Atlassian geniuses just hipster rent seekers

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A couple of stories today for the smartest guys in the room. First, mega-mansion dwelling Atlassian genius, Scott Farquar, says at the AFR:

The software billionaire, who spoke on Tuesday at the company’s first “Team Tour” event in Sydney, said eliminating variables and optimising output rates worked for factory workers in the 19th century but made little sense now.

“We should absolutely not do that. The reason for that is they lived a highly predictable world. They walked into that factory each and every day and did the same thing.”

Now, environments were unpredictable, work changed every day and machines were becoming better than humans at performing tasks, from recognising images to diagnosing diseases.

…The software company, which is working with ANZ to overturn their workplace culture, predicts the future of work will rely on opening up new capabilities of collaboration.

Fair enough. But what is collaboration if not just another way of looking for higher productivity? Perhaps it is this confusion between the drive for efficiency and the drivers of efficiency that enables Mr Farquar to simultaneously warn of robotmaggedon and cuts to mass immigration, previously:

Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar has warned the government’s proposed changes to modernise the visa system could stunt the growth of local tech companies, and are already causing harm, ahead of the expected release of the official report next week.

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The combined robot/immigration nuclear class war will certainly make doing business cheaper for Mr Farquar though it may not help you out too much.

Meanwhile, genius number two is caught up in some less than bright stuff, also from the AFR:

Spaceship Financial Services, the firm backed by tech luminaries including Mike Cannon-Brookes and Peter Thiel that runs a superannuation fund aimed at millennials, has been fined by the corporate regulator for false and misleading conduct.

…ASIC was particularly concerned with a statement on the Spaceship website that said the fund would “fight to get you the very best assets in your portfolio … We will measure companies in our portfolio based on their ability to provide defensibility of profits and high levels of product differentiation.”

However, ASIC argued that, given the fund had 79 per cent of its assets in index-tracking funds that “involved no qualitative analysis of the underlying companies”, there was little opportunity to pick specific assets.

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Atlassian geniuses boosting wages and wealth with their “disruption”.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.