Atlassian has a public stated philosophy of “Open Company, No bullshit.”
But the philosophy is currently being tested in the United States, where a software engineer claims she was only acting in the spirit of the “No BS” culture when she spoke out about workplace issues, including sharing her opinion of CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes on an internal company Slack channel called “Outrage Notification”.
To make things interesting for Atlassian and any company seeking to leverage its women to promote its culture externally, the woman who was fired has regularly featured in marketing blogs and videos, having started as “Employee 603” back in 2012.
Denise Unterwuzacher claims she was illegally fired in 2023, days after making the comments about Cannon-Brookes. According to documents from the 3 March hearing in Austin, Texas, before the National Labour Relations Board, her lawyers say their client’s comments are permitted under US law, where employees can share protesting comments about working conditions. Lawyer Colton Puckett adds that US-based employees are “allowed to do so in ways their bosses might not like”. Atlassian denies any wrongdoing.
Unterwuzacher appears well-versed in the company’s culture of openness, as reflected in its own marketing content and in the comments of its team members.
Unterwuzacher is listed as a “Senior Operations Engineer” on an Atlassian blog of “five long-time Atlassians” in an article series “exploring what a culture of openness really looks like, warts and all, in the words of every day Atlassians who are living it.” In the piece, published well before she was fired, Unterwuzacher speaks favourably about the company’s “open” culture and shares a positive anecdote about former co-CEO Scott Farquhar, who personally supported her team as they responded to a data loss incident during her early days at the company.
She also appears in an episode of “Women in Tech” in 2026 on “Atlassian TV”, where they discuss career paths, technology, and what it takes to be a great software engineer. Unterwurzacher shares some of her experiences as “a woman in tech”, the value of diversity in tech, and how women’s behaviour in a male-dominated workforce can affect how welcome the next wave of women feels.
The comments that ended it
Unterwuzacher’s 2023 comments were made in the internal Slack channel as Mike Cannon-Brookes responded to questions about a “re-levelling” plan that included demotions for some staff and job losses for others. According to Puckett, Cannon-Brookes had interjected to “tell off the people who were complaining”, and disagreeing in the chat that only a “small number” of jobs were being affected.
Unterwuzcher was one of several employees to take issue with Cannon-Brookes’s comments in the “Outrage Notification” Slack chat. Especially the fact that Cannon-Brookes was joining the virtual meeting from the Utah Jazz’s headquarters, the basketball team he co-owns.
“What’s up, Outragers, just dialling in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummelled,” she wrote, before she was fired a couple of days later.
Atlassian claimed at the time Unterwurzacher had “engaged in acrimonious communications and ad hominem attacks against teammates and colleagues.”
According to the hearing documents obtained by Bloomberg, Atlassian’s company lawyer, Troy Valdez, claims that Unterwuzcher’s comments were not legally protected, giving the company the right to dismiss her. He described the comments as “an irrelevant personal attack and insult directed at a colleague, essentially calling him a ‘rich jerk’.”
The case is currently before Susannah Merrit, a judge of the NLRB, which has the power to order companies to reinstate employees. Her ruling could be appealed by Washington DC based NLRB members.
But for now, we await the ruling on whether calling out your boss for dialling in from the headquarters of the NBA team he owns to respond to comments about demotions and job losses can legally get you fired, according to US laws.