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Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'
- Bootvis 6mo agoProving her point.
- Forgeties79 6mo agoApparently he hates the moniker the good people of Atlassian have bestowed on him. Actually, why he would hate being called out like this is baffling to me. It would appear he did everything in his power to earn it!
- tempodox 6mo ago> Atlassian has denied wrongdoing. But if they say so themselves!
- kmfrk 6mo agoMarked as wontfix.
- abhinai 6mo ago[flagged]
- dboreham 6mo agoBecause before you were born society decided that was a bad idea.
- BoggleOhYeah 6mo agoThe techbro crowd has no use for the humanities.
- genxy 6mo agoOr empathy (Musk) or introspection (Andreessen). None of those things are necessary and could prove to be detriment when you are grinding in the bitmines.
- throwawaypath 6mo ago[flagged]
- beedeebeedee 6mo agoBut effectively, that means no empathy. Both Musk and you (explaining Musk) have set it up in such an extreme way that it makes it appear as if empathy is bad and there’s really nothing you should do. Short of lighting yourself on fire, you could (1) invite them to use an unused space to sleep, (2) donate your time, money, food, water or other goods, (3) advocate for better solutions on a local, state or nation level, or (4) at least not foment hatred against them. There is a wide variety of empathetic actions that one could do other than burning yourself or nothing. This directly applies to every social, political or economic issue that Musk has tangled with, but instead he sets it up to convince himself and others that actually there’s nothing he can do and empathy is for losers.
- ath3nd 6mo ago> Both sides should be able to end employment for any reason whatsoever What an uninformed take! That's why we have labor laws and such a thing as "wrongful termination" exists.
- tbrownaw 6mo agoWell, no, saying that the law is wrong doen't necessarily mean someone is uninformed. Those are distinct things.
- bradchris 6mo agoAnd we would not need rules at all if everyone was perfect all the time.
- tbrownaw 6mo ago> I’m not sure why the labor board is involved here. Not all jurisdictions respect freedom of association to the same degree. Employment can be anywhere on a scale from a simple exchange of time for money, to something closer to a feudal lord/serf arrangement.
- mystraline 6mo agoI made this comment on the school side of the issue, but also referred to work. According to the now discontinued CIA world factbook, the US is a "republic with strong leaning democratic ties", the 2 worst institutions in the USA are school and work. Both are increasingly fascistic and authoritarian. Both are approved to exist at the approval of the federal and state governments. But both throw out due process, all Bill of Rights, and more. But the monied elite? Oh yeah, their rights are preserved. They DO get all their rights. Is the first amendment really 'Freedom of Speech', if you're saying it while living under and interstate overpass? And before someone says "The first amendment only applies to government", remember all companies must get the approval of the same government. The government should apply the same rights to any prospective corporation, being an extension of government.
- bloqs 6mo agoso if i dont say its racist thats fine?
- andriy_koval 6mo ago> Both sides should be able to end employment for any reason whatsoever. (Excluding covered reasons like racism, sexism etc). I’m not sure why the labor board is involved here. companies have legal duties to enforce code of conduct they established. It happened that Attlassian adapted freedom of speech in its code, and also likely non-retaliation policy, so there is some ground for law enforcement.
- burnt-resistor 6mo agoThe most naive, reductive, and oversimplified brain fart I've read on this site thus far this week.
- mohamedkoubaa 6mo agoPaywall to read this story is amusingly ironic
- ZeroCool2u 6mo agoGift link then: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-16/atlassian-defends-firing-worker-who-suggested-ceo-is-rich-jerk?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc3NDE5NTMxMCwiZXhwIjoxNzc0ODAwMTEwLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUQzAwS0xLR1pBUjIwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJBMTc4NDk2MTA2M0M0RDBBQjdCRENDN0NCMEVERDIxRSJ9.WSRBrF1zHAylNxeU-tBBG1CYLOm7RhZAG3sIVw2ChCA https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-16/atlassian...
