And the person who accepted 6 months salary/$30k to leave the job he started two days prior... Bravo, that's efficiency.
A 30K budget would make a very nice 6 months vacation indeed...
At least in big American cities, $60k is a bus driver's salary.
...yearly salary
For a comparison, starting salary for a bus driver in Paris is 30k euros (with no prerequisites, they will send you to learn how to drive a bus). I'd imagine the conditions are much better (a lot more time off, lower working hours), and the cost of living is lower, so those compensate for some of the difference.
So there are probably very few employees whose 6-month salary would only equal $30k. Most people leaving will be getting a lot more.
While you are learning it’s only €22k though.
I guess the fact you get free insurance helps, and it’s not quite as bad as I thought, but with an income like that you can get a mortgage of around 170k, which will net you around 40% of a house.
Then again I’m only speaking from my experience. Fewer companies are interested in interviewing and hiring me than ever in my career right now. If I had a job, I wouldn’t be leaving it.
Maybe other people are having an easier time. I hope so!
- did they work there?
- can they be rehired?
If the second is a "no" it usually isn't good news (usually, that only happens when you're fired 'for cause', at least in the US).
So, it isn't as pretty as an offer as you'd think.
I would expect you have to have been there for X months or Y years already in order to be given the deal. Unless Mullenweg is really that desperate to get rid of anyone who doesn't agree with his hissy fit.
Given his quite emotional outbursts, this does not seem that unlikely.
They say that before the layoff in 2021 they had been trying to grow aggressively. And since the layoff they have decided to stay small and not rehire. They say they were 83 and now they are 60. Specifically they have not hired anyone to be a full time manager since. Now everyone works on non-managerial tasks. Management is only part of your work.
I did see David post that they had 1500 applicants for a recent job posting. They offer extremely good pay for remote jobs outside SF and the US so it makes sense that lots of people are interested.
Is this Matt being a mercurial, megalomaniacal jerk, or is there some darker motivation that makes his behavior here borderline-rational?
It kinda doesn't matter, but it would be interesting to know. OTOH, I'm well past being surprised when some super wealthy tech bro shows his ass, so...
I guess you shouldn't let facts get in the way when you're pushing a narrative...
All of Matt's discourse suggests that there will be no settlement because he sincerely believes (in the face of all released evidence) he's in the right, so this very well could be them preparing for the long haul.
Dwindling runway as a theory to explain squeezing WPE and Matt’s public communications is getting harder to ignore.
Based on public posts only, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, founder of Wodpress completely lost his mind and went into war against WPEngine for unclear reasons (many suspect it's money pressure perhaps from investors). He claims they don't contribute to Wordpress and WPEngine says while they don't contribute to the core product they contribute aplenty to plugins, sponsor camps and documentation. He claims WPEngine "butchers" WordPress, WPEngine claims they host an unchanged version. (Note: WordPress is a codebase under GPL, you can change it). He claims WPEngine disables revisions and indeed they do and you need to contact support to get it switched on -- but the ability to disable revisions is included with WordPress although normally it's a simple setting. WPEngine claims they do this for performance reasons while Matt claims this is done only because of greed. He claims they violate trademarks, WPEngine says they didn't change how they use trademarks over more than a decade and their usage is referential (nominative) which is legal.
Further, WPEngine points out as recently as 2023 Matt had a positive opinion of them at a fireside chat at DE{CODE} 2023 "when you support companies like a WP Engine, who don’t just provide a commercial service, but are also part of a wider open source community, you’re saying, hey, I want more of this in the world". https://wpengine.com/resources/decode-2023-fireside-chat-mul...
This was merely an argument between the two but then Matt decided to cut WPEngine off from wordpress.org making installing and updating a much more arduous manual process for every WPEngine customer. He did this without any notice to WPEngine. Dragging users into this seriously and negatively impacts WordPress itself and calls have mounted for a WordPress governance overhaul eg https://x.com/QuinnyPig/status/1839340016738480226
That he is not acting rationally was crystal clear when the lawsuit got filed because he came to this very place and started commenting on it while multiple people begged him to just stop because he is digging himself deeper into a hole. Everyone knows you shut up the moment you are sued.
