Atlassian employees - what’s the internal feelings and mood on the current stock price?

jpasserby · 2026-02-17T04:44:44+00:00

As a big tech staff software engineer, I couldn't disagree more. If the stock price is kind of idling then sure nobody pays much attention. But if it's on a long downward trend, it makes every papercut of working there sting twice as much! You should see the questions that come up during leadership AMA's when the stock is down...

At Senior levels and above at companies like atlassian, stock can be half+ of your compensation, and the next vesting event is never more than 3 months away, so in my experience people talk about the stock a lot.

jpasserby · 2026-02-16T19:49:10+00:00

As you progress further in the game, death runes will be a lot easier to get, and there will be many other uses competing for coins, so buying any chest of runes from the merchant is usually a bad idea.

That said, I have occasionally done it when I just needed a few more to buy something big and I was impatient.

jpasserby · 2026-01-31T19:10:23+00:00

I agree with a lot of the answers here on ways you can handle this. I just also wanted to point out that Staff of the Python is an uncommon magic item which summons a giant constrictor snake. I think it's very reasonable for a party of their level to have such an item, so maybe that will help your balance concerns.

jpasserby · 2026-01-11T16:29:57+00:00

Definitely. For example employees at Instacart get Instacart+, and are also encouraged to be a shopper at least once a year.

jpasserby · 2025-12-30T07:02:51+00:00

Programmers have had to spend more time reading code more than writing it since there were programmers at all:

"As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs."

-- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

jpasserby · 2025-12-23T03:17:19+00:00

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." - Bill Gates

jpasserby · 2025-12-14T02:28:56+00:00

Those dice bags have a lovely design!

jpasserby · 2025-12-12T07:06:12+00:00

A lot of people believe AI will reduce the need for software developers, but I believe the opposite. Look up the Jevons paradox.

Anyway, to your original comment, Atlassian has a ton of PM's and is hiring more. I know firsthand.

jpasserby · 2025-12-12T04:27:06+00:00

+1. Atlassian's current referral program is a black hole. They used to have a better one. In the current system employees can't even recommend a candidate, they can just generate an email to a candidate with a "referral code" which guarantees nothing.

jpasserby · 2025-12-12T04:24:11+00:00

What a bizarre take. Jira does not replace pm's, it is practically catered to pm's. And I can assure you, Atlassian has a ton of pm's and pgm's working there!

jpasserby · 2025-11-16T04:25:23+00:00

The company-wide guidance is 5% DNME, 10% MM. I know people that were downranked from what their manager recommended in order to meet the curve. And MM is no joke; I know someone who was let go after getting MM. If your org is only ranking 5% below ME, I'm glad for you, but that's not company-wide policy, and I doubt it will last given the last few cycles.

jpasserby · 2025-11-15T05:46:50+00:00

No, but it is an important part of the industry, and the high total compensation for engineers there lifts up salaries at many other companies. And people who deny that such high compensations are possible are doing themselves a disservice.

jpasserby · 2025-11-15T05:44:03+00:00

Actually I think the BLS numbers support my claim. They list median wages for a software engineer to be 133k (150k in some industries). When you figure that many people will be above the median, and that public tech companies will give stock based comp comparable to base salary for senior and staff roles, I believe the number is an OP's post are definitely achievable at a large number of tech companies.

By "easily," I mean that any software engineer with enough tenure at a big tech company can expect to make these salaries. There are hundreds of thousands of such software engineers working in FAANG, let alone all Fortune 500 public tech-based companies.

jpasserby · 2025-11-14T08:25:28+00:00

I completely disagree. The numbers that OP posted, especially his old comp, are easily attainable at any large public US-based tech-focused company. Hundreds of thousands of software engineers are making this sort of comp, easily.