- bdangubic 6mo agoyou have to be a rich jerk to read the article :)
- tag2103 6mo agohttps://archive.is/7p7LD https://archive.is/7p7LD
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoI acknowledge headline writing is hard, but man, there's gotta be a better way to frame this. I was prepared to take Atlassian's side here, you can't call your coworkers jerks. But the article says "rich jerk" is Atlassian's characterization of a sarcastic comment: > What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled And I just don't see how that can cross the line. It's clearly meant to stoke the fires, but it's also pretty close to a recitation of the facts. Perhaps if the CEO finds this insulting he shouldn't have dialed into a layoff AMA call from his NBA team's headquarters.
- burntalmonds 6mo agoThe headline definitely took a side. Not surprising given the source.
- antonvs 6mo agoIt makes me glad that our company has just dropped all Atlassian products.
- Alupis 6mo ago> “Employees disagreed in the chat, which resulted in Cannon-Brookes angrily interjecting to tell off the people who were complaining,” Puckett said in an opening statement at the hearing. On the company’s internal “Outrage Notification” Slack channel (a play on the “outage notifications” staff receive about technology issues), employees including Unterwurzacher mocked and condemned the comments from Cannon-Brookes, the company’s billionaire co-founder, who had joined the meeting from the headquarters of a basketball team he co-owns, the Utah Jazz. > “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,” Unterwurzacher wrote. It takes a certain amount of entitlement and lack of awareness to do this on official internal channels - with your name attached and viewable by anyone in the company, particularly during a downsizing event. This would have been akin to printing out the statement, signing it with your name, and then stapling it to a literal bulletin board in the office hallway. There's no reality where that is acceptable...
- happytoexplain 6mo ago>There's no reality where that is acceptable... Except the reality in which the criticism is well-deserved, obviously. That's subjective, of course, and I'm not commenting on whether it applies here, but "zero public outcry allowed, no matter what's happening" is an absurd position. Of course that doesn't mean you shouldn't expect consequences, even up to being fired by the tyrant in question, but that's not the same thing as "unacceptable". Employees aren't slaves.
- Alupis 6mo agoIf this was said on a private, non-official channel there would be no issue. She's allowed to have that opinion, and even say it. But doing so on an official internal channel is where it crossed the line. Again, what she did was akin to printing out the statement and stapling it to a bulletin board - or, mass emailing it to everyone in the company. It was an official internal channel everyone in the company can access... Imagine one of your reports saying something like this about you during a team meeting, while you're standing there. Not acceptable workplace behavior... and that would be limited to just your team.
- 152334H 6mo ago“What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,” Unterwurzacher wrote. Atlassian fired her a few days later, saying she had “engaged in acrimonious communications and ad hominem attacks against teammates and colleagues.” Unterwurzacher replied, “I think it’s difficult to point out the power imbalance in a way that is not potentially described by somebody as an ad hominem attack.” Perhaps it is difficult, but it doesn't look like she was trying
- verall 6mo agoAlso from the article: > At a March 3 hearing in Austin, a National Labor Relations Board attorney said the fired software engineer, Denise Unterwurzacher, had been acting in the spirit of Atlassian’s own stated “Open Company, No Bullshit” philosophy I think if you have a "Open Company, No Bullshit" philosophy in your company handbook, then you can't claim "No, not like that..." when called on your BS. If their company policy was "always obey legal orders from superiors" instead then I think they have a much clearer case at firing for cause.
- yipbub 6mo agoYou're either being naively or facetiously too literal. She's saying that her point is about him, so talking about him is ad hominem, but not a fallacy because unlike fallacious ad hominem attacks, her argument about the hominem is very relevant to her working conditions and experience as an employee. Her group having just been pummelled and yelled at.
- nutjob2 6mo agoI don't see it. What part of her satire was off the mark? it was entirely factual. If you can't take such a gentle ribbing from people you've potentially just fired, you shouldn't be CEO, because you can't control your emotions in the simplest way.
