Rajeev Rajan on career development
From Why Accidental Managers are the Best Leaders with Rajeev Rajan, CTO at Atlassian · · Modern CTO
“When I speak to candidates I'm like I try to convince them not to become a manager — why do you want to be a manager when you're writing code and having fun? If their motivation is right (for example they enjoy coaching), we will still support them and put them through an interview process to understand their true motivation.”
On , Rajeev Rajan, Chief Technology Officer at Atlassian, spoke about career development during Why Accidental Managers are the Best Leaders with Rajeev Rajan, CTO at Atlassian on Modern CTO.
About Rajeev Rajan
Rajeev Rajan, Chief Technology Officer at Atlassian, has spoken in multiple interviews about his focus on "developer joy" as a guiding metric for engineering teams, which he described as prioritizing the removal of blockers and fostering a positive coding experience over traditional productivity goals. He stated that Atlassian sends a quarterly survey to engineers asking about their productivity in the codebase and has created an internal "AI school" modeled on a Stanford University course to upskill engineers. Rajan also discussed the company's sponsorship of the Williams Formula 1 team, saying it was chosen for its mass appeal and connection to world-class engineering and teamwork. Rajan has emphasized that Atlassian is "betting big on AI" with its Rovo offering, and he described the emergence of large language models as a "profound shift" comparable to the internet and mobile revolutions. He stated that the company uses AI across departments including engineering, finance, HR, and legal, and that customer data is not used for training without explicit permission. Rajan also noted that coding assistants can save one to two hours per week per engineer and expressed the view that AI will not eliminate jobs but will help people "move up the value chain."