Some initial sidenotes about the redundancy

Context

It's easy to get distracted and side-tracked by other things that you happen to notice when applying a change to a non-trivial software system. I've gotten into the discipline of making a note to address that later, then moving on to maintain focus on the work that is the current priority. 

A couple of examples include:

- One of our older services includes an alerting library that references OpsGenie, that's going to be phased out soon (by Atlassian)

- The dependencies of this service includes a DataDog library, we haven't been using DataDog for metrics for as long as I have been at the company

Last Thursday I was made redundant along with about 1600 colleagues at Atlassian, so here I am keeping a few notes about what I have been learning from this experience.  

Things I've Been Contemplating Since Starting Garden Leave

Twitter / X Accounts Spouting Nonsense, That Spreads To LinkedIn...

Some Twitter accounts post made up nonsense claiming to be "inside information" about what had been going on in the lead up to redundancies and layoffs at companies. While I can't claim to know about every detail of what has been going on across the entire company, I can smell bullshit in at least one post that claims to be about Atlassian.

A few days after seeing the conspicuous post I came across a reputable account that had called out similar false information from the same account about a different company, so that made it clear to me that I hadn't missed something that was happening at Atlassian.

While holding off on pushing "publish" on this post, I came across someone on LinkedIn repeating the same nonsense. Sure enough at the bottom of their post they cited the dodgy Twitter / X account as their source.

Conspicuous Survey Questions

With the benefit of hindsight, I am wondering whether the answers provided in a recent internal survey may have fed in as data points counting for or against individuals for criteria for being less suited for the increased application of AI.

If I recall correctly, the questions included topics such as:

• "Do you see yourself working at Atlassian in 12 months time?" 
• "How likely would you be to recommend Atlassian as a place to work?"
• "In the last 30 days, how much time has AI saved in your day to day work?"

I think the answers to those first 2 questions would be quite different today, as I was in quite a positive frame of mind up until last Thursday.

Based on the shocked reactions from my team mates, their responses may also shift - if the surveys continue.

An internal blog post with more em dashes than I have seen in my life

Perhaps a slight exaggeration, but there was a blog post that went around pushing for major changes and heavy investment in setting up environments for AI to run in. The post did have a lot of em dash characters, which is something that has been described as a symptom of content that was generated using AI.

The range of people impacted is significant

It has only been a few days since the announcement, but so far I have heard about quite a few people that I knew who have been caught up in this round of redundancies: 

• Four of my former team mates
• A senior recruiter who was involved in hiring me my first time at Atlassian
• The head of department of my former team
• The main incident response trainer

What's not in the headlines

It's kind of odd that a major technology company can part ways with the CTO and that doesn't make any headlines. In most articles it doesn't even get a mention (maybe I'm just basing this on the commentary on LinkedIn, as opposed to news articles).