And after that he cut off the Advanced Custom Fields plugin team who is employed by WPEngine from wordpress.org. This plugin has a few million users. https://x.com/wp_acf/status/1841843084700598355
My personal take on this is obviously not positive. This entire debacle hurts open source itself. Mind you: I do not know whether Matt is right or not but there was no need for any of this. If Matt thinks WPEngine violated his trademarks? Asking for a license fee, sending a C&D and suing them are what a trademark holder normally does. Indeed, it might even be beneficial for us all to get judicial review on trademark usage like this, mostly these open source trademarks operate on "gentleman's agreements", I don't think they have ever been tested in court. If Matt has a beef with WPEngine using too much wordpress.org resources? 1) he could've announced that in say three months there will be a cutoff so WPEngine can implement a proxy 2) either fastly or cloudflare would've been happy to take that traffic off his hands (indeed, Matt said after the cutoff both reached out to him). For both of them a thriving web ecosystem means more business and it has a nice marketing value too. Finally, if he has a problem with the amount WPEngine contributes? That's a very hard problem, some ideas are at https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem but inconveniencing countless sites because you have a beef with their hosting company is not going to help that's for sure.
And once again which one it is: you didn't answer me. If you think you did that's because you forgot to switch accounts. https://i.imgur.com/LeF241n.png
A company creates a free buffet and sells seats at a table. They hope a competitor doesn't come and take the free food, slather it in hot sauce, and sell it at their own restaurant, because that would be rude.
You are constantly talking nonsense. This is simply not a thing. Much as "rizz" and "cuckoo" is not in this context.
This is the big one. I believe his argument was that when WPE customers updated they were using WP.org bandwidth for free.
That's a reasonable point.
But...doesn't that also apply to nearly everyone else who is running WP somewhere other than via a paid plan on WP.com?
If I download the install zip from WP.org and install WP on my own server, won't it get updates from WP.org?
If I get shared hosting at one of the zillion shared hosting companies that include cPanel or something similar, and click the button to set up WP, won't that then get its updates from WP.org?
What about if I use the Wordpress docker image from docker.com? That comes configured by default to just do the initial install from the WP that is included in the image and then update that as needed, so it seems that if I go that way and don't explicitly change it to be static (and then do updates by redeploy when new images are available) I'm going to be hitting WP.org.
Do I need to be worrying that if I use WP in any of those ways I'm going to be cut off from updates because WP.org isn't getting paid when I update?
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt
Since then, WPE filed a lawsuit against Automattic.
https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
I think these people really overestimate how much people give a shit about their company and what they are doing. Automattic is a sweet remote first shop which pays well - albeit I've heard you have to drink plenty of BS in day to day job.
Attacking WP Engine and preventing them to access OSS (which is not even OSS if you can ban people you don't like) was moronic enough, but this tops that.
I wonder who the hell advises these people - or maybe they're rich enough they just don't listen to anyone.
You're hallucinating that part of OSS. There's no requirement in any open-source software to interact with people you'd rather not interact with, for whatever reason you have, and there are extremely low limits to your continuing obligations for past interactions if you decide to "ban" them. (I'm using my non-lawyer understanding/memory on OSI-approved licenses, but I'd appreciate counter-examples to what I'm saying here if anyone knows of them.)
If you have employees in N jurisdictions you potentially have to deal with N different sets of laws and regulations concerning income taxes, unemployment insurance taxes, health insurance, employment contracts, layoffs, maternity/paternity leave, unions, and probably many I've overlooked.
Remote employees in the same city? Trivial.
Different cities in the same county? Possibly slightly more work.
Different counties in the state? Maybe a slight step up in work.
Different states in the same country? Could be a big step up in work.
Different countries? Likely much more work than for employees in your country. With employees in different states in your own country things will work similarly. The bureaucracy you have to deal with for an employee in Florida and for an employee in Washington, for example, will be fairly similar, and much more similar to each other than they are to the bureaucracy you'll be dealing with for your employee in say Germany.
Given that, and the behavior we've seen from Matt and Automattic so far, what are the odds that they've actually got a bunch of really great international accountants and are doing everything correctly everywhere, versus they're just ignoring all of the tax laws and winging it, and are therefore at high risk of getting smacked down once the relevant authorities get wind of what's going on there?
You’re also talking without concrete knowledge. We work as international contractors, we handle our own local taxes. Automattic pays us the gross salary and it’s up to you.
