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It wasn't a surprise, but it was a surprise

It wasn't totally unexpected

It's Friday 13th March 2026, the news is still sinking in that I have been made redundant due to Atlassian's decision to reduce costs by cutting 1600 from the workforce.

I've been telling friends and family that I'm okay and that it wasn't entirely unexpected. My teammates had been speculating and half-joking about the prospect of layoffs in the last couple of weeks, particularly as one of the developers had been unlucky enough to go through a couple of rounds of redundancies at his previous companies.

Getting mixed signals

Earlier in the week I had received an invitation from the talent acquisition team to participate in interviewing a candidate for a software engineering position next Tuesday, so I quietly thought, "hmm, maybe we're not in a total hiring freeze after all", and also, "oh crap, that goal related to participating in interviews is still going to be relevant this quarter so I'm gonna need to complete that refresher about the interviewing process".

It's just business, numbers matter

The other number being used to describe this round of redundancies is 10% of the Atlassian staff, so being on a team with about ten developers I can speculate that we would be expected to have one person be cut. I'd like to believe in this instance it may have come down to the "last in, first out" approach, as I was the most recent person on the team to join the company.

I've even seen at least one person mention, "On Monday I was promoted, on Wednesday I was made redundant", so performance hasn't been the driver for these cuts.

So far I haven't heard of anyone else in my little corner of the world being caught up in this round of redundancies. As New Zealand doesn't have a particularly significant number of Atlassian employees, I suppose our headcount reduction may fall under "Australia".


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