“I was recently affected by layoffs made by Atlassian and wanted to take some time to reflect on the time I spent working there.” This is how it begins the video that Vasilios Syrakis shared on his YouTube channel. The video, titled “I have been fired by Atlassian” seems to be a criticism of the company. It’s something much better.
What has happened? On March 11, Atlassian, the company behind software like Jira or Trello, announced that it was going to reduce its workforce by 10%which translates into about 1,600 street workers. The reason, of course, was AI. In the company’s words: “Our approach is not that AI will replace people, but it would be dishonest to pretend that AI does not change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas.” One of those roles was that of Vasilios.
The answer. Instead of recording himself criticizing the company’s decision, this engineer opted for something different. What he did was publish a detailed, 38-minute description of everything he built during the eight years he worked at the company. Your video is a masterclass on How the architecture of a company of the stature of Atlassian works and it serves two objectives: it turns your experience into a common good and at the same time it is a letter of introduction for future jobs.
what he did. Vasilios did not have a minor role at Atlassian, but for eight years, he worked on the invisible “plumbing” that connects millions of users to Jira and Confluence. In the video he details how Open Service Broker works, the internal platform he built so that Atlassian teams could publish their services on the internet with one click; also the Sovereign system, which acts as the “brain” of the more than a thousand proxies; and how it rebuilt security so that all internal services inherited the same authentication and attack security without having to write it one by one.
The context. In the announcement, Atlassian admits that it is achieving very good results. In February 2026 they published their resultsin which they boasted a 23% increase in their total revenues, which reached 1,586 million, and a 26% growth in cloud revenues. Despite the fact that the company is doing very well, 10% of its staff ended up on the streets, including engineers with roles as important as Vasilios’.
As mentioned in the Experienced Devs subredditVasilios is careful and in the video he does not seem to mention confidential information about the company, but instead limits himself to talking about the design of its systems, so it does not seem like they could sue him. At the time of writing, Atlassian has not commented on the video, which already has almost a million views.
Image | Vasilios Syrakis, YouTube
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