Kudos to Matt man. Dude has actually done a lot of good stuff. Sure he has his problems. But who hasn't.
Why do you say that? I do have sympathy for people in such countries and circumstances, but this isn't about that. It's about corporate compliance. For better or worse, corporations cannot just do something because it's a nice thing to do. They have to comply with the law in both the country they are based in and operate in, as well as in any country any prospective remote workers might be in.
I also never claimed to have any concrete knowledge. It's entirely possible they are doing everything correctly. I just find it odd that they are reportedly doing something that many companies do not do due to it being legally complex, and also their CEO is spouting off a bunch of unwise statements on public forums while being actively sued, which any sane corporate lawyer would strongly advise them not to do.
(Just hiring people as contractors, as it sounds like Automattic does, is another option.)
Think of the worst behaviors you have done which you are probably ashamed to even talk about.
Now imagine us using that worst behaviors to look at everything you do.
Sounds stupid right?
Exactly. That's why Christ was making a good point. Throw stones if you have not committed any sins.
This is a great offer but "a bird in the hand" etc.
In other words, for those actually affected by the drama, a much higher percentage left.
If it were me I would have stayed while I kept looking. It's always better to search for a job when you already have one, and you really don't know when/if the right thing will come along.
On the other hand, it's a great mini-runway for people who want to start their own company.
On the other hand, most companies easily have at least 20% headcount overhead, so it'll be okay.
Now one could reasonably argue that it wasn’t due to the firing. However, the burden of proof lies with the people claiming that the concurrent loss of revenue and profit had nothing to do with the firings.
And Twitter being a private company it’s unlikely anyone can ever get the data to support that claim. Further, Twitter’s unique nature as a vanity project for the owner makes even public statements bh thst owner highly suspect, since they have a vested interest in making this look like the right decision and disclosure laws don’t apply to private companies so he can basically lie and still be ok.
> And Twitter being a private company it’s unlikely anyone can ever get the data support that claim
So, only the data supporting your point of view is reliable?
No, if you want to establish correlation or causation, you have to prove it. Don't have access to the data to prove something? Sucks, but then you can't draw that conclusion, at least not definitively.
I can believe, though, that you're at least somewhat correct that the mass firings were responsible for Twitter's decline. But it's plausible that other things are also to blame, and possibly even primarily to blame: questionable product decisions made post-acquisition (Twitter Blue, lax moderation, requiring logins to view, ...), the volatility and offensiveness of the new owner causing advertisers to leave, etc.
> We have incurred significant operating losses in the past, and we may not be able to maintain profitability. Since our inception, we have incurred significant operating losses, and, as of December 31, 2018, we had an accumulated deficit of $1.45 billion. Our revenue has grown from $664.9 million in 2013 to $3.04 billion in 2018. While we were profitable on a GAAP basis in 2018, we believe that our future revenue growth and our ability to maintain profitability will depend on, among other factors, our ability to attract new users, increase user engagement and ad engagement, increase our brand awareness, compete effectively, maximize our sales efforts, demonstrate a positive return on investment for advertisers, and successfully develop new products and services. *Accordingly, you should not rely on the revenue growth of any prior quarterly or annual period as an indication of our future performance.*
Imagine if a company told its investors: “Our growth is guaranteed! Nothing can affect our revenue and margins.” The only companies that give that kind of promises are ponzis (and to-the-moon cryptocurrency projects, which is not categorically too different).
Care to share which measures are those you speak of?
From what I saw, Twitter's revenue went down only due to the post pandemic economic slump following the pandemic bubble, and due to advertisers leaving en-masse because Musk won't purge the platform of hate speech and other content that's non advertiser friendly, not due to the workers who got fired leaving.
Comparatively, it's hard to find information about Twitter now. Most news articles mocks the revenue, but has no information about profit. However, given that Elon said Twitter "will be" profitable in 2024, I think it's safe to assume it isn't profitable yet?
This surprises me, I thought it became profitable from cutting expenses, but the truth is complicated. It used to be both profitable and not profitable at the same time (see the first link), but now it's mostly not profitable.
What also doesn't help Twitter's case is that employees are still fighting to get paid their severance fees. That's a couple hundred million dollars that Elon probably assumes he doesn't need to pay. Other fees on the order of tens of millions of dollars also include the rent that Elon decided he doesn't need to pay, as well as a bunch of other bunch of unpaid stuff.
