To start, there's very little training into the vast, internal structure or options for outside training. There is a ton of in-speak, acronyms, and politics to understand to be effective. Managers tend to focus on improving your weak points instead of bolstering your strengths. Decisions are made via waterfall and handed down from the executive layer with little regard to the impact those decisions have on the end user. If you have a bad relationship with your manager don't expect much help or mediation. When I asked who to talk to about being mismanaged and verbally abused I was told that I shouldn't bring it up and just power through until the manager in question moved on to harass another employee. There's an underlying current of gossip and politics and the "Open Company" part of their values is totally [inaccurate].
The Culture: Everyone plays second fiddle to the Sydney office. There are more promotions and raises in the Sydney office. Diversity is a joke, a literal joke. The head of HR has a staff of beautiful, young, blond women and has an office deemed the "Man Cave". The open office arrangement makes for a lot of distractions. Whether it’s dogs barking, the beer bikes, or a mariachi band (I swear to God that happened) they don’t seem to want to promote a productive environment. The office is located a block from the San Francisco County Jail and a park with one of the few public bathrooms in SoMa. There’s a lot of homeless harassment, human waste and crime you have to consider when coming to/from the office. If you drive in, they don't reimburse you for parking.
The tools: Atlassians “dogfood” all their own software which is cool in theory. Most of the software is groaning under it’s own infrastructure and poor IT and is very buggy since you’re seeing a development version and not production software. Somedays the inferior system you’re forced to use crashes for half a day and you have to work over the evening to make up for it. They don’t like email. Expect 90% of your communications to happen through their instant messaging app (also inferior) which will undoubtedly lead to miscommunications within your team.
Their future: I expect to see a lot of employees leaving and cashing out their stock after they IPO. There's a lot of poor business decisions being made right now to try and boost the share price and with little regard to the customers who support them. That's bad business.
