Just Another Tuesday at a Values-Driven Company - Anonymous employee Atlassian Employee Review

I was part of a major org at Atlassian named Data Tech & Insights (DTI), and am not alone in experiencing repeated bullying and disrespect from senior leaders. I provided my serious concerns about DTI executives in the anonymous employee survey (TIPS) and several other forums accessible to company executives. I had used AI to shift the tone of my comments to avoid being identified. Then I was suddenly fired for “low performance”, and my corporate access was cut immediately. However, my performance ratings and peer-written feedback had consistently been positive up until I wrote about my concerns. On the termination call with ER present, when I asked my supervisor if she had collected feedback from any of my stakeholders for this “performance evaluation”, she first admitted “no” and then quickly deflected: “well, we are not getting into that”. They offered severance with a highly restrictive non-disparagement clause that would significantly limit my ability to share my experience or openly support other mistreated employees. After being fired along with other colleagues who also spoke up against the poor leadership, I became aware that a senior executive publicly labelled us as “unregretted attritions” in a major forum. Such public humiliation of ex-employees is not isolated at Atlassian. In a separate all-hands meeting with over a thousand intended attendees, when asked why three sudden departures happened with no internal communication, SVP/Chief Data Officer responded publicly that performance-driven attritions are not just made by managers alone and that “ER and HR act as the counter balance”. About a year earlier, a DTI org-wide document titled “State of Data” shared by the SVP/CDO open to all Atlassian employees cited a number I recall in the range of 49 “unregretted attritions” within his group. This phrase with the associated number remained on the page even after someone slacked the SVP that their team felt DTI was “celebrating their colleagues’ departures”. A senior leader was known to have told people on different teams that he had given up a better job at Facebook and “only joined Atlassian as a payback” to the SVP, including specifics on how he had learned that lesson from the SVP the hard way at Facebook. The same leader had an unhealthy enthusiasm for discussing how to get peers and reports fired, from VP level to junior level. He told me about a well-respected executive: “I have very mixed feelings about her. But she is gonna be here. We cannot fire her,” and that executive left abruptly not long after. A young, high-performing female employee was told "you are just a middle man", "you create no value", "there is nothing you can do that a data engineer cannot do." As for me, it was just another Tuesday to be told that “your job is on the line”, “you will be fired”, “you will face consequences”, “people like you are fake nice.” That senior leader is not the only one who is generous in praising the SVP/CDO. Another leader openly praised the SVP as “a leader who leads with heart and integrity”, while directing her reports not to contribute to cross functional projects “unless DTI gets enough credit”. DTI is known for not getting along with several partnering teams up to the top executive level, but the DTI executives would place their teams from leads to the analyst level to “pick a side”. They demanded we document every conversation with every business partner, what was said, every yes, every no, and all the back and forth in between, but as I raised with ER, their documentation could deviate drastically from the actual conversations that had occurred. The company consistently struggled with basic data integrity on the most critical business metrics. DTI leaders instructed staff to hide data issues from partners and banned the use of words like “data issues”, “overstatement”, “understatement”. They asked us to adopt the “one DTI narrative” that conveniently shifted blame to others. When the company-wide TIPS survey results were released, my supervisor's direct reports' results were particularly low, with Engagement around 50%, Effectiveness around 50%, Company Satisfaction around 30%, Intention to Stay around 10%, Rarely Thinking About Leaving Atlassian 0%. She commented to multiple people that even though the survey is “anonymous”, they could figure out who provided what inputs. She further commented that for the open texts, “these days people use AI to change their language, but, ‘we’ can still tell who wrote them”. De-anonymizing TIPS was nothing new in the DTI org, I once viewed a Slack message from an individual contributor sent to the SVP noting that she had identified the reason a named ex-DTI employee had still submitted the TIPS feedback, and that it was because their last day occurred after the survey date. The SVP used to attribute the low TIPS scores to low performers unable to handle the higher performance standards. However, the data showed that trust in executives in making the right decision for Atlassian, feeling safe raising concerns, and collaborating effectively across teams were among the lowest scoring items. After I raised a detailed account of concerns with Employee Relations, they characterized everything as: “different management styles”, “communication gaps”. When I specifically asked about a senior leader’s use of the F-word to describe a senior female executive, ER called it a “different communication style”. ER declined to share whether a single employee had been interviewed, citing Atlassian’s company policy. I was far from the only one. A long-tenured senior manager posted a deeply personal blog internally about the lost Atlassian values. It was deleted immediately allegedly by ER, though it had stirred wide discussions among DTI and beyond. His words resonated with my experience involving the same group of leaders: “I witnessed a top performing team become demotivated, dismantled, and lose nearly all its veterans in just a few months”, “be the change you seek turned into being the casualty of the change”, “office politics overpowered the engineering spirit”, “unsung heroes took all the blame instead of being appreciated”. While a senior DTI executive publicly labelled him as part of “unregretted attritions”, it is worth noting that his terminable “low performance” was determined soon after he raised serious concerns about DTI leadership. Following that public labeling, DTI management reportedly tracked down specific individuals who had viewed the post before deletion for private conversations about this senior manager.