As the other half of a former Atlassian employee, I can very much confirm that a lot of the essence of the OP's story is real, and particularly endemic to Atlas

As the other half of a former Atlassian employee, I can very much confirm that a lot of the essence of the OP's story is real, and particularly endemic to Atlassian's San Francisco office, one which has not groked nor imported the Australian work ethic of their Sydney head office. The issue with POCs is very real, but I don't beleive it to be universal nor 'from above', much more about the biases of individual middle-managers. Atlassian has a long and painful history of promoting from within, for management roles (team lead, feature lead, product manager, etc), from a pool of mostly programming staff wanting to "give management a go", often with zero management training, far too often with poor consequences for those who then find themselves being managed by a once-peer programmer who's now 'off the leash', and sometimes with 'something to prove'. Programmers love to dis "management", but most of them make terrible managers theselves and havent a fucking clue how to be one; thee response characteristics of transistors and flesh don't correlate well. In my other half's case, a 'sw development manager' (2.5 years experience in that role, followed by 1.3 years somewhere else that presumably didn't work out) was hired from outside to lead a Bitbucket team but with a title one level above the actual role (and salary to match). Within a year or so there was nothing left of that team of 5 who in all other respects was high performing and loved working with each other, they all either resigned or moved to other products, meanwhile Fuckface McL**s, as I tended to call him, got a demotion and continues to fester within. This was the final straw after 3+ years of languishing in a P4 'Programmer' role, because of the revolving door of team-leads that came before Fuckface, andother Atlassian hallmark. (1 employer and 2 promotions over following 2.5 years and he's now considered a 'Principal Programmer' in US nomenclature). Atlassian's Glassdoor reviews are a classic case of greenwashing, with interns and recent recruits often sent in waves to flood over the... let's just say less enthusiastic reviews they get from more experienced staff - present or recent past. It's a little depressing, but not surprising, that the vast majority of the comments on this post are fixated on the semantics of "unlimited PTO"...