Atlassian: Shocking recruitment experience

I recently had an appalling experience with Atlassian recruitment process. I'm very disappointed and in disbelief of how such a reputable company that prides itself as one the greatest places to work can mishandle and screw up completely when trying to hire a new employee.

All started when the recruiter contacted me via LinkedIn to see if I was interested on a Senior Java developer position. At that time I was leaving my previous job after contracting for nearly 4 years, so it seemed attractive to join Atlassian, despite the huge salary drop that it would mean. I had the illusion of meeting smart people, and working in a dynamic environment, and having the opportunity to make a difference.

The first 2 stages were quite straight forward, the first a 1 hour pair programming exercise, and the second a 1.5 hour detailed presentation/discussion of the recent projects I had worked on, with a panel of 2 senior developers. These were great and positive experiences, the interviewers were friendly, attentive and down to earth. All seemed to be in good track. Unfortunately, the positives ended here.

The issues started to appear towards the last stage interview, what they call it Management Interview. First, they sent confusing details of the interview, initially indicating apparently another technical interview about Java and Scala. Then another indicating an interview about work styles and preferences, and career goals. The last interview was quite different to the previous ones, this time the interviewers (apparently 2 team leads) were less friendly and less attentive (I was desperate for a bottle of water, I could have asked but I think they were in a hurry). Apparently, they didn't prepare the questions on before hand, so they were jumping from technical questions to behavioural questions or so. All in all it lacked substance. At one point one of the interviewers laughed as in mockery when I answered about what technologies or new approaches to application development I was interested on working. It seemed that they had some sort of prejudices. This interview left me feeling a bit uncomfortable.

For almost a week I didn't receive any feedback. I was considering that the process was over, when the recruiter finally called to let me know that they were going to make a decision that same day. Then later that day, he called to offer me the job, but with a lower salary that initially proposed, not a big difference, but it didn't feel good, since I was actually aiming to negotiate a higher salary. Apparently, they have some sort of system where they classify or rank people based on experience/skills or who knows what else, so that was my rank. I guess developers are just a commodity after all huh? you are ranked and assigned a value.

I replied politely that I was being underestimated and that anything lesser than the initial salary wouldn't work for me. Then he called some time later informing me that they are flexible company and that they had agreed to the initial amount, but I will have to demonstrate that I'm really that senior. We agreed on the start date and he run the procedure going forward, the paperwork, the contract, etc. Feeling optimistic I take my family for a short holiday before I get fully energized onto my next role.

Several days later, the unexpected happens right when I'm having a good time with my family in Cairns. The recruiter calls me to inform that they will still be offering the lower salary until I demonstrate that I'm really that good for the rest of the year. Seriously, I would be happy to demonstrate that I'm a lot more than what they expect, working months or even a year for free if the incentive was worth it, but for 5K it seemed just ridiculous and insulting. Obviously this is the breaking point, how can you take anyone seriously when they change their mind in matter of days. Perhaps I can expect it from a person, but from a company that's just unreal, absolutely unprofessional.

Why Atlassian? Is it that they are so successful that anyone will be willing to sacrifice dignity in order to have the privilege to work for them? They say that it's a great place to work. I can't get my head work around that idea. It's such a shocking contrast. I can just speculate that perhaps it's a great place to work for the "cool" people, but they need someone to do the hard work while they spend having a great time playing or drinking beer.

In the end, I'm sure this will be one of the most beneficial experiences I ever had, and I will thank them in the future!

A headless Bamboo

Today I had the last stage interview with Atlassian, still waiting for the outcome, anyway one of the questions was: "If you were to implement a feature in Bamboo what would it be?" at that moment I didn't have anything specific, so my answer was not that great. Anyway, waiting for the train back home, it occurred to me that Bamboo should be invisible, should basically get out the way.

As a programmer I write code to automate things, so I'd expect the process of building and packaging the programs should also be programmable and automated. I think having to configure build plans in Bamboo manually is an unnecessary friction. So I'm thinking of Bamboo as an invisible agent running on the background (locally or remotely) discovering programs to build and building them. So instead of going to Bamboo to configure my build plans, I want to create the build recipes as part of the project code. In most cases, not even this recipe should be necessary, for instance if a project is using Maven, the default task would be to clean and deploy.