My guess is that Twitter is banking on not having to pay all of its debts at once, slowly building up a profit and regaining its value so it can have the cashflow to pay back its arrears later, but that's a risky move that may lead to a debt spiral or bankruptcy.
Sure, it has been plagued by the occasional random errors and downtime ever since Musk came in, but I don't expect most companies to remain operational on a technical level when 80% leaves.
An important lesson for tech companies: hire strategic H1B employees throughout your company so when times are real tough, you're sure you can maintain operations with desperate staff that can't afford to leave.
In other words: slavery has only upsides for slaveowners.
However, the site is going through a serious cultural (maybe you could say spiritual) death, and that might have something to do with the lost institutional knowledge of what made Twitter tick at a level deeper than just the code.
I was never a big fan of it, and never used it much, so I can't judge any loss of quality over the past 2 years. And since they now require a login most of the time, and I don't feel like logging in, I don't bother clicking through links to Twitter that people post.
Quality content has disappeared on Twitter and there is a proliferation of Only Fans tweets. However if you love Musk and right wing conspiracies it is still a fine platform to use.
People are addicted to twitter because of FOMO, because god forbid they learn about breaking news an hour later than anyone else.
The only thing that changes is i used to click on those that looked interesting and now i don't because i know i won't see the thread without a login.
That said, Twitter is no longer "open" like it used to be - I bet it just won't handle the public traffic anymore. That is directly tied to cratering revenue but it's hard to untangle from the owner's self-destructive drug-induced behavior.
It's a testament to the quality of the codebase in general. Good code is hard to kill, but it WILL be eroded to the point where it can no longer grow and be better.
Twitter as it runs now is far more locked down. And that happened after it experienced significant, noticeable outages.
Performance is not binary… Twitter is still “up” as a service but with a much smaller public footprint and handling much smaller amounts of traffic.
Also, Twitter had two notable Spaces problems, when launching the DeSantis campaign (into the ground) and the second fiasco, which I actually forget what it was, just recently. The system just cannot handle truly planet-scale traffic like before.
Sure, the advertisers say its because of the platform being a cesspool. But I mean anything on Twitter is on FaceBook or YouTube; you might have to look faster or harder. However, that stuff isn't where FaceBook / YouTube sends your ads. The targeting on Twitter is so bad compared to alternatives that advertisers just don't care to use it. This is an engineering problem caused by having nobody to fix it.
Not doomed, but lots of failures did follow. Timeline not loading or repeating forever, SMS auth issue, API performance, going down in Australia, etc. - they experienced quite a few problems early post-change, but managed to recover.
It's is currently on a path of slow but steady decline. It is no longer useful for breaking news and it is full with Only Fans tweets.
However, if you want to read about Elon Musk or are into right wing conspiracy theories, it is still perfect.
If I want to enjoy Only Fans, I know where to find it.
- Scrolling after a while, the sound of a video doesn't stop anymore => force close
- A lot of violence, literally. I keep on blocking them ( recently logged in with another account due to a new phone and I had to do it again). It's nuts how much violence it promotes recently.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people who got fired did censorship and I miss it.
Working in the sense of being a successful purchase that's making a good return on Elon's investment by growing and profiting, not so much apparently.
Edit: it seems like he is. Wow.
Edit: thanks for removing the attacking language that was previously at the end of your post.
Low performances usually go on a performance improvement plan (which almost half who enter it graduate it successfully to stay).
People on PIP didn't want to take their chances and just took the offer.
This does not mean all 150+ people were low performers, some of the brightest, most intelligent engineers and designers left, and I do miss them greatly and hold so much respect for them. Many of them were dear friends of mine.
For your attacking comment, I'm engaging my actual profile and name, and you're engaging with a throwaway account that's less than a day old, so I don't know who's more spinless.
It is much easier for humans to rationalize hardships around them as something they can control. Nobody can control a monkey suit's decisions, specifically when they exhibit the emperors' new clothes type of issues. This is before you get into any of the usual resentment relationships that occur when companies restructure around their own self interest.
Try not to let the anon vitriol get to you. I understand that's quite a ridiculous thing to ask someone when their job/career is on the line.
