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.
(Anyway: the main offence is using the term "jerk" instead of "wanker").
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.
> 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.
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
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.”
If the CEO wasn’t a jerk before he certainly is now.
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.
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.
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.
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47478579