Since there’s a lot of assumptions on personality here, I’ll toss my perspective here.
Worked at Atlassian for 5 years, had plenty of interactions with Mike. I wouldn’t categorize him as a jerk. I have plenty of disagreements about decisions he’s made, and I think he heavily over-hired (and is paying for it now), but a jerk he is not.
The reality is Atlassian has mechanisms, for better or for worse, that reward social discontent - Hello (their internal Confluence instance which has Reddit-like upvoting on blogs) and their karma bot on slack. Both of which tend to result in people gamifying these to boost their social status, which as you’ve seen with Reddit, often results in a subset of people realizing negative comments get more attention than positive ones. This got out of hand and they’ve been trying to dial it back, leading to cuts like these. It’s been a problem at Atlassian for a while.
The employee didn't call him a jerk. That was a straw-man from Atlassian. Now we're arguing over whether he's a jerk or not.
A opposed to what actually happened: Mike (CEO) fired 19,000 people. Then Mike held a video AMA regarding the firings. Mike took the meeting from the headquarters of the NBA team he owns.
The employee, Unterwurzacher, parodied the CEO on Slack, writing, “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
> The employee didn't call him a jerk. That was a straw-man from Atlassian.
We don't really have enough information to adjudicate either way, the article doesn't include a transcript of what she actually said or a transcript of what was being said in the courtroom with context (tribunalroom? boardroom? wherever the lawyer was talking).
It seems a bit pointless to hypothesise what might have happened then decide whether the imaginary actions were reasonable in the hypothetical scenario. If we're going to debate correctness there needs to be actual source material instead of this third-hand summary behind a paywall.
does this particularly qualify him as a jerk? or just that the employee takes all the risk in employment, and capitalism does wrong by rewarding owners and management vs workers?
that he's showing off how rich he is as the result of throwing these people on the street is just part of the system weve built
He was a passionate climate activist, possibly still is.
He has since purchased a private jet under controversy.
His company now sponsors an F1 team.
He now seems to be a typical billionaire. You don’t get to be a billionaire without being ruthless.
He probably is now a rich jerk. When I worked at Atlassian and on boarded, one of the managers said if you are in a lift with Mike or Scott, and they asked what you do here, you better tell them what value you are bringing…
Mike was also very public he was proud Atlassian was not a high payer, he wouldn’t compete with Google etc on pay, at the time, yet people still wanted to work at Atlassian. Also didn’t hide the fact they absolutely utilised lack of local market knowledge for visa holders when nearly have the office was a temporary visa holder at the time.
Reading this comment really shifted my perspective on this whole thing. I’m less upset about the firing and more upset that anyone ever has the ability to control the livelihoods of 19,000 people.
19k is a fairly small business. I mean it isn't "small business" but it is small relative to many others.
Large companies aren't anytime new. Ford had 100k in the 1920s. Then you have places like new York City government that has 309k people.
I would prefer to have many smaller companies than a could of big ones. But 19k isn't really that many people
Think about what was happening in US labor in the 1920’s, it’s pretty interesting you chose that decade, actually and I think it speaks to my train of thought.
The size of a business may not be the best part to care about, maybe the power of a single executive is more concerning - but one person holding power over 19k people who have no representation to bargain with that person (like an elected official) is extremely unbalanced.
Maybe he was a great guy. But people change. It seems as though having your brains marinated in money is highly neurotoxic, no matter how you started off.
(Anyway: the main offence is using the term "jerk" instead of "wanker").
“But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary.” — https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1127738-but-although-the-cl...
> Most of us aren't good people at heart.
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
Regardless of the fact that he probably is a jerk, it doesn't seem like appropriate workplace behavior to be calling anyone a jerk. Just because you have free speech doesn't mean that your speech should have no consequences. Maybe it's unfair and a double standard, but to me it seems like a no-brainer that you shouldn't be calling people names in your workplace.
Regardless of whether it is 'appropriate workplace behavior' to call a jerk a jerk, firing someone for it is so far outside the range of 'appropriate behavior' that it's hard to make a comparison.
What a wild cultural difference. Where do you live?