To recap, in the lawsuit post, someone said about the law firm WP Engine got:
> Quinn Emanuel is one of the premier (and most expensive) litigation firms in the US. Partners in their litigation department run $2000/hour or more. Associates cost almost $1000/hour.
And I noted the team is lead by Rachel Kassabian who was lead counsel for Google which in Perfect 10 v Amazon (originally it was against Google) resulted in thumbnail of copyright images in search results being fair use.
Automattic chose Neal Katyal. His latest accomplishment was trying to defend Johnson & Johnson 's dicey "Texas Two-Step" and lost while billing $2,465 an hour.
A hell lot of money will be spent on this case, that's for sure.
There's not really a measure to say how much worse an $1000 or $500 per hour lawyer would be but no one is taking chances when you have this much money on the line.
Lawsuits are decided on facts if they end up going to court, and every case is unique even if they follow similar fact patterns.
> Neal has been adverse to Quinn Emanuel a number of times, and won every case.
And one of those was a motion for summary judgment that QE's client was not expected to win.
Mullenweg doesn't explain when the offer was announced, but the earliest I can imagine is the Monday after he blocked WPE customers from accessing wordpress.org, which would mean employees had a max of four days to consider this deal. If it was after the WPE lawsuit, then employees had less than a day to consider it.
For comparison, when Basecamp did this in 2021, they originally had a deadline for the offer but extended it indefinitely.[0]
It's interesting to compare the way DHH presents the buyouts to the way Mullenweg does. Here's DHH[1]:
>Yesterday, we offered everyone at Basecamp an option of a severance package worth up to six months salary for those who've been with the company over three years, and three months salary for those at the company less than that. No hard feelings, no questions asked. For those who cannot see a future at Basecamp under this new direction, we'll help them in every which way we can to land somewhere else.
DHH's explanation of the buyout feels gracious and that he genuinely wished well to the employees who accepted the buyout.
Mullenweg explaining his buyout just feels like a petty tyrant purging anyone who won't pledge loyalty to him. He highlights the tight deadline and the immediate shunning of employees who take the deal. He uses the word "enticing" as if the employees who accept the deal are the weak-willed ones who succumbed to temptation.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hand...
It's 2 days, 22 hours.
Figured I'd throw at least one positive comment your way.
For the reasons I gave in that same paragraph.
I agree that you made more lucrative offers than Basecamp, but they presented their offers (publicly, at least) in a way that feels more professional and respectful of their employees.
Or perhaps that's not what you are saying at all, but are just a poor communicator yourself? If that's the case, I am surprised you are not more sympathetic to the folly of interpreting such statements without other context. Dunning-Krueger effect strikes again, I suppose.
I didn't say that poor communication is what qualifies someone as a tyrant.
You did say, as interpreted by the reader, that his poor communication skills makes him come across as a tyrant, and therefore that is what makes him a tyrant.
That may not be what you meant, but in that case we're right back to you and the poor communication skills of your own.
But perhaps you did and that realization frightens you. That would explain why you have decided to tell us that you are running away now. Logically, if you were just bored of the conversation you'd simply stop replying. Clearly something has gone haywire in your thought process for you to think it is necessary to share that you are going to stop.
Or maybe I'm just not grasping what you are trying to say. Such is the risk of dealing with those who are not good communicators.
To try and take the emotion out of it, it's the difference between saying "I am tired" versus "this comment I wrote makes me sound tired"
But perhaps I have failed to understand what you are trying to say? Such is the trouble with communication.
So if you agree there's no personal attacks, I guess that settles things!
But that's not what we were talking about anyway. The entire discussion has been about how communication is hard. Which I guess is what you have set out to prove by showing us that you have no clue as to what is going on around you. But I already established that communication is hard right from the very first comment, so what, exactly, do you think you are giving us by this live demonstration of what we already know?
https://www.reddit.com/user/r_mutt1917/
I understand that things get emotional and things happen. Especially in business. If you’re looking for perfection, you will not find it in me.
But, this is extreme. It’s tremendously unkind and terribly unprofessional. The worst part is that they claim they can’t tell what division they are in. It leaves the impression that trashing > 100 people is fine, but being identifiable is a problem.
Can you please do something about this? We can part ways with people, feel sad about it but not destroy their lives.
