Atlassian Job costs - Less about AI and more about Revenue per Employee metric

 Atlassian has announced employee cuts to the tune of 1600 people. But is it about AI, or more about fixing bad management.

In the last 3 years, the FE's have increased by 3113 workers, from 10,726 to the current level of 13813.  Atlassian now has a Revenue per Employee metric of $356953.

Compare this to say other SaaS platforms like ServiceNow ($441,395) or Salesforce (472,652) and Atlassian is looking a bit employee fat.

The cuts will bring back numbers to 2024 levele and make this important metric more reasonable compared to its peers (if it can keep subscription revenue growing)

So once again, the specter of AI is really just a fig leaf to improve past mistakes of over hiring.