I used to work their, albeit many years ago now. I found it a bit cult like/cliquey, a lot of people living/breathing Atlassian thinking they are saving the world "we put a rover on mars", "we're a hundred year company" etc. I think that's like most large tech companies though.

My team was labeled a "high performing" team. I had positive 360 reviews, bonuses, my direct manager said "you are obviously the star of the team, we wouldn't of delivered this without you" on a large project.

The business had a change of direction on the tech stack. What my manager was previously advocating for and encouraging was now a big no as his manager and some others didn't like how we did things. I think the new CTO at the time was trying to stamp their mark. We now had to use what was set out on the new tech radar. From an advocate, strongly encouraging our now old tech stack, my manager changed to actively discouraging and stamping out any mention of specific tools/languages.

My team wasn't happy, strongly disagreed with the changes being forced upon us. We where forced to re-write one project using the new blessed tools on the tech stack. It turned out worse/buggy, we where unhappy in retrospectives, "Manager: what can we do better", "Team: use the previous version we wrote", but our manager pushed back trying to force false positivity. That was the worst retro I've been in. The entire team silent, heads on desks as anything we said was rebuked. We knew what was wrong, how to fix it, our answers where not the answers our manager was looking for, it wasn't going anywhere, round in circles so we eventually ended sat silent with any enthusiasm beaten out of us.

The team then got systematically broken up to weaken the strong bias and bring in people elsewhere who advocated the change in direction and moving the people disagreeing to other teams/projects where they would be a minority.

A colleague unfairly got put on PIP due to the new dev lead brought in as an advocate for the new tech stack having fundamental differences of opinions on how things should be done. My colleague ultimately handed in his resignation.

On his last day, the end of the afternoon on a Friday I got called in to HR. Some HipChat messages was used against me talking about the now banned tech stack (generally nerd HipChat/Slack chat, nothing out the ordinary). A twitter tweet was shown on the screen of me self venting about being told a free deli bar at lunch and free soft drinks "so take one for the team" isn't compensation to be forced on call disrupting personal life with compensation below minimum wage while not being able to be active in personal time. I named no companies in the tweet, my other tweets unrelated and my profiled had no information where i worked.

They walked me out on gardening leave with enough time for some stock to vest, for "disclosing internal financial information", the less than minimum wage part. My feed had about 10 followers so going through HipChat and putting my name in to google and finding my twitter feed, my manager who was a few weeks before praising me and encouraging more use of specific tech was now searching for something to get rid of me.

Fully accept self venting on twitter wasn't my best move but at that point my manager must of been looking for reasons to get rid of me and PIP would be next like my colleague so it would of been something else if it wasn't that.

Was a good lesson. No matter how good your work is, how positive the feedback, if the company changes direction, you either disagree and get on with it with a smile and collect your pay check no matter if you believe it's the wrong choice or leads to lower quality work, or leave there and then. Everyone is expendable no matter of past performance as recent layoffs has shown.

To summarize, i'd say it's probably like most large companies. It's nice if you play the game and get a good manager/team. There's ambitious people trying to make their mark and will be ruthless to do so. It's nothing extraordinary and certainly not changing the world. For Australians, it's probably their best option for a good paycheck and probably does give the most interesting work in Australia being limited on tech companies in Australia.