Over here in the USA, I don't think any customer service worker expects to be able to openly mock a customer and still have a job. I struggle to imagine the idea of calling my boss a wanker to his face and still expecting to have a job. To insult the CEO seems like it might as well be a resignation - if you have that little respect for leadership, why are you working at that company?
> if you have that little respect for leadership, why are you working at that company?
What an astoundingly dumb question. Most people work somewhere to get paid, and If you think its unusual to hate the boss, oh boy, do I have news for you!
There's a huge difference between "I hate my boss" and "I'm willing to publicly humiliate him to his face". Are you really struggling to understand that distinction?
Over there in the USA there's a culture of extreme deference to corporate leadership, probably stemming from the slavery and servitude past. It's very similar in Brazil as well, sharing from the same past.
It's funny that such a cognitive dissonance between freedoms and rights vs the absolutist tyranny of corporate life making a mockery of those freedoms can coexist in the same society with the same staying power.
You aren’t wrong, but having worked in China as well as the states (and a short stint in Switzerland), I think east Asia (china, Japan, Korea) has that even worse, probably due to Confucius. As China is looking more and more like the future, I fear that this gets worse before it gets better.
East Asia definitely has a similar flavour of this issue, Confucianism's filial piety forces unbounded respect to hierarchies, coupled with social harmony as a virtue and criticism of anyone "above" you is highly frowned upon.
I just think it's stranger for the USA's work culture to be so deferential to leadership while its societal values are outwardly quite loud about freedoms, it's more understandable to me for East Asia to be that way. For the USA case it's probably a mixture of the servitude/slavery past with still being quite religious compared to other Western peers.
It never made sense to me in the USA, I just took it as it being what it is. I think everyone knows corporate culture is kind of a farce, but no sustainable alternative has appeared to replace it.
Let's bring this close to home. You hire someone to mow your lawn. They come in every week and mow your lawn. And you pay them. One day you walk by and they're talking with your neighbor and you overhear them saying you're a rich a-hole and a jerk, and an idiot. I mean not appropriate workplace behavior. Are they going to still have a job or would you prefer that someone else mows your lawn? I mean they just said nasty things about you- nbd. not something that should affect their status as your "employee".
Several things severely wrong with this example. The employee didn't talk to an outsider, they didn't talk to someone the CEO would be likely to have known personally, and they're so far removed from the CEO nobody thinks they'd know them on a personal level.
You just can't talk about a CEO as if they're a person interacting and hiring people individually because they just don't.
In a small company a CEO may approve all hiring. In a larger company they delegate that. But they run the company. Everyone in the company including those hiring reports directly or indirectly to them.
When an employee communicates broadly inside a company, even if it's not directly to outsiders, that is essentially public. As we can see in this thread some random person chimed in with the details. But s/neighbor/your wife/ if that helps the analogy and insider vs. outsider is the issue. It's an imperfect one as they all tend to be.
This is why for example quarterly results are not generally communicated to all insiders in a company before they are released, because they are going to leak.
I think my analogy, though imperfect, demonstrates that when you have some sort of employment or other relationship, "bad mouthing" the other party, either in public or in private, is expected to be damaging to this relationship. The CEO of your company is the closest thing to the single person employing you. He runs the entity that employs you.
> … It was an irrelevant personal attack and insult directed at a colleague, essentially calling him a ‘rich jerk’.
> Unterwurzacher reportedly parodied the CEO on Slack, writing, “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled.”
Wow. I mean, come on, thats like the least offensive thing ever. At the most, maybe tell the manager to tell them thats not the “spirit” of the workplace, but firing for this is a step too far.
If the CEO wasn’t a jerk before he certainly is now.
There's no "free speech" at work [-places] in the USA. That's not what free speech means anyways. You can and will be absolutely be fired for saying things at work that are incompatible with your employer's opinions. I can't think of a faster way to get fired anywhere than insulting the person running the company you work for, private or public company, definitely in public.
The US has less free speech than some other countries. Especially now, but this was always true at corporations. In the US you can be fired for anything, including speech.
Generally people in power will surround themselves with yes-men. It takes a good amount of humility and sincerity to look beyond this and deliberately choose people with a spine to listen to.
