
Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever - el_duderino
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/07/atlassian-tells-employees-they-can-work-from-home-indefinitely.html
======
cblconfederate
One thing that is not often mentioned is these threads is how this is
particularly beneficial for European workers. They live in cities that are
already small and dense, generally don't depend on the office for their
socialization, internet speeds are good (due to density probably) and family
life is balanced. Plus a lot of them are already accustomed to working
remotely. They 'll probably be able to compete for a lot more jobs now.

~~~
ryanSrich
Which is hilarious to me as someone that has hired devs from Europe for a
while now.

Why compete with FAANG trying to pay new grads $300k when you can pay an
experienced developer from Europe $100k? I honestly never understood it.

~~~
macNchz
I’m a big remote work advocate and have worked with some amazing European
engineers. That said, having worked as an engineer in the US office of a early
stage startup with a European office, the 5-9 hour time difference is a not-
insignificant impediment when you’re resource constrained and moving fast.

Even with great communication and good management, having little overlap
during the day for realtime conversations made it hard for me to feel like we
were a well-oiled machine, especially with so much of the product changing on
a daily basis. It’s very much a complex decision to make, in my opinion.

~~~
onion2k
Why do people who are remote need to stick with 9-5 hours? Plenty of people
hate those times, and would rather work later/earlier, which could well lead
to more congruent schedules.

~~~
throwaway1777
Because it’s useful to actually talk to people even if it’s over video chat.

~~~
iso947
The point being if someone in NY works 9-17, someone in UK May be happy
working 13-22

~~~
barry-cotter
Working different hours from all your friends and family gets old fast. It
gets old fast even if your family is on another continent and all your friends
are on the same schedule. Most English teachers who come to China start in
training centres where they work three evenings and two full weekend days a
week. Everyone either leaves China or gets a job with more normal hours
eventually.

I’m sure there are people who’d work 13-22 but I’d bet a substantial sum
employee churn would be consistently higher.

~~~
iso947
I have fried st hat have worked shift patterns (some 24/7, some more like 4x10
hours “unsociable”) for decades and are fine with it. I have one colleague who
works 4-12 5 days a week for the last 6 years and wouldn’t change it for the
world. Another does 11-23 or 11-19 3 or 4 days a week. Personally I get more
done between 18 and 21 than most of the day, hence I work 10-15 then 18-21.

Wife used to work for a company with an office in Yorkshire where working
hours finished at 2pm (7-2 no lunch). Horses for courses.

HN does seem to bias towards morning based extrovert urbanites in its group
think. It’s nowhere near as universal as you might think.

------
errantspark
The first thing that went through my head when I saw this headline was: "Huh,
maybe I should send them a resume." I'm hype if this trend continues.

~~~
james412
You'd honestly work for the folk responsible for the BitBucket redesign, or
the 6 billion lines of dynamic JS loaded for every Jira page?

I'd sooner work the curb while living in a coal bunker

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
I know bashing on Jira is a popular pastime on HN, but I'm always surprised
folks are not more introspective around why it's still so popular in the
enterprise. It's because there are a million and one ways that teams like to
work, and any one project has lots of different stakeholders with competing
needs, and there really isn't any other tool that can scale out to this many
use cases.

I've certainly pulled my hair out a million times with Jira, but TBH I'm
extremely impressed with their redesign. They've really scaled back the
complexity IMO while still giving my team the customizability we need (we
started on Trello and quickly hit roadblocks).

~~~
tsimionescu
I was amazed at how rigid Jira is when I started using it (we used a heavily
in-house customized version of Sabrina before, and Rally as well). Sure, if
you have loads of time you can work with an admin to write custom code for it,
but at the level of what one of many teams can do with it directly, it offers
virtually no options.

You want to split stories and leave sub-tasks behind? Sorry, that's not Agile,
so we're not going to make it easy.

You want to Subtask estimates to accrue to the Story estimate? Sorry, that's
not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.

You want to customize the sprint report based on custom labels? Nope, probably
not Agile.

You want to plan the capacity of your team to see how much work you should
take into an iteration taking into account vacations and partial availability?
Sorry, that's not Agile, so we're not going to make it easy.

And on and on, with very basic needs...

------
NoOneNew
I have a feeling this is going to end up similar to the "open office" fad.
Lots of companies are going to go 100% on "forever work from home". Then in a
year it's going to be not so much. That being said, I do believe "work from
home" will become more of an option and far less frowned upon by employers.
Then again, this is a white-collar problem. Blue collar and a few other
industries still have to go to work. But who cares about them, right? It's
only the white collar jobs that matter and should have a form of change and
evolution to how they work. Those lowly blue collars and service industry
peasants need to get back to work. It's far more vital for the important
industries to hide away from the outside world, from its horrors and look down
at the rest.