This was a very distracting 4 days, I'm glad it ended quickly, the dust is settling now, and we're slowly going back to work.
Also, as a longtime WP user, my understanding of the product is... pretty different now to say the least.
In many jurisdictions it would be an unfair contract.
To then say "Look at how many people didn't take up the offer so they clearly support us" despite such a short notice on the offer makes a mockery of the company and it's leadership.
Can you talk more about this? What jurisdictions? Is an unfair contract a legal term?
My point was a broader one not a legal one, that the company is acting in a manner that is hostile to a good work environment, putting up this kind of life-changing decision with only a few days to decide and then trying to paint decisions to stay as being a champion of the current direction.
That's treating your workforce with contempt.
Make the same offer with 30 days notice and see how many stay.
They're even still honoring lifelong premium access for first purchases of their apps.
I found Podcast Addict to be significantly superior.
While not necessary, especially because of the proprietary sync stuff you can't self host, Pocket Cast is open source.
What features are you looking for? What features are you avoiding?
Overcast is at least independent, so I’ll go back to them for now.
20% of the employees across all campuses took the buyout. The percentage of staff (not faculty) that accepted it varied across campuses from 8% to 41%.
Like never eligible? That seems kind of petty. I would understand some timeframe, like "not eligible for 3/4/5 years", but a permanent ban seems weird.
Personally, i have never done so, be it because was always leaving by a "voluntary" "termination agreement", and the employers involved being either not attractive, not existent, or plainly incompetent. If you are residing in a major city, there are always other options.
And given 100% remote seems to be a must for many people, even more so.
The whole reason you are leaving is because you think the CEO is worse at adulting than a grade-schooler.
I completely agree it’s petty, but it’s entirely in line with their behavior over the past few weeks.
I guess at least it’s better than Musk?
30k probably has something to do with it.
I imagine for at least some people "$30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher" was the main motivator, and may have stayed otherwise.
That doesn't make sense to me. People stay in jobs they don't like all the time, with leadership they don't agree with all the time. Here's the reason: it's because they pay you to go to work. Like, money. If everyone just pulled up stakes every time the thought occurred to them that their CEO might be a petty tyrant, there would be tumbleweeds blowing through every Slack channel in the world.
They may call it “non-regretted attrition” or something similar, but the purpose is the same.
Matt, please, I know you're not going to listen to some random stranger, but maybe think about distancing yourself from this and getting some perspective from people that aren't as emotionally invested in this and listen to people like your lawyers, pr people, other senior management, etc.
Probably not the right way to hire a lawyer at all, frankly.
How does he expect a junior attorney to help him at all, especially one who is depending on him for his paycheck?
Here’s the job ad:
https://automattic.com/work-with-us/job/associate-general-co...
> Probably not the right way to hire a lawyer at all, frankly.
> How does he expect a junior attorney to help him at all, especially one who is depending on him for his paycheck?
Most large companies outsource the bigger stuff and anything non day-to-day (like trademark enforcement and litigation) to law firms.
Where's today's DHH, Jason Fried or Joel Spolsky?
So, roughly 2,000 employees?
Original post: https://ma.tt/2024/10/alignment/
Edit: I stand corrected. OP is asking how many employees are in the WordPress "division", which I cannot find a public source for and is kind of hard to tally.
Matt said yesterday[1] that ~100 employees work on wordpress.org, one chunk of what encompasses the WordPress "division".
The person you are replying to is asking what percentage of the WordPress division, not the company-wide percent.
I mean, you are attempting to destroy your competitors.
For example they own Pocket Casts, a podcast application on Android (bought from NPR - I really wish NPR had decided to keep it, I feel like they would have been much better stewards).
That sounds bad
Until Apple does that, I'll likely keep using Day One.
For scale, Automattic has previously indicated that "over 100" people work on WordPress full time [0]. How many of those ~100 were part of the 126 WordPress employees who left?
[0] https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/09/26/our-wordpress-contribu...
> The posted memo states that a majority of the 139 employees working on product and marketing at Tumblr (in a team apparently named "Bumblr") will "switch to other divisions."
The % of people who left is consistent between those 2 divisions.
How's the distribution of departures by tenure and level? We know one of them was Executive Director over WordPress—is she an outlier or does the departure list skew to the top?
And within the "WordPress division", is the spread even between groups, or does it skew towards some groups over others?
Spread mostly evenly. I'm not sure I'm allowed to share tenure, I'm mostly going to share what was here, but tenure felt logical, most people who left were on the 3-5 years range, most of people in Automattic joined in that period of rapid hiring.
Everyone is using the Wordpress trademark to promote their service and the plugins library to keep their services updated. If that's the legal precedent being used now, Automattic winning the lawsuit implies that nearly the entire community loses it's legal right to exist.
The "Wordpress era" has gone on a really long time.
That longevity makes it easy to forget how quickly these things can change; remember Movable Type was the king of the blogging systems for a good while, until THEY (if I recall correctly) did a gross moneygrab and WP filled the gap.
How quickly MT became a footnote should be something Matt keeps in mind.
Once you reach a certain size, inertia alone will allow you to survive for a very long time, even making bad mistakes. Digg died because it was still small enough that a mistake could kill it; Reddit is now so big that the exact same mistakes (or even worse ones) will just not stop it. Same for Twitter or Facebook. Wordpress is way past the size where it will take something more than an isolated legal case to cut it to size.
I disagree about Twitter, tho. It's not been doing very well lately; it's been in all the papers.
I know, but it has taken more than two years to take serious wounds and it's still very far from being dead.
Every shared host had PHP/MySQL, which made WP installs dead simple.
> WP Engine's lawsuit points to promises made by Mullenweg and Automattic nearly 15 years ago. "In 2010, in response to mounting public concern, the WordPress source code and trademarks were placed into the nonprofit WordPress Foundation (which Mullenweg created), with Mullenweg and Automattic making sweeping promises of open access for all," the lawsuit said.
> Mullenweg wrote at the time that "Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the nonprofit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress's identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company."
This sure sounds like Automattic made WordPress - both it's technology and the trademark - free to use. Apparently Automattic basically lied about making WordPress open:
> WP Engine alleges that Automattic and Mullenweg did not disclose "that while they were publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this intellectual property away from a private company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had quietly transferred irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that very same day in 2010. This meant that far from being 'independent of any company' as Defendants had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic's hands."
It's possible that Automattic's trademark claims are not valid. Trademark claims become weaker if companies don't actively defend the use of their trademark. Even if the secret revocation of its permission to use the WordPress trademark is real, the fact that they've ignored 15 years of WP Engine's use of the trademark really weakens their case.
Imagine I very publicly say "I'm making my tech project open source, you can build on it and use the logo in your projects!". Except on that same day as the announcement I revoke that open license and tell nobody. Then, after a decade and a half, I start claiming infringement and demanding that people pay royalties to use the trademark. Is that valid business practice?
This is one of the reasons why trademarks have to be actively defended to stay viable. This is why companies can be very aggressive and paranoid about use of their trademarks: inaction people infringe on the trademark can lead to the trademark being considered abandoned. In this case, Automattic let WP Engine and others use the trademark for well over a decade. There's as strong case that the trademark was abandoned by Automattic due to this inaction.
I've really enjoyed some of the jobs I've had, but find it hard to imagine a world where I wouldn't accept a six-month payoff.
We actually had a contingency plan to just leave WP Engine and fix our wordpress up, but in light of Matt’s nonsensical actions we have scrapped that option.
Congrats to these employees on fleeing what appears to be tyranny for the Automattic employees and the customers.
Good riddance Wordpress.
Yes there are a lot of Wordpress installs, a lot of them perhaps never even updated. You can claim those as being loyal to Wordpress but if they just set it up and forget it then there’s probably no real loyalty to Automattic. If you have concerns about just setting up a site on a different platform outside of Automattic for whatever reason, why would you trust it any longer? Those people will move on to another just as easy to install cms. Wordpress hasn’t gotten easier to customize in the last x years since your 3.0 install or whatever.
Easy to install and forget isn’t a Wordpress exclusive idea. It perhaps has a lot of mind share, but this is the 2nd time Matt has taken drastic action. It’s now at historical precedent levels.
To recreate the site in another CMS will cost hundreds of more dollars, at minimum, (probably thousands, realistically) and even then: what CMS are they switching to that's easier to use and has as wide a variety of plugins as WordPress? Because I'm not sure that CMS exists.
So the conclusion is: why switch? WordPress is perfectly fine for these people.