- smohare 6mo agoIt’s a pretty literal description of what he did. If techbro bosses don’t want to get butthurt over being called out for douchey behaviour, maybe they shouldn’t engage in douchey behaviour? Almost none of these tech leaders deserve their station except by virtue of luck or often borderline sociopathic tendencies. To flaunt it so egregiously is a bit over the top.
- therobots927 6mo agoIf my employer ever deidentifies my anonymous online comments I will be immediately fired
- cynicalsecurity 6mo agoAtlassian never heard of the Streisand effect.
- rvz 6mo agoThis firing is going to "backfire" in ultra-wide 4K.
- ffsm8 6mo agoi doubt it, honestly. atlassian is too deeply ingrained in big corpo with jira and confluence. this controversy will not have enough steam behind it to affect hteir bottom line whatsoever
- leereeves 6mo agoIt might not affect their bottom line or even how customers feel about them, but I think it will affect current and future employees.
- rwmj 6mo agoTheir garbage software hasn't hurt them, it's unlikely that one developer being fired will make any difference.
- nunez 6mo agoIt happened in 2023.
- firefoxd 6mo agoI think the cult of personality always backfires, pun intended. Our company biggest product was a celebrity making fun commercials for the actual product. Works wonders. Personally I don't have a problem with him, I enjoyed his movies in the past. But not everybody does. Internally, the company tried to push this cult so deeply that it was part of the hiring process, part of the onboarding, even obscured some of the CEOs messaging. And you wonder, what happens when you hire someone who doesn't like this celebrity? Many of us are mature enough to follow the principle of, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything." But not so when you have young developers flowing in and out of the company. In one of the town halls, a 24 year old dev, was put on a mic, and simply said, "I don't like X, he is super annoying, why do we keep plastering his face everywhere." I've never seen an entire company freeze before. There was no way forward, no way backwards. The script had been broken. The dev, thinking he wasn't heard properly, sent the same message in our townhall slack channel. I did what I believe 90% of other people did. I screenshoted it. The kid got another job a few months after. For once we saw the emperor wore no clothes. Edit: million typos Edit 2: in case it wasn't clear, no was not fired, he just found another job.
- AbbeFaria 6mo agoI am guessing this is Salesforce and the celebrity is Matthew McConaughey who’s real chummy with Benioff. Brave of the developer to bring it up. This cult of personality is pervasive throughout the tech industry.
- leereeves 6mo agoI was thinking of Mint Mobile. I guess there are many examples, not even counting the cases where the CEO becomes a celebrity (like Steve Jobs).
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Tade0 6mo agoThe interview for the next job must have been interesting. Anyway, good for him. Too many agree to too much because they fear they'll lose their job.
- breppp 6mo agoIs it really surprising she was fired? It's completely okay to say whatever you want and stand up for yourself, but you are not a child, own the consequences rather than whine
- triceratops 6mo agoNo using the legal process if you think your company is violating the law is also part of "stand up for yourself". If a rich guy can't take some minor criticism maybe he's the whiner.
- mettamage 6mo agoThis assumes that you think people operate on principles. As the years go on, it feels that people in the top seem to mostly operate on money. The CEO has money and the power to fire that person if the employee is disliked. Maybe that shouldn't be a thing, maybe it should be illegal, but they'll find a way around it. Just because they can means that they will. I wish it wasn't like that but that's how I see things are happening these days, save for perhaps a few nuances here and there.
- happytoexplain 6mo agoNo, it assumes that people should operate on principles. You're falling into the "you're naive, just accept that things are bad" philosophy, which is self-fulfilling over time. It's ok to be angry at people for behaving in a way that is unsurprising. Otherwise, there's no room for the word "immoral".
- triceratops 6mo agoEvery CEO technically has the power to fire anyone they dislike. I assume they usually don't out of some form of noblesse oblige, and aversion to PR problems. But mostly just because they're too busy to get involved in minor, petty shit like this. For most normal CEOs criticism from a low-level employee would just not be worth thinking about.
