– Life at Atlassian
Atlassian is a fast paced and exciting work environment that stays true to our entrepreneurial roots. We work hard everyday to create useful products that people lust after, but we also know how to have fun.
So what exactly is it like to work and have fun at Atlassian?
Gingerbread houses, the Atlassian way – December 2009
Black Friday, the Super Bowl, dinner with the in-laws - the holidays are always good for some competition. In keeping with that theme, the Atlassian San Francisco office decided to follow our annual Halloween pumpkin carving contest with an inaugural holiday gingerbread house building competition.
The rules: each team gets a bona fide gingerbread house kit, and $10 to buy supplies. Everything added to the house must be edible.
Before we get to the results, we thought we'd pass along a few tips from the experience:
- RTFM: those teams that thought making icing was a piece-of-cake (okay, strange pun) struggled. Add too much water and you run out of mortar; too little and the darn thing won't set.
- Gingerbread tastes really, really bad: a few of us got hungry during the build and tried to eat part of our houses. Trust us: it's not worth it.
- Don't wait until the last minute: the biggest underestimation most made was around how long these things take to build, especially when competing against people that are willing to pull out all the stops (see below for examples). If you want to win, start early. Nothing kills a good eggnog buzz like a caved in gingerbread roof.
- throw away the blueprint: following the box is going to yield you one very boring square gingerbread house, adorned with gumdrops and jelly beans. If you want to win this puppy, you have to go off-road. Just when everyone is expecting you to pull out the little ski chalet with marshmallow topping, you throw down the Taj Mahal with stained glass from melted Jolly Ranchers. Dream big.
So, without further adieu, the results of the inaugural Atlassian gingerbread house competition:
Admirable entries that didn't win:
Lots of great ideas here, and some very creative use of materials.
First up, the Polar Bear House. Surprised this team pulled this out, considering the Polar Bear ate up half of their $10 allowance.
A Gypsy caravan. Technically, the x-mas lights aren't edible, but we let it slide.
A bunch of us like to play board games during lunch, so the House of Cards house won some votes:
A tribute to our Amsterdam office, the Redlight District House, complete with a risque silhouette etched from a fruit roll-up and snow people embarrassing themselves:
The Golden Gate Bridge house, with two halves of lettuce representing the Marin Headlands and Presidio, and blueberries representing the rough waters of the bay.
This was a close runner-up, an almost exact replica of our office building at 375 Alabama Street in San Francisco. The bus in front was actually parked outside of the office that day.
And the winner:
The Beach Chalet house, with roof of bay leaves, a blue ocean of jello powder, and a beach of brown sugar.
Not sure what we'll do for Valentine's Day, but holidays around this office certainly aren't dull. Happy holidays from Atlassian.
Movember @ Atlassian: MO with the MOst Announcement – December 2009
I'm going to keep this post short and sweet and let the results do all the talking.
Last week we opened up the voting for you to decide who should take home the three annual Atlassian Movember awards. You've had your say and the winners are...
The Sydney MO with the MOst
Confluence Developer, Jonathan Gilbert, took out this gong by the narrowest of margins with his Chevron stache.
The ReMOte MO with the MOst
Our BDM, Todd Revolt, was the favourite all along. He took it out with a staggering 43% of the vote with his porn star mo.
Thanks for coming in today
I think this one might have been rigged (there's no way I should have been in the top three), but nevertheless, can everyone please join me in saying to our Technical Sales Engineer, Kevin Williams, "thanks for coming in today, Kevin".
Well that's it for this year! Thanks to all the Mo Bro's that participated and helped us raise ~$9,000 in support of men's health. Also, we can't forget to thank all the wives, girlfriends, and partners who put up with supported their men through Movember.
Until next year...what stache will you be growing?
The Dundee Arms is Open for Business – November 2009
Rich in history, the Dundee Arms has been home to many interesting residents including T.J. 'Buttie' McMahon - grandfather of Australian Prime Minister Sir William McMahon, and award-winning artists Rod Shaw, Graeme Inson, and Ivy Shore.
Today the walls are decorated with many paintings and drawings that played part in the pub's vast history. Visit us for a bar meal or a quiet beverage and make sure you ask the bartender to tell you a tale of yesteryear."