~~~
herval
The open office “fad” is pretty much the only office arrangement for more than
a decade now, so what you’re saying is this will be the de facto going
forward?

~~~
dbish
De-facto, but actually counter to productivity, just like open-office.
Companies that choose to not do this, will have a per employee efficiency
advantage. Big companies may not care just like in open office because the per
employee advantage is outweighed by the ability to reduce costs for the space

~~~
mnm1
In software, remote work is way more productive in my experience working
remotely for the last almost seven years. It's a win win. More productivity
and way better working conditions (home office, nice desk etc.). Less hours
needed to finish. Easier to concentrate. Easier to deal with bad bosses or co-
workers or take time out and breaks during the day. More flexible schedule.
Much less stress. The pros go on and on. The only negative for work is
promotions and visibility, but when everyone's remote, even that works itself
out.

~~~
dbish
How big are the teams you've worked with? I agree it's productive for deep
work and when design is already worked out for large changes or additions, but
I've had many people on my team complain that they can't work through a hard
problem on a whiteboard with peers or quickly sync up on a design and require
more time in meetings to get things done across components/team members/teams.
Also not everyone has a dedicated office space at home, those people are
hurting and having a hard time focusing in many cases.

------
bargle0
I feel like permanent WFH is outsourcing real estate costs to the worker. This
isn’t a big deal for some, since one may live alone or already have a home
office, but it gets burdensome if there is more than one home worker in a
household.

~~~
digianarchist
I'm OK with this. WFH means I can cut my mortgage costs by 50%.

~~~
bredren
Or not buy / maintain a car and spend hours a week commuting.

~~~
lucidguppy
Its a large chunk of your life they're giving back to you. It will help cut
carbon too.

------
znpy
The really cool outcome for me would be if all my coworkers get to work from
home and I could snatch a whole office just for me (there's a binding rent
contract for the next X years still, we might as well use it :P)

Edit: this comment was a bit sarcastic, just in case somebody didn't get that.

~~~
ConsiderCrying
Ah yes, the perfect horror movie scenario. Honestly, if the office was pretty
close to my home, I wouldn't mind going there every week on one or two days,
just to break the routine of sitting at home. But happy to see the 5-day
mandatory "go talk to your coworkers and sit in a cubicle" regime slowly being
phased out.

~~~
znpy
I'd love to have my own cubicle. I fu--ing hate open spaces.

Btw, currently my job is a 25 minutes subway ride away, so... So and so. Not a
lot, to be honest, I don't have to drive and the monthly public transport
subscription is fairly cheap (~39€/month).

------
quaffapint
I'm noticing we're about 40/60 with more wanting to go back to the office at
my midsize company. I'm happily with the 40, but the company is just using
this time to spruce up the office just waiting for our return. I find
communication and the work being better now then when we're in the office. All
the cliques and hallway talk is more online, so I have a better clue what's
going on. I wish it would stay that way.

~~~
tqi
I'd be curious to know the split between newer / more tenured employees. As
someone who has just started a new job, the process of building relationships
across the company has been much harder than at previous jobs. Even with
things like donut and social slack channels, it seems like theres no easy
substitution for the types of casual interaction you get while working in the
same location.

~~~
spike021
Agreed with this. I started 2 weeks before my company began the SIP, which
itself was a few weeks earlier than the government mandate.

It's been _rough_. I knew going in that I hadn't joined a new company in 5
years, so it'd be difficult. But this has been a whole different level.

Nearly 6 months in now and I still don't feel like I've meshed with the
majority of my team, only one or two people who are just extra friendly, and
forget knowing anybody outside of my team at all.

I rarely get pings from anyone asking how things are going; I usually wind up
needing to do that myself.

I've never been a very extroverted person, but I'd definitely prefer working
from an office (in obviously better circumstances) during this period of on-
boarding and readjustment. I feel so isolated right now, which is completely
opposite of how I think I would have been if I were still at my last role but
during this environment.

------
tomerico
Unfortunately, game theory says that remote work will not stay once people can
go back to work from the office safely.

The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person. Whether
it’s increased trust, communication, or lower friction. We could see it pre-
COVID in a he fact that there are barely any successful remote offices (let
alone individuals).