I help out with a sports league who run a couple wordpress sites.
- One, its totally the wrong CMS for how they use it.
- Two, they have almost no ability to diagnose and debug issues themselves. Honestly 80% of the issues that get raised to me are even just solved by clicking "keep plugin automatically updated"
They really just want a CMS that allows them to share announcements, post schedules and where to show up to play.
But it gets the job done, for cheap, and there is a decent community on plugins and themes.
Wordpress was originally popular because of its openness and community right? I wonder if that's still the platform it is.
(asking for someone who has a site using wp+woo. I don't plan to switch us - the switching cost is too high to be worth it - but I do want to have something in my pocket for the future.)
So, you end up with this scummy feeling every time you install a plugin and discover its pricing.
I was incredibly disappointed in how the plugin ecosystem is dominated by "freemium" plugins that don't really seem in the spirit of open source. Even Automattic's own jetpack seems nothing more than a connector to a proprietary SaaS.
I still don't understand how the new template system is supposed to work either.
Maybe I'd feel different if I was doing this for a company, but I was doing this for free for a charity with near zero budget.
The only real competition seems to be ghost though, and it doesn't even have a real plugin system. If you want something simple like a event calendar you need to host it entirely separately.
Oh gosh I had to use a blog post to even find documentation on it. It’s basically a pile of hidden legos, for a simple table with columns you have to essentially implement it yourself with a few helper methods to help out. Then there’s the new system based on react because they could that has an entirely separate implementation stack. Also for a simple table you end up implementing all the functions and JSX yourself.
I haven't been doing WordPress for a few years now, but plugin maintenance does take up either money or time.
"Freemium" is how everyone gets the end customer to contribute something if they want something readily off-the-shelf, considering how low the barrier of entry for plugin installation is.
As the same for most sites hosted with WP.
I feel I could battle harden a WP setup with those needs.
Disable most of the admin interface. Just let them access what they need.
Announcements, schedules, and where to play - stored as ACF records on a page/post and displayed with a custom template/loop.
Slim down the admin interface to just CRUD for those items.
And it's not like Wordpress is known for it's phenomenal code quality or anything. This is your chance to ditch some of the bad ideas (cough Gutenberg cough) or legacy code.
> “I think a fork would be amazing,” he told TNS. “They should fork WordPress, because what they offer is not actually WordPress. They call it WordPress, but they really screw it up.”
Yeah, part of the confusion here is Matt's unreliability as a narrator of his motivations. He wants WP Engine to fork, but then he asks them to pay. He wants Wordpress to grow and be open source, but suddenly he champions branding and restricting trademarks.
It's hard to know what his stated end goal in all of this is - maybe he's okay shrinking the Wordpress community so long as they control a bigger slice of it?
All I’m learning is that never elect Matt as POTUS because he always wants to go nuclear to teach a lesson to a small percentage of the population.
ClassicPress is already a thing:
Wordpress makes those things easy.
I always have discussions with people about possible hosting issues, and issues with licenses changing when suggesting to use or continue to use WP (or anything else you do not control)
This whole kerfuffle does not bother me, as it reminds me of the licensing issues with some of the AI models being released - if you are super big you can't use them for free.. well fine - if I get that big and my biggest worry is how to brigade online to save face while trying to save a few million - well that is .1% problems I wouldn't mind having,
seriously, at that level a person/company can make all sorts of choices, and those choices don't have to be to convince people to throw salt and shade at the sandbox you are leaving.
> 159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay!
That is an interesting (meritful, imo) way of putting it.
There is a Reddit user right now:
https://www.reddit.com/user/r_mutt1917/
They’re making some very rude statements about the people who accepted the severance package.
Not too long ago, there was this unspoken rule amongst humans where we don’t trash a large group of former coworkers in public like that. We wouldn’t speak in absolutes about large groups of people. We had class.
And now I see this person who has trashed everyone who left. They apparently aren’t allowed to state what division they’re in. But trashing over 100 people seems to be okay. I cannot imagine a single functional organization approving of such a thing.
I haven’t used Wordpress in a very long time. But I had a lot of respect for Automattic. My hope is that I don’t have to keep the verb in the past tense.
Somewhere along the lines, we lost a lot of our humanity. It is very embarrassing to think that we traded humanity for social media likes.