- k33n 6mo ago
- helterskelter 6mo ago"The beatings will continue until morale improves"
- 4d4m 6mo agoSurprisingly thin skin
- neversupervised 6mo agoThere’s no reason a company should put up with enemies within. In rare instances a disgruntled employee might be able to make a positive contribution. In most cases, even if the employee has valid reasons, by the time they are disgruntled there’s no coming back. It’s best for everyone to move on.
- Drakim 6mo agoYes, why surround yourself with people who are critical of you, when you can surround yourself with yes-men who will loyally toe the line? Positive contributions comes from loyal subjects who agree with their betters.
- IncreasePosts 6mo agoThat's one way to look at it. Another way is that people who are aligned with the CEOs mission will help achieve the mission, and people who are not aligned will not help achieve the mission. And it's the CEOs job to define the mission
- philipov 6mo agoWhen the mission is to screw over the employees, we don't need people who will align with that. CEOs should be held responsible for the enemies they create within their organization. Treating people as necessary collateral damage is unacceptable.
- array_key_first 6mo agoThe mission is usually stupid and also dumb, and it would be in the CEOs best interest to surround himself or herself with people willing to tell them that. Meta could've saved billions of dollars if more people told Zuck that the Metaverse is stupid, because it was. The end result is the same. The death of the idea. That much is actually unavoidable, because stupid and bad ideas will always fail, with or without support. So, it shifts to a question of it being a long, drawn-out, expensive death or a quick Old Yeller type putting down. I think the issue we're seeing across a lot of companies is that leadership is incredibly stupid. I think we have this wrong idea that, because a CEO exists purely to make decisions, they must be pretty good at it. But that's not really the case. You can only be capable of doing one thing and still be shit at that one thing, it's definitely possible. The problem is, I think, we assume that CEOs and other leadership work like normal people, but I don't think this is the case. I think there is a brain decay that occurs as people become more rich and powerful. It's becoming evident to me that the human brain was never intended to be in that type of situation, and there are consequences. There's a sort of detachment of reality that comes along with that, and it almost seems unavoidable. Like a type of delusional psychosis that just onsets when you become rich and powerful enough. It's not a new thing, either. You can basically see this across all of history with kings and rulers of all kinds. The really good ones do something remarkable: they predict their own oncoming psychosis. They build in controls and preventative measures so that, when they inevitable go off the rails, the damage is minimized. It's wild, isn't it? I think about everything George Washington did prior to his rise in US politics, and it can only be describes as stopping his future self from eventually becoming drunk with power.
- janice1999 6mo agoThe best email I ever received was a notification my company was moving off Jira. Atlassian’s own stated philosophy is “Open Company, No Bullshit”. I wish that was true. Maybe they would have better products.
- garciasn 6mo agoTell me a sad story in three words: We Use Jira.
- crossroadsguy 6mo agoAfter suffering Jira at two previous employers when it was being considered at the third org, I lobbied, pretty much begged, and cried along with many other colleagues who had this inflicted upon them previously. Yes, we indeed ended up with Jira and one another Atlassian monstrosity.
- Henchman21 6mo agoConfluence? I know most people really want a hard-to-use wiki with a special markdown flavor to write up things that instantly go stale, never to be reviewed again. Or, at least that's the only way I've really seen Confluence used?
- anal_reactor 6mo agoNah. The prime use case of Confluence is to tick "yes I've written the documentation".
- dcrazy 6mo agoYou can fail to maintain a wiki written in any software. The value of Confluence is when everyone uses it, so there’s one place to find info to answer questions like “why the hell did we do it this way?”
- tpm 6mo ago
- MultifokalHirn 6mo ago“I think it’s difficult to point out the power imbalance in a way that is not potentially described by somebody as an ad hominem attack.” Amazing answer.
- dpark 6mo agoIt feels like a stretch to claim that mocking your CEO (deservedly or not) counts as collectively discussing or protesting working conditions.
- leereeves 6mo agoDoes the law protecting discussion of working conditions (in this case the handling of layoffs) really vanish if those discussions are humorous?