The most charitable interpretation is that most rich/powerful people are just as flawed as everyone else. Obviously, their power/wealth makes them less deserving of that charity ultimately.
> The most charitable interpretation is that most rich/powerful people are just as flawed as everyone else.
I can't believe that. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps at their private schools and then had to claw and fight as a legacy admission to the school their parents attended. From there they lived hand to mouth destitute with barely a million dollar loan from their parents!
Then there was the existential crisis of meeting with their college roommates' parents and their own parents' bridge buddies to secure millions in loans. It was their flawless vision and skill that let them be at the right place and the right time. If they wouldn't have had the foresight to fall out of a lucky vagina we would all be worse off.
You see they're scrappy go getters that started from the absolute bottom. They're infallible supermen whose greatest assets are their humility and unerring genius.
> Generally people in power will surround themselves with yes-men.
It's probably a CEO thing too - you have some vision for the company so you're going to hire people that enable that vision, not people that will question your every move.
CEO is one of the least meritocratic jobs ever. It’s all just vibes, and the vibes are based off of what school you went to, who your parents know, where you grew up. Deep down they probably know this hence the insecurity. If it were a meritocracy they’d be toppled fast.
Can we agree that you are exaggerating? Not that you are totally wrong, but the flip side is, that ceos do need a different skillset. Workers who excel at the bureaucratic grind might not make the best leaders for lack of vision and empathy. Then again the concept of an empathic leader also seems to be foreign to many. It's hard to see anything with all the bullshit covering everything.
Eh, you don't hear about the ones who are well adjusted.
Usually nobody cares if you're a poor jerk. At least unless you do something phenomenal you don't get wide attention.
"New" rich people, especially those with power over other people, can develop plenty of complexes and insecurities that come out as weakness... like firing somebody for mocking them.
"Old" rich, generational wealth tend to develop a set of manners and habits where they don't get noticed or embarrass themselves quite so much by displaying such weakness.
You don't stay rich for a long time if you act like a fool.
I've been in positions to hire/fire before and never, ever would I fire someone over a kindergarten insult. How pathetic do you have to be to pull rank over "you rich jerk"
excellent case btw why you should never let these tech bros have power over your life, they're super charged angry little school boys with worse fantasies than a Soviet commissar
This is maybe beside the point but it annoys me how many CEOs wax poetic about "locking in" and "grindset" but then seem to have infinite time for bullshit side projects like owning an NBA team.
Has there ever been a positive story or product out of this wretched company; which has possibly destroyed billions in value across the US software sector by forcing everyone to use their disgustingly bad project management tool? When I interviewed there (and anecdotally from the people I know that worked there), at least they seemed like a nice place to work at. But alas even that had to be destroyed.
Nobody is forced to use it, they use it because it aligns with managers' incentives. Which are not related to ensuring technical work is completed effectively. Or having good visibility. Everything being obscure and hard to use allows you to paint the picture with your own words rather than the picture being painted right there on the computer screen plain as day.
If you consider choosing to leave a job of a tool a choice that people can easily make, then sure. Otherwise, yeah a good portion of employees don't have any say in the software their managers choose, and either use it or get let go
lol the only atlassian engineer I knew spent 3 months 4 times a year "working remotely" from various resorts across Europe, I'm sure the 4-hour review of javascript she did per month was really worth that plus the apartment in brooklyn.. absolutely insane
Worked at Atlassian for 5 years, had plenty of interactions with Mike. I wouldn’t categorize him as a jerk. I have plenty of disagreements about decisions he’s made, and I think he heavily over-hired (and is paying for it now), but a jerk he is not.
The reality is Atlassian has mechanisms, for better or for worse, that reward social discontent - Hello (their internal Confluence instance which has Reddit-like upvoting on blogs) and their karma bot on slack. Both of which tend to result in people gamifying these to boost their social status, which as you’ve seen with Reddit, often results in a subset of people realizing negative comments get more attention than positive ones. This got out of hand and they’ve been trying to dial it back, leading to cuts like these. It’s been a problem at Atlassian for a while.