own stated philosophy is “Open Company, No Bullshit”. I wish that was true. Maybe they would have better products.
There’s no reason a company should put up with enemies within. In rare instances a disgruntled employee might be able to make a positive contribution. In most cases, even if the employee has valid reasons, by the time they are disgruntled there’s no coming back. It’s best for everyone to move on.
Yeah, I've met Atlassian's investor and advisor folks and that was my impression of them as well. Immediately unlikable people who treat people like objects.
Disappointing. A better response from Atlassian (or the CEO if this really bothered them so much) would be to look at the criticism and try to understand why this sentiment is in the org.
Is he too rich for some people’s taste? Does that indicate workers are unhappy with the real/perceived pay disparity?
Is he a jerk in other contexts? Is this proxy for unapproachable, rude, or some other unbecoming set of behaviors?
It’s an opportunity to improve, or at least reflect on the perception they have in the company. Firing, and asserting the right to do so for expressing an opinion, seems to me to be a poor choice of action.
Since the article is behind a paywall, the slack message she wrote (after the CEO dialed in from his NBA team’s HQ to speak about a company-wide layoff plan that also included demotions for many engineers) is this:
“ What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
Seems like a fair statement to make, and she didn’t call him a jerk directly. She didn’t deserve to be fired, but I’ll be surprised if she has any actual recourse.
Frankly, if the CEO is the leader he’s pretending to be, he’d apologize to her and offer her the job back with a signing bonus.
It’s sad how little respect most of these guys have for the engineers that enable them to walk into their country clubs and call themselves “tech CEOs”.
> “Employees disagreed in the chat, which resulted in Cannon-Brookes angrily interjecting to tell off the people who were complaining,” Puckett said in an opening statement at the hearing. On the company’s internal “Outrage Notification” Slack channel (a play on the “outage notifications” staff receive about technology issues), employees including Unterwurzacher mocked and condemned the comments from Cannon-Brookes, the company’s billionaire co-founder, who had joined the meeting from the headquarters of a basketball team he co-owns, the Utah Jazz.
> “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,” Unterwurzacher wrote.
It takes a certain amount of entitlement and lack of awareness to do this on official internal channels - with your name attached and viewable by anyone in the company, particularly during a downsizing event.
This would have been akin to printing out the statement, signing it with your name, and then stapling it to a literal bulletin board in the office hallway. There's no reality where that is acceptable...
“What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,” Unterwurzacher wrote. Atlassian fired her a few days later, saying she had “engaged in acrimonious communications and ad hominem attacks against teammates and colleagues.”
Unterwurzacher replied, “I think it’s difficult to point out the power imbalance in a way that is not potentially described by somebody as an ad hominem attack.”
Perhaps it is difficult, but it doesn't look like she was trying
152 comments
Amazing answer.
It's completely okay to say whatever you want and stand up for yourself, but you are not a child, own the consequences rather than whine
> What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled
And I just don't see how that can cross the line. It's clearly meant to stoke the fires, but it's also pretty close to a recitation of the facts. Perhaps if the CEO finds this insulting he shouldn't have dialed into a layoff AMA call from his NBA team's headquarters.
Many of us are mature enough to follow the principle of, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything." But not so when you have young developers flowing in and out of the company. In one of the town halls, a 24 year old dev, was put on a mic, and simply said, "I don't like X, he is super annoying, why do we keep plastering his face everywhere."
I've never seen an entire company freeze before. There was no way forward, no way backwards. The script had been broken. The dev, thinking he wasn't heard properly, sent the same message in our townhall slack channel. I did what I believe 90% of other people did. I screenshoted it.
The kid got another job a few months after. For once we saw the emperor wore no clothes.
Edit: million typos
Edit 2: in case it wasn't clear, no was not fired, he just found another job.
"“What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,”
That is an absolutely true statement (to the degree that you can pummel a non-physical thing).
Is he too rich for some people’s taste? Does that indicate workers are unhappy with the real/perceived pay disparity?
Is he a jerk in other contexts? Is this proxy for unapproachable, rude, or some other unbecoming set of behaviors?
It’s an opportunity to improve, or at least reflect on the perception they have in the company. Firing, and asserting the right to do so for expressing an opinion, seems to me to be a poor choice of action.
They don’t treat their employees well. Now with all the AI slop, it seems they don’t know what good software is.
Yeah if you have option to move away from Atlassian, you should do so.
Modern tools like Claude code have the ability to craft and bring dreams to reality.
Atlassian is old school. Their rich CEOs no longer care about good software. They are rent extractors.
“ What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
Seems like a fair statement to make, and she didn’t call him a jerk directly. She didn’t deserve to be fired, but I’ll be surprised if she has any actual recourse.
Frankly, if the CEO is the leader he’s pretending to be, he’d apologize to her and offer her the job back with a signing bonus.
It’s sad how little respect most of these guys have for the engineers that enable them to walk into their country clubs and call themselves “tech CEOs”.
NextDNS doesn't route to .is or .ph or .fo or .today anymore.
My ISP doesn't route to .is, but it routes to the others. Using my ISP's DNS means receiving tons of spam though.
Cloudflare apparently doesn't reliably route to them either, and I wouldn't want to use it even if it did.
UPDATE: I see that https://dns.adguard-dns.com/dns-query still routes to all of them, so guess I will use it! I have no conflict of interest.
> “Employees disagreed in the chat, which resulted in Cannon-Brookes angrily interjecting to tell off the people who were complaining,” Puckett said in an opening statement at the hearing. On the company’s internal “Outrage Notification” Slack channel (a play on the “outage notifications” staff receive about technology issues), employees including Unterwurzacher mocked and condemned the comments from Cannon-Brookes, the company’s billionaire co-founder, who had joined the meeting from the headquarters of a basketball team he co-owns, the Utah Jazz.
> “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,” Unterwurzacher wrote.
It takes a certain amount of entitlement and lack of awareness to do this on official internal channels - with your name attached and viewable by anyone in the company, particularly during a downsizing event.
This would have been akin to printing out the statement, signing it with your name, and then stapling it to a literal bulletin board in the office hallway. There's no reality where that is acceptable...