- dpark 6mo agoIs there a meaningful discussion of working conditions here? The article doesn’t have a lot of other context. If this is all that the employee in question said, I would not call it discussion of working conditions.
- godelski 6mo agoYes, the "joke" only works because the implication is that the CEO is out of touch with the lives and working conditions of the average employee. It's pretty overt in meaning. Should employees be required to discuss things explicitly? Without the natural way people talk? Especially the natural way Americans talk? Seems pretty rigid if you ask me
- Arainach 6mo agoThe headline is outrageous for using Atlassian's misrepresentation. Per the article, the employee did not use the term "rich jerk". Their full quote: "“What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,” That is an absolutely true statement (to the degree that you can pummel a non-physical thing).
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- chimon 6mo agoA close friend of mine said Atlassian is one of the the worst companies she has worked for, second only to Okta.
- OutOfHere 6mo agoI don't know who even routes to archive.* anymore. NextDNS doesn't route to .is or .ph or .fo or .today anymore. My ISP doesn't route to .is, but it routes to the others. Using my ISP's DNS means receiving tons of spam though. Cloudflare apparently doesn't reliably route to them either, and I wouldn't want to use it even if it did. UPDATE: I see that https://dns.adguard-dns.com/dns-query https://dns.adguard-dns.com/dns-query still routes to all of them, so guess I will use it! I have no conflict of interest.
- cr125rider 6mo agoCloudflare does, just not on their ad blocker resolver. There was another post on this just today somewhere on here
- real_joschi 6mo agoNo problems with that in good old Europe.
- Henchman21 6mo agoWhy would you not run your own Unbound locally?
- joecool1029 6mo agomullvad’s DNS routes to it with adblocking, you do not need to be a subscriber to use it: https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
- bigstrat2003 6mo agoNo DNS server "routes to" a domain. The correct term is "resolve". This stuff matters, it causes confusion when talking about technical topics if people misuse the terminology.
- OutOfHere 6mo agoApologies and thank you.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- k33n 6mo agoSince the article is behind a paywall, the slack message she wrote (after the CEO dialed in from his NBA team’s HQ to speak about a company-wide layoff plan that also included demotions for many engineers) is this: “ What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.” Seems like a fair statement to make, and she didn’t call him a jerk directly. She didn’t deserve to be fired, but I’ll be surprised if she has any actual recourse. Frankly, if the CEO is the leader he’s pretending to be, he’d apologize to her and offer her the job back with a signing bonus. It’s sad how little respect most of these guys have for the engineers that enable them to walk into their country clubs and call themselves “tech CEOs”.
- snowchaser 6mo agoDisappointing. A better response from Atlassian (or the CEO if this really bothered them so much) would be to look at the criticism and try to understand why this sentiment is in the org. Is he too rich for some people’s taste? Does that indicate workers are unhappy with the real/perceived pay disparity? Is he a jerk in other contexts? Is this proxy for unapproachable, rude, or some other unbecoming set of behaviors? It’s an opportunity to improve, or at least reflect on the perception they have in the company. Firing, and asserting the right to do so for expressing an opinion, seems to me to be a poor choice of action.
- burnt-resistor 6mo agoYeah, I've met Atlassian's investor and advisor folks and that was my impression of them as well. Immediately unlikable people who treat people like objects.
- burnt-resistor 6mo agoAnd this is why knowledge workers, professionals, and every kind of worker needs to unionize and potentially find a path to working for themselves or forming worker-owned co-ops to create more stable, long term stable, less toxic, and fairer profit sharing environments because corporate extraction machines treat owners like kings and employees like dirt. It doesn't have to be this way.
- cindyllm 6mo ago[dead]
- nojvek 6mo agoAlways wondered why Atlassian was so big. Their software is utter garbage. Slow, clunky. They don’t treat their employees well. Now with all the AI slop, it seems they don’t know what good software is. Yeah if you have option to move away from Atlassian, you should do so. Modern tools like Claude code have the ability to craft and bring dreams to reality. Atlassian is old school. Their rich CEOs no longer care about good software. They are rent extractors.