I didn't realize they own Day One! That really stinks. It's a great app, but his childish antics make me question the wisdom of relying on it. I wonder if I can get a prorated refund.
Day One is really nice. I actually prefer Apple's Journal app, but for some reason they don't want to put it on the iPad which makes no sense to me. IMHO, Journal should have been an iPad-first app.
Until Apple does that, I'll likely keep using Day One.
Extra odd given how much they tout the ease of having one codebase that scales from the watch to a Mac.
I was thinking more about the features unique to the iPad. With the Pencil you could sketch and doodle and hand write the entries. I think that would make it feel more personal and, if the benefits of writing by hand are true, more valuable.
I'll second that Day One is a great app... I've used it nearly every day for the past 13 years. I was afraid it would stagnate after it was acquired by Automattic, but it's only gotten better.
I suspect it was the 6 months salary rather than any major philosophical agreement.
It seems like a great deal at any company, if you're confident you can find a new job within six months. This plus the extortion makes me wonder if Automattic is strapped for cash?
If they were strapped for cash, they would’ve made the severance amount much lower.
The only rational reason to lay off 159 employees and demand millions of dollars from your competitors, ruining your reputation in the process and losing all your customers, is if not doing that results in an even worse outcome.
TBH, I'm surprised they had almost 2000. I would've thought they'd be around the 500 mark.
They made several acquisitions that have nothing to do with WP which probably inflated the headcount a good bit.
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).
As of today we are 1,733. But that may go up soon, we are hiring aggressively to fill roles of some people who left and meet increased customer demand! https://automattic.com/work-with-us/
Seems rather desperate, please give this whole situation a once-over Matt
The handling of this is so bizarre it makes me want to sympathize with Matt (even though some of the information against him seems pretty damning), grab him by the shoulders and yell "please, for your sake, get offline, listen to your lawyers - this can't be healthy".
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.
Maybe that's why they are hiring an "Associate General Counsel"?
Plenty of people who took the offer were on the fence already or looking to switch companies anyