Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'
Comments
tag2103
Bootvis
Proving her point.
tempodox
> Atlassian has denied wrongdoing.
But if they say so themselves!
Forgeties79
Apparently 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!
dpark
It feels like a stretch to claim that mocking your CEO (deservedly or not) counts as collectively discussing or protesting working conditions.
MultifokalHirn
“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.
breppp
Is 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
No 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
This 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.
triceratops
Every 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.
happytoexplain
No, 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".
dcrazy
The NLRB alleges that “the consequences” she faced are illegal under Federal law.
Alupis
That doesn't mean they are, in fact, illegal. The NLRB alleges a lot of things - the courts will decide.
miltonlost
You sure seem to hate workers
IncreasePosts
It would be equally ridiculous to say "the nlrb hates the rule of law" since they make lots of allegations that end up getting ruled against in court
hollerith
I saw GP as an argument that they shouldn't be illegal.
breppp
I don't know if they are legal or not. But assuming you don't want to leave a company, there is minimal tact of what to say when.
You have a choice not to use said tact, but this entire "employee goes on moral crusade, gets fired, goes on moral crusade about firing", is a feature of a kind of employee that is even for other employees not amazing to be around
dcrazy
There’s enough of a difference, IMO, between campaigning against your organization’s plans and venting to your coworkers about the way in which the CEO delivered said plans.
jnovek
Surprised? I don’t think anyone is surprised but I, personally, am grossed out by it, it lowers my opinion of Atlassian and makes me less likely to select their products in the future.
robbiewxyz
Who is surprised by this? Surely you don't imagine a woman who dared to call her boss a rich jerk was surprised when he retaliated! US women are taught very young how powerful men act when their egos are threatened.
As for "the consequences", those are what are at stake now. They are what the courts & to some extent the people of the USA get to decide.
nraynaud
Wouldn't she have the excuse of truth as defense?
mlhpdx
It’s simply satire, not “truth”.
The statement doesn’t claim any fact: it’s a hypotheical not unlike a “based on real events” movie/book/etc that never quotes or attributes specific actions to a subject.
And that’s why Atlassian is very likely to lose over and over as they appeal (but never say never these days in the US).
dcrazy
The company isn’t suing her for defamation.
helsinkiandrew
That’s a good point. If that was the only thing she said, it’s hard not to see it as a statement of fact (Although I’m sure lawyers could argue about pummeled):
> “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,”
anal_reactor
I love the argument "freedom of speech doesn't imply freedom after speech"
happytoexplain
"Why are you surprised" is such a common format of weasel-phrase, which is mysterious because it's so plainly fallacious. Just because something is predictable doesn't mean it's acceptable.
denus
Frankly, it's still surprising to see this tip-toeing around given how much the mask has been ripped off recently.
fragmede
I'm waiting for the Europeans to wake up and tell us about labor laws.
em-bee
seems redundant given that even in the US the court sided with the employee, but interestingly i feel this one is undecided, because insults are taken quite seriously in some european countries.
from germany i know that whether an insult is grounds for firing someone depends on the regular interaction the two people have, so if you take a company of rednecks (to employ a stereotype), a redneck employee calling their redneck boss some typical redneck insult would be interpreted as acceptable, and make any firing based on that illegal. but if the same insult is used by a lawyer in a law firm from a big city, then suddenly that same insult is a valid reason to get fired.
dcrazy
The court has not sided with anyone yet. The NLRB sided with the employee and has argued her case in court.
nunez
For a light insult at an executive of a company at a company with a "no bullshit" culture? Absolutely!
miltonlost
Being an adult is realizing you shouldn't fire people for saying you made a poor decision
janice1999
The 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
Tell me a sad story in three words: We Use Jira.
jnovek
I’m literally using a flat file to track one of my personal projects right now and I like it more than JIRA.
jdlshore
I’m not a fan of Jira either, but this isn’t a particularly relevant criticism. it’s meant for coordinating large groups.
jnovek
I was replying to a joke so there was a bit of humor intended there. :-)
Honestly I don’t hate JIRA, it’s “fine”. There aren’t really any project tracking tools that I love.
crossroadsguy
After 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
Confluence? 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?
dcrazy
You 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?”
anal_reactor
Nah. The prime use case of Confluence is to tick "yes I've written the documentation".
neversupervised
There’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.
mingus88
Agreed. I have held similar opinions of leadership at many of my jobs.
If you are so burned out that you can’t help but vent publicly, it’s time to go. It’s just not healthy for you.
But of course leadership is going to take care of that for you because it’s not healthy for the company either to have open dissent. And most of us are far easier to replace than a CEO
Drakim
Yes, 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.
ivan_gammel
The “people who are critical of you” are very broad category that includes both toxic behavior and constructive disagreement. The former must not be tolerated, the latter can be encouraged as long as it’s not a blocker. In this case it is clearly the former and it requires suppression, but disciplinary action may have been too harsh or perfectly adequate depending on prior history with this employee. It was not said like “it was insensitive to appear in front of the team this way”. It was indeed said like he is a rich jerk. Zero added value, rage bait, polarization of the team.
IncreasePosts
That'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
When 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.
firefoxd
I 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.
Tade0
The 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.
nutjob2
I've been that 20-something myself.
I was working as a programmer at some high flying merchant bank in London in the 90's and at the pub with my workmates one night I started tearing strips off of the IT director because he was comically incompetent. Everyone was kicking me under the table because unbeknownst to me his close friend was at the table taking in my rant. Everyone agreed that I was toast and bought me drinks.
In the morning, at about 10am, security went into his office and marched him out of the building, right past my desk. I turned around and said to my team and said "See! Don't fuck with me!"
It was hilarious.
dcrazy
Was his close friend the MD or something? I’m curious how this wound up playing out exactly backward from how everyone expected it would.
nutjob2
It was a coincidence. A few weeks earlier there was a fault at the bank's data center. The very expensive backup data center failed to go online. Management was not amused.
Another memory from that time: a stressed sounding trading desk assistant rang me asking after a trade confirmation that went missing and the client was demanding. I determined that the system I worked on didn't handle those kinds of trades. Out of curiosity I looked up the trade. It was for 2 billion GBP of UK Gilts (government bonds), thats about $5 billion USD in today's money.
kstrauser
I don’t often literally LOL here.
Bravo.
AbbeFaria
I 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
I 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).
anal_reactor
> Many of us are mature enough to follow the principle of, "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything."
This isn't maturity, this is selfishness. A group often benefits from someone challenging the status quo, but the individual doing that gets punished. In your view, Germans during WW2 were "mature" by not saying anything that wasn't nice about nazism, and nowadays Russians are "mature" when they don't want to discuss a war that left a million people either dead or wounded - both cases are individuals acting out of self-preservation, not "maturity".
If you're American, then maybe a good example is Martin Luther King Jr. - do you really think that he should've had the maturity to shut up and not say anything that wasn't nice about racism? Well, he got killed, just like your junior employee got fired, so I guess he was indeed a loser in a sense.
In general this is a very common pattern in corporations where everyone is "just doing their job" and "being mature" but the end result is atrocities - for example Nestle literally killing babies.
kstrauser
I might generalize this as “push against actions, not personalities”. Don’t like someone because you just don’t mesh? Keep your mouth shut. You have a different outlook than they do, and yours is as wrong from their POV as theirs is from yours. Someone you think is interesting and fun to be around does something bad? Resist it.
Arainach
The 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).
4d4m
Surprisingly thin skin
snowchaser
Disappointing. 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.
chimon
A close friend of mine said Atlassian is one of the the worst companies she has worked for, second only to Okta.
helterskelter
"The beatings will continue until morale improves"
SpicyLemonZest
I 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
The headline definitely took a side. Not surprising given the source.
antonvs
It makes me glad that our company has just dropped all Atlassian products.
rvz
This firing is going to "backfire" in ultra-wide 4K.
ffsm8
i 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
It might not affect their bottom line or even how customers feel about them, but I think it will affect current and future employees.
rwmj
Their garbage software hasn't hurt them, it's unlikely that one developer being fired will make any difference.
nunez
It happened in 2023.
cynicalsecurity
Atlassian never heard of the Streisand effect.
152334H
“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.”
verall
Also 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.
rubyfan
She’s satirizing the irony of a wealthy ceo’s tone deafness while communicating decisions that adversely affect workers while preserving their own lavish lifestyles. Sounds like she was living out the no BS culture.
yipbub
You'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
I 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
It’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.
mohamedkoubaa
Paywall to read this story is amusingly ironic
ZeroCool2u
Gift link then: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-16/atlassian...
bdangubic
you have to be a rich jerk to read the article :)
therobots927
If my employer ever deidentifies my anonymous online comments I will be immediately fired
k33n
Since 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”.
OutOfHere
I 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 still routes to all of them, so guess I will use it! I have no conflict of interest.
joecool1029
mullvad’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
cr125rider
Cloudflare does, just not on their ad blocker resolver. There was another post on this just today somewhere on here
real_joschi
No problems with that in good old Europe.
Henchman21
Why would you not run your own Unbound locally?
Alupis
> “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
>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
If 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.
miltonlost
I am not the CEO. I am not a leader of a company. Leaders should expect for their behavior, which has far far far more reaching effects than mine, to be criticized. CEOs shouldn't be little babies who can fire everyone but not take a little heat themselves.
Alupis
If you emailed something like this about a coworker to everyone in the company, it would also be inappropriate for the workplace. Just because it was the CEO doesn't make it acceptable.
happytoexplain
Not always, but it does make it more acceptable, in terms of tone. That's how the power dynamic works.
JKCalhoun
I don't know. "Punching up" should always be acceptable.
triceratops
> Just because it was the CEO doesn't make it acceptable
Actually, yes, yes it does. There are some things you can't say to any employee of any rank: racist or sexist harassment for example. And commenting on the performance of an employee that doesn't report to you is also generally a no-go. But legitimate, job-related criticism of the CEO, or any other senior management, is entirely acceptable. Why wouldn't it be?
miltonlost
Yes it is acceptable because it is the CEO. CEOs and lowly coworkers are not the same people and do not deserve the same level of interpersonal communication. CEOs shouldn't make evil decisions and then think they can not have mild criticism laid against them.
wood_spirit
The company has an internal policy of “open company, no bullshit” and an internal channel for venting called literally “outrage”. I don’t see an “official internal” and “unofficial internal” distinction here.
rdiddly
It would be nice to know what comments the CEO decided to make in those same official channels though. The article doesn't say, except to quote someone as saying he angrily told people off. What was the communication, and should it be without consequences?
triceratops
Describing events as they happened is now not acceptable in any reality?
The CEO was at his NBA team's HQ. He had demoted many staff members. He was then criticizing staff members for protesting those demotions.
nnm
> It takes a certain amount of entitlement and lack of awareness
It takes integrity and bravery to challenge the lies of the powerful.
antonvs
> It takes a certain amount of entitlement and lack of awareness
Your comment would make sense if it were talking about the CEO.
Otherwise, it's a unwittingly sad comment on the quasi-feudal nature of these corporations.
abhinai
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.
andriy_koval
> 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.
tbrownaw
> 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.
bradchris
And we would not need rules at all if everyone was perfect all the time.
bloqs
so if i dont say its racist thats fine?
dboreham
Because before you were born society decided that was a bad idea.
BoggleOhYeah
The techbro crowd has no use for the humanities.
genxy
Or 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
>Or empathy (Musk)
"I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people," Musk said as part of the same discussion on Joe Rogan's podcast, "but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide."
Musk specifically outlined "suicidal empathy" not empathy in general. Setting yourself on fire to keep the homeless warm on a cold night doesn't help you nor the homeless long term.
beedeebeedee
But 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.
mystraline
I 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.
ath3nd
> 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
Well, no, saying that the law is wrong doen't necessarily mean someone is uninformed. Those are distinct things.
https://archive.is/7p7LD