Hi,

I'm Janusz Gorycki, Manager for Atlassian's newest office. We just started working for Atlassian on January 7th. We are from Gdansk, Poland and we are the staff of Atlassian's European office, located here.

There are currently eight of us - seven software developers and their manager--me. We joined Atlassian as a team, having moved from a giant, multinational corporation, where we had been working in the IT department. We're all experienced developers - for example I started my professional career in 1994 - some of the readers of this entry were probably in the kindergarden at that time ;).

So, how come we ended up here? That is quite an interesting story, proving that sometimes having weird ideas and courage to try them pays off. What happened was, we became increasingly frustrated with soul-sucking environment of the aforementioned corporation. With rumors of layoffs to come, which seemed to have become the standard operating procedure with our former employer, we weighed our options. Preferring to remain in command of our lives, we started looking hard for alternatives.

One of us had been a fan of Atlassian, its products and its culture for quite some time, and he suggested that we send the nice folks from Sydney an email, proposing that we work for them. The chance of success seemed minimal, but we decided that there was nothing to lose - the worst that could happen would be no answer, or a "no" answer - something that somebody looking for a job experiences quite a lot :).

To our astonishment, Mike Cannon-Brookes answered our email. Moreover, he was actually quite interested in the idea of employing somebody in Europe! Next thing we knew, three Atlassians were in Gdansk, interviewing us for a job. Moreover, all of us passed the interviews with flying colors (yes, we are that good :)) and were offered a job!

So, at the moment we are working hard to start a full-blown European-based support organization, so that all of you folks from the "Old World" will not have to wake up early or stay late to get help with JIRA, Confluence and other Atlassian products you have purchased.

Moreover, we have also started development of some really cool software, which you will really like. I guess we will announce it in due time.

Meanwhile, take a look at our office.