This means that employees would see advantages to coming to work, and those
that don’t would fare worse in promo and productivity on average, bringing the
equilibrium state back to the office.

~~~
chronofar
> The reality is that there is a real advantage in working in person. Whether
> it’s increased trust, communication, or lower friction.

There is no inherent advantage to "working in person." Lower trust or
communication or higher friction are not inherent to working remotely, they
are the product of poor and overconfident management (at least in tech, given
our forum here) and can be seen in any number of environments. You can replace
"working in person" with various other specious truisms like "having an
organized workspace" or "having weekly status meetings" or "using agile
methodologies" and the two sentences above will be likewise banal and true
only in specific instances.

Most technology work can be done remotely, and I'd argue should be done both
remotely and asynchronously (many companies recently forced to do the remote
piece are still are holding dearly to 9-5 and constant meetings), unless there
are specific use cases that require more in person synchronous efforts (and to
be sure this is the case in some cases, especially when specific hardware must
be used for instance). The perception that there is something "better" about
9-5 in-office work is more a product of tradition and resistant over-
management than inherent advantages to either setup.

~~~
d1zzy
People are different and they have different needs and skills. Working in
meatspace is different from working remotely so those needs and skills may
better match one model or the other. That is, SWEs aren't bug tracking robots
that only need to communicate online using emotionless text.

~~~
chronofar
To be sure different models fit different situations, and there are other
needs people have aside from getting shit done, namely social interaction
(which is at its root the biggest cause of resistance). If you don't get those
needs meet elsewhere, the workplace is historically a good place to do so. But
of course there are all sorts of ways outside a traditional office to optimize
for this.

------
m0zg
Trouble is, it only works if everyone is remote or everyone is in the office.
"Piecemeal" situation does not work - remote people will be left out, and
disadvantaged in terms of their career progression. So if they are serious
about remote, they should commit to being remote only. Yes, some people won't
like it, at least initially. But most of them will get used to it over time,
same as they got used to the ridiculous proposition of spending a good chunk
of their lives in traffic every day without getting paid, or not seeing their
spouse and children for more than a few hours a day, or not being able to take
a nap when they are tired, or sitting in a distracting noisy environment and
being unable to focus, etc, etc.

~~~
ghaff
>Trouble is, it only works if everyone is remote or everyone is in the office.
"Piecemeal" situation does not work

Piecemeal is more difficult but it's basically what my company was pre-COVID
and presumably will be again (with probably a lot more remote) posy-COVID. It
does mean the people who are co-located need to have the discipline to treat
decision-making, etc. as if everyone is remote.

It probably helps that we're a somewhat larger company so most things are
piecemeal anyway--people working together are in multiple offices even if
they're not working at home.

~~~
m0zg
Discipline requires upkeep and it will eventually deteriorate. You want to set
things up such that discipline is not required: either the "right" outcome is
the lowest energy state, or the "wrong" thing is logistically impossible.
Fundamentally, this is the secret to successful people management in general.
Anything else doesn't really work in the long term.

------
daenz
Anyone else suspect we are going to see a massive deflation of cities?

~~~
webkike
Not really, cities offer public transportation and a lot of enjoyable things
to do. They were a thing before large corporations were seated there.

~~~
cheez
most people move to cities for work, not for restaurants and things to do. Not
all, but most.

~~~
webkike
Okay, but then what would be the incentive for the people who are already
there to leave?

~~~
cheez
Life reasons I suppose

------
coldtea
I hope those now remote employees have access to some good issue tracking,
repo hosting, and collaboration/documentation tools.

Else they'll be forced to use something like Jira, Confluence, Bit Bucket, and
such, which suck...

~~~
Solstinox
You know what’s worse than having to work with JIRA/Confluence/Bit Bucket, and
such? Working with people who keep changing systems every 6-12 months. A
crappy system used fully is better than system surfing to find the Holy
Grail™.

~~~
dijit
Man, I’d agree with you if my experiences with these tools wasn’t _so bad_.

The current implementation of jira and confluence I’m using is worse than
having _no_ ticket tracking and documentation system.

Because if it didn’t exist there would be the impetus to implement something.
But we just kinda barely limp by with what we have.

It’s so barely functional that people actively avoid using it.

I’m fully aware that the company is to blame and not necessarily atlassian
though, as we have a number of plugins and random custom fields.

One of the most dangerous things about jira is that it tries to be everything
to everyone and people get carried away in the customisation believing they
need it. It slows everything to a crawl and leaves you inundated with
mandatory fields and a nightmare of matching stories with sprints and
estimations in order to bring a bloody task in.

Life was better with rt and mediawiki.

