[notfried]

If they are paying them 6-month severances like Block did, this means they are effectively saying 1,600 people for 6-months wouldn't have fixed JIRA's usability and performance, which if they could have done like many have been begging, they'd would probably make more money long-term than this firing would save.

[dozerly]

I wholeheartedly believe that they could not have fixed it with 9,600 people months of work. They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that.

[Octoth0rpe]

> They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that.

which may actually be the problem. I suspect that there is actually some ideal ratio that could be calculated of Input Fields / Dev, LoC / Devs, or maybe Unique Pages / Dev, or some mix of all of the above. Some of the metrics I hear out of places like airbnb absolutely blow my mind (>5000 engineers! wtaf are they all doing?!?). I can sort of see the #s at google, MS making sense given the breadth of the problems they are solving, but other places, not so much.

[jiggawatts]

There was an interview with a lead tech at Uber about this some years ago, with the conversation starting with "why is the app so bloated!?" (in terms of megabytes) and his answer also answers your question:

The smooth and simple interface of the Uber app is the tip of the iceberg. His example was that their users don't (and won't) reinstall the app because they travel overseas. If anything, the time when you've just stepped out of an airport is precisely when you want the app to work smoothly!

The hiccup is that many countries have their own payment systems, Byzantine tax codes where this may or may not be displayed up front to the user (in various currencies and formats), there may be local laws around taxi-like services, etc... Some of those laws apply to areas smaller than a city, or may apply only to airport pickups, or the CBD area during congestion, so on and so forth.

The "core" app might be a simple thing that you can bang out over a weekend with an AI and a decent UI framework, but then you need to "draw the rest of the owl". Don't forget that there must be a matching app for the drivers! Different categories of drivers offering services that may be local to a region and totally absent elsewhere: rikshaws, tuk-tuks, taxi boats in Venice, and who knows what else!

AirBnB is very similar to Uber in this respect. They have to deal with about a hundred countries worth of law, often down to the state level. There's fraud detection. Customer support. Integration with travel agencies. Government-mandated reporting. Etc, etc...

[ShinTakuya]

You're assuming performance has been the core priority, or even a priority at all, and I think this is a bad assumption to make. I would estimate a much smaller number of people-months of work if I were you.

Dev users assume the only problem a product can solve is performance, when there is a lot more than that in reality.

[linkjuice4all]

Maybe in the past companies wouldn’t take the extra time for performance enhancements - but they’re apparently saying that AI is sooo good and speeds up work that they don’t need all of these extra people. So if their product was sped up it would enable their customers to work faster and lay off all of their extra employees (or just keep everyone and just do more stuff faster).

So are they doing this to make the product better or, as others have mentioned, they can’t innovate further and can’t grow their market so they need to cut costs.

[tech_tuna]

The first step in fixing something is being aware that it needs to be fixed.

[fyrn_]

They need to just clean slate start from skratch. I don't believe that code base can be saved. AI means it's easy to copy any SAAS now right? so should be easy /s

[i7l]

If Atlassian hasn't fixed Jira's lack of usability by now, they won't in the next six months or six years.

[paxys]

A lot of problems (I’d say the majority in tech) can be solved faster and better by 100 people than 1600.

[jamesfinlayson]

Yep, I have been in small times and I don't think adding more people has ever resulted in better outcomes.

[ddoottddoott]

I mean probably not. It's not 1,400 hardcore engineers and 200 Jony Ives being let go, it's a mix of everyone including randoms like HR and the person who orders the office coffee. Business is not good.

Okay I just wrote an "it's not, it's..." organically, is this the zeitgeist or what.

[happytoexplain]

It's not a zeitgeist, it's a common English sentence structure.

The em-dash observation makes sense. Obviously a minority of people reach for an actual em-dash. The "it's not X, it's Y" complaint is totally bonkers. We might as well call proper spelling a "sign of AI". I.e. yes, AI does it more than humans, but not by so much that it makes sense to be suspicious when you see it.

[toraway]

No one actually used that as a red flag except the OP themselves facetiously so that’s a bad example.

The AI version of what they wrote would be more like:

  People have the wrong idea about who is getting fired. It’s not John Ive. It’s Jan ordering coffee.