Atlassian, the corporate behind instruments like Jira, Confluence and Trello, in the present day introduced that, after a reorg a month in the past, it’s now shedding about 500 workers. That’s about 5% of its whole workforce.
Atlassian co-founders and co-CEOs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar notice in in the present day’s announcement that this transfer shouldn’t be seen as a mirrored image of the corporate’s monetary efficiency (although it’s value noting that regardless of growing its total income lately, it continues to report web losses in its quarterly earnings releases). As an alternative, the co-founders are positioning this transfer as a “rebalancing” that can assist the corporate prioritize the areas the place it’s rising.
“We’ve made arduous calls to scale back our funding in particular areas, so as to reinvest in others,” to co-founders write. “That is completely different to a financially-driven discount, the place you’ll look to make ‘broad-based cuts’ – for instance, a ten% reduce equally distributed throughout each org throughout the firm. This isn’t what is occurring right here.”
Particularly, Atlassian will reduce workers in areas like expertise acquisition, program administration and what it calls “analysis and insights.”
Within the terse language of the corporate’s SEC submitting, the concept right here is to “higher place it to execute towards its largest progress alternatives.” In accordance with the co-founders, these alternatives are cloud migrations, IT service administration (ITSM) and “serving our enterprise clients within the cloud.” It’s no secret that Atlassian’s focus lately has been on its cloud providers and it appears to be like prefer it’s doubling down on that, in addition to merchandise like Jira Service Administration, the ITSM answer it launched in 2021.
In accordance with Atlassian’s submitting, the corporate will incur about $70 to $75 million in fees in reference to these layoffs.
Whereas layoffs are by no means straightforward, the corporate is providing affected workers 15 weeks of severance pay, plus one extra week per yr of service, with unused paid time without work additionally getting paid out. Atlassian will provide accelerated vesting and employer-sponsored healthcare for the subsequent six months, in addition to visa help. Workers will be capable to maintain their work laptops, too (which is changing into more and more frequent).
In what’s a little bit of an uncommon transfer, laid off workers will maintain entry to the corporate’s communications instruments for the remainder of this week — although customers with entry to delicate information will get locked out of their laptops (although they may nonetheless be capable to entry instruments like Confluence, Slack, Zoom and Gmail on different beforehand enrolled gadgets).