~~~
JoshuaDavid
I think you're underestimating how bad the "something" people can come up with
is. Think "weekly status reports to describe how you're doing on fixing a
problem that was described through email, or an in-person meeting with
someone, or a phone call, and never entered into a ticketing system at all".

Also the mandatory fields are definitely a per-organization thing. At my org
we have I think 3 mandatory fields, which are the project the ticket goes
under, the title, and the description. In many cases, "migrating" from JIRA to
JIRA but 90% of the features are disabled would probably be an improvement.

~~~
stjohnswarts
If you don't have scripts that will fetch all your parameters and just have to
fill in a couple of fields then you're doing it wrong.

~~~
dijit
Uh... I’m having trouble envisioning this, do you have any examples?

I ended up forcing my slack bot to issue POSTs to Jiras API out of
frustration.

~~~
JoshuaDavid
Yes, exactly that. Basically wire up very simple commands with curl and jq
that do the transitions you need, pulling data from other rest apis as
necessary.

The two workhorses of my integration are two methods named jira_get and
jira_post.

    
    
        function jira_get {
            ENDPOINT="$1"
            PAYLOAD="$2"
    
            URL="https://your-org.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/$ENDPOINT"
            QUERY_STRING="$(jq --null-input --raw-output --argjson x "$PAYLOAD" '$x|[to_entries[]|((.key|@uri)+"="+(.value|@uri))]|join("&")')"
    
            curl \
                --silent \
                --request "GET" \
                --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
                --user "$JIRA_USER:$JIRA_TOKEN" \
                "$URL?$QUERY_STRING";
        }
    
        function jira_post {
            ENDPOINT="$1"
            PAYLOAD="$2"
    
            URL="https://your-org.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/$ENDPOINT"
            QUERY_STRING="$(jq --null-input --raw-output --argjson x "$PAYLOAD" '$x|[to_entries[]|((.key|@uri)+"="+(.value|@uri))]|join("&")')"
    
            curl \
                --silent \
                --request "POST" \
                --user "$JIRA_USER:$JIRA_TOKEN" \
                --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
                "$URL" \
                --data "$PAYLOAD";
        }
    

Then if you want to get the available transitions, and required fields for
those transitions, you can do

    
    
        ISSUE=PRJ-1234
    
        ISSUE_JSON="$(jira_get "issue/$ISSUE/transitions" '{"expand":"transitions.fields"}'
        TRANSITION_NAMES="$(echo "$ISSUE_JSON" | jq '.transitions[].name')"
    

and then given the transition in question, you can look at the fields required
for the transition, and figure out where you get the data that goes in those
fields normally. Any time the data that goes in those fields is obtained
through a rote process, you automate that process, and then prompt for any
fields you can't get in an automated fashion (e.g. "signed off by" you can
fetch the reviewer names from the github api for the associated pull request).

But yeah, a slack bot that issues requests to the JIRA api is a perfectly
workable solution, and I think you'd be surprised at how much of a quality of
life improvement you'll get by continuing to add capabilities to it that
reflect your specific workflow.

------
ram_rar
If this trend continues, it should affect bay area housing prices. I dont see
any reason to pay such high rent, if I could work anywhere in the pacific
north west.

~~~
crispyporkbites
I don’t know about the US, but there’s more to urban areas than just the
commute time.

If anything wfh means spending more time in your home neighbourhood, so you’re
going to need more amenities closer by - which are generally found in cities.

~~~
baddox
There’s an opposite effect too, because one of the biggest urban amenities is
the density of activities which are likely to be closed for some time: night
life, concerts, lots of hobbies, etc.

------
fallingfrog
I feel like it’s the right thing to do at this moment but.. it’s one of those
things where the long term consequences are unforeseeable, and it makes me
nervous. Like: how can you organize a union if everyone is remote? Does this
make outsourcing a lot easier? What about personal connection? Is this a step
in the Uber-ification of the office worker? Will we all become independent
contractors? It’s impossible to say at this point.

------
sfjailbird
As much as people like to complain about JIRA and Confluence, the very essence
of corporateness, Atlassian is a great company for both customers and
employees. Also, I have 'known' Mike Cannon-Brooks since twenty years ago when
he was active in developer forums, good dude then, too. So nice to see
engineer driven companies succeed and not forget the little guys.

------
_peeley
I'm anxious to see what kind of macro trends arise from this, if it's still a
popular policy post-pandemic. I'd predict that most industry jobs being remote
by default would inevitably lead to a race to the bottom for wages, due to
positions being far more competitive and able to effectively outsource to the
lowest COL areas. For example, NPR has already experienced this[1] with its
internship program this fall - after going remote, it led to a 10x increase in
the number of applicants. [1] [https://current.org/2020/08/how-to-find-a-
pubmedia-job-in-a-...](https://current.org/2020/08/how-to-find-a-pubmedia-job-
in-a-pandemic/)

------
jayd16
I like the trend but one big hurdle will come when we have a partial return to
the office. Everyone at work, or everyone remote works well. Mixing office and
WFH communication will have further growing pains.

------
dominotw
uber laidoff american staff and is hiring in India[1]. This is not an
exception, just a sign of things to come.

If you do ordinary CRUD coding at work in USA, I would seriously start looking
at how to pivot out of that job.

1\. [https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-india-south-asia-
stipen...](https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-india-south-asia-stipend-work-
from-home-2020-8)

~~~
davidw
1\. stop allowing foreign workers into the US

2\. extremely portable work goes abroad

~~~
dominotw
reversing 1 won't stop 2 though. I don't understand your logic.

Why would someone go through the hassle of hiring and bringing a H1B at higher
salary in USA when they can hire the same person in India at much lower cost.

~~~
triceratops
> Why would someone go through the hassle of hiring and bringing a H1B at
> higher salary in USA when they can hire the same person in India at much
> lower cost.

Why do so many companies hire at a higher salary in the Bay Area when they can
hire the same person anywhere else in the US at much lower cost?

~~~
dominotw
presumably because they can come into the office in the bay area.

------
shinyFeature
How would they handle remote employees who want to work from countries where
Atlassian doesn't have a physical /legal entity? How would thing like taxes
work in that situation?

------
watertrash
The article mentions that this will allow the company to recruit from areas
where pay is much lower than the Bay Area, but I wonder if this will affect
the pay of current workers.

~~~
d357r0y3r
Right away? No, not in most cases. For future hires, how could it not?

If high COL located companies starting going fully remote, it's a huge
opportunity for workers in medium or low COL. For workers still determined to
live in a high COL, it will absolutely put downward pressure on their salary.
Their labor market is being exposed to a lot of competition that wasn't there
before.

I think if this trend of going fully remote holds up, it becomes much harder
to justify living in an expensive city, especially as workers age.

~~~
Hamuko
> _I think if this trend of going fully remote holds up, it becomes much
> harder to justify living in an expensive city, especially as workers age._

There's still distinct benefits to big cities. You can order stuff online
fast, even groceries. You get good Internet connectivity, which is a thing
that you need for remote work. Lots of services around.

~~~
ornornor
Maybe in North America. In a lot of Europe, you can get pretty fast internet
in small cities (fiber speeds)

~~~
lotsofpulp
In the US, the bigger and older cities have worse internet. The newer areas in
newer cities have fiber.

------
GhostBih
A dream i still have for Telemedicine. I wish I could do telemedicine as long
as I wanted, surely it’ll end.

------
mensetmanusman
They are resisting the heat death of the universe some how.

~~~
ge96
haha what's better than forever, the past maybe

------
PopeDotNinja
I should ask if I can start expensing coworking spaces.

------
dudeinjapan
Atlassian tells employees they can egregiously ignore customer requests from
home forever

------
lloydatkinson
Does this mean they will be able to focus on creating products that aren’t as
crap?

------
tus88
Lucky they aren't building a new headquarters in Sydney or anything LOL.

------
simonswords82
It's a no brainer. We will look back at offices like we look back on Victorian
warehouses.

Edit: People seem to be agreeing but I'm getting downvoted. WTF.

~~~
arcticbull
Yep, Victorian warehouses but with snacks, slides and peers.

~~~
anonAndOn
Don't forget the espresso machine! I wonder how it's doing all alone in the
big empty office :(...

~~~
arcticbull
I’ve been looking for one for home, maybe craigslist has some gently used ex-
Victorian warehouse ones.

------
sushshshsh
Side rant, I'm convinced that companies who say the office helps communication
are just really bad at communication.

If I send you an email with some pithy questions that you need to answer for
me to complete my task, you should respond to them. If you don't respond to
them, even with a "I can't help you", then you aren't hiring people who are
good at communicatimg.

~~~
djohnston
is this irony?

~~~
sushshshsh
No, I'm really being serious. If someone doesn't answer an email, the reason
usually isn't "I'm busy", it's "I don't want to help you".

If the answer is "I'm busy right now and I am not responsible enough to
remember all of the people I need to follow up with to at least give them a
pointer of who could actually help", then your company is dysfunctional.