As of today, the two floors above the Dundee Arms are inhabited by Atlassians! We're expanding to make room for 32 new engineers, and what better choice of premises than the pub right next door? You don't find many offices with four different kinds of beer on tap.
The Sydney Morning Herald says "the beer looks absolutely huge" because "the frothy stuff comes in great big whopping pint pots". In a hot Sydney summer, that's just the stuff to finish off the week with.
Sound like a great place to work? In addition to making kickass software, Atlassian offers 20% time, a fun entrepreneurial environment, and a holiday before you start. We're hiring.
Photo copyright Arup Maity.
Halloween Comes to Atlassian – November 2009
Last Friday the San Francisco office got dressed up and broke into teams to carve up some pumpkins! So much fun (and we've got the photos to prove it):
Support Engineer, Jonathan Costello is beheaded?!!?1!?
Channel Coordinator, Trisha Hong, plays Alan from the movie "The Hangover"
A beer pumpkin!
Customer Advocate, Sherrie Ladegast, dressed as a geisha
Office Administrator, Rochell Lopez, with Tina as Crulla de Vil
Marketing Monkey, Morgan Friberg, as Carl Fredricksen from the film "Up"
Support Triage Engineer, Marian Finch, is a bunch of grapes
To see a bunch more photos from Atlassian's Halloween festivities, check out these photos on Flickr.
Atlassian Values - Once upon a time... – September 2009
You don't set core values, you discover core values. - Jim Collins
I often talk about Atlassian's values to people outside the company, and the most frequent question asked is "are they real values that people live, or are they just words?" This is closely followed by "how do you get people to follow them?", and then "how did you create them?".
It's important to state that we didn't create the core values, we just articulated values that the company and the staff were already living. That answers the first two questions, I'll answer the 3rd question in this blog.
I was in the very unique position of being at both the management development side and facilitating the staff session that we did in Sydney, so really saw the core values solidify. (Plus, I just moved desks and in the clean out rediscovered the brainstorming sheets that we did the workshop sessions on. I think they're quite interesting to look at to see how the values evolved.)
Some background:
In July 2007 there was a lot of concern from the founders as to how the company was growing so quickly and how to retain the culture of Atlassian.
In the previous year, 2006, we had jumped from 28 people to 57 people. In the next year we knew we were going to grow - we almost doubled the number of staff and by the end of 2008 the company had grown to 97 people. We had also put in a management layer - something that the smaller sized company had not previously needed. Articulating the company's values seemed an important building block for the future of the company.
We followed a bastardised methodology of Jim Collins' the 'Mars Group'. Collins describes the 'Mars Group' like this - "Imagine you've been asked to recreate the very best attributes of your organization on another planet, but you only have seats on the rocket ship for five to seven people. Who would you send? They are the people who are likely to be exemplars of the organization's core values and purpose, have the highest level of credibility with their peers, and the highest levels of competence."
When you got to Mars, it didn't matter what you were making - it could be awesome software products, it could be gumboots. We looked at those attributes we valued and listed out what was the most important, regardless of what we were making.
Stage 1 - the management team
The newly formed management team undertook this exercise and came up with a huge list of attributes that they valued in themselves and in the staff.
The team then distilled those attributes down to 5 values.
Stage 2 - Atlassian staff
We spent a half day workshopping the values in the Sydney office with a group of 12 employees from a variety of departments.
Mike Cannon-Brookes was thrilled to see that:
The most fascinating (and gratifying as a founder) thing about it was the huge overlap between the two lists the teams came up with (which were merged to become the above). The correlation was scary, they were almost exactly the same list.
Would you look at that:
The missing element from the management team was the value that came to be known as 'Play, as a team', had been squeezed out to make space to include the value 'Create useful products people lust after'. The employees disagreed that 'Create useful products people lust after' was core value, rather it was a purpose for the company. They also all felt that play and humour was an integral part of the company culture.
The end result
We then brought the founders into the employee group and thrashed out the wording and order of the core values. Resulting in the values, and company purpose as we know them today:
...and they all lived happily ever after.
(inspired by the the Chief Happiness Officer's post Happiness at work at Atlassian)
Want to see more?
Check out what we've done in the past
(Note: no staff or animals were permanently harmed in the making of this page. All merriment is genuine and unscripted. Yes — it is possible to have fun at work!)