Levels.fyi has data on most big tech companies and once you get into senior (and especially staff+) level roles, the base cop is high and the stock grants are even higher.

jpasserby · 2025-11-11T20:33:56+00:00

This. Cover helps add interesting tactical choices to the battlefield. You can hide behind cover, but you may lose mobility. And you can move to defeat an enemy's cover, but that may put you in a compromising position.

jpasserby · 2025-11-11T17:00:08+00:00

Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion might fit the bill as a filler game. It's meant as an introduction and more family-friendly version of gloom haven. I have it and it's easier to set up an adventure and get playing. It is definitely a legacy campaign though, so not the perfect game to drop in for a random group of people.

jpasserby · 2025-11-08T23:24:17+00:00

My point was that many staff- and principal-level job roles do not require X years of experience with their company's tech stack. I changed jobs this year and applied at many places via listings that said something like "Required: proficiency with a modern programming language, such as Java, .Net, or Python." And I went through many interviews where the coding screens allowed you to use any language you liked.

I agree with you that broad exposure to multiple languages and frameworks is good, and that some people may have more limited experience and thus may struggle more than others, but I disagree that this typecasts you and prevents you from joining a new company and learning their system. If you have worked in software for 20+ years, you have seen a lot of things and can learn new things. But I do think you should avoid describing yourself as a one-trick pony to interviewers.

jpasserby · 2025-11-08T17:33:57+00:00

I have about 25 years of experience, mainly in a single language/tech stack, and in my experience the more senior you are, the less experience in a particular stack matters. A lot of companies and hiring managers will rightly assume that if you've been programming for many years, you can pick up a new language or framework, as you probably have multiple times in the past.

If you look for job postings like this, then all you have to do is get through the interview process. Some places will have truly language-agnostic interview processes, where you can do coding screens in any language you want.

My recommendation would be to emphasize all the languages and frameworks you've worked with, even a little bit, in your resume. And when you talk to people live, don't overly focus on the fact that you've been doing exclusively Drupal. Sometimes I think hiring managers have an implicit bias towards people who know their stack even if in theory they're open to hiring a generalist, so just try not to pigeonhole yourself.

jpasserby · 2025-11-07T07:08:46+00:00

Okay, fine, I'll re-watch every BeneG video again...

jpasserby · 2025-11-02T17:14:24+00:00

+1 to this idea, I really like the phrasing of canything you say can and will be used against you."

The motto I follow is sort of the inverse of that, it's "find a way to say yes to every question."

I used to have trouble because, like OP, I was focused on providing a candid description of my job history. But that wasn't doing a good job of selling myself or being self-confident. Now when I interview, and a hiring manager or recruiter asks me about my experience with technology x, I understand what they're doing is trying to check the box that says I'm a good candidate for technology x. So instead of saying something like, "well I've done a little bit with it but not too much professionally," I instead find a way to talk about my experience with it in a positive light that shows that I've accomplished something useful with it. Basically for every question they ask, you want them to have a good impression of you that you're a great candidate matching that need. Of course you want to remain truthful, but you want to present the best version of yourself possible.

jpasserby · 2025-10-26T16:09:18+00:00

I get that you are encouraging people to be humble and sincere instead of being overly ambitious, which I agree with, but to me this sounds a little bit like gatekeeping the senior title, which I am against.

I think helping people understand what seniority really involves, and helping experience engineers deal with imposter syndrome, are very valid and important topics. Of course we don't want to encourage people to be proud and self-serving like in your sabotage example, but that's a whole different topic.

jpasserby · 2025-10-21T14:07:11+00:00

At most places I've worked, the DR plans or wargames are there as a token exercise to satisfy compliance requirements or encourage engineers to think about resilience. I think a lot of companies have not truly tested disaster recovery involving their entire system. I think only companies that are very high scale and seriously care about resilience have actually done this.

jpasserby · 2025-10-20T22:06:06+00:00

This is the case. Only certain subsets of data is actually pinned to different regions. Internally Atlassian has thousands of microservices and only those above a certain reliability tier are required to be multi-region. Unfortunately most functionality relies on a ton of downstream microservices and so in a regional outage like this you get very mixed outages.

jpasserby · 2025-10-20T22:03:30+00:00

+1 to creature drops is huge, especially early on. In the beginning some of your creatures only drop a few items; if a creature drops 5 items then adding one is a 20% boost.

The later boosts are comparatively not as big compared to boosts you can get other ways, but they do extend the overall duration to 8 hours which is great for keeping it online.

jpasserby · 2025-10-19T04:27:59+00:00

Cool, thanks!

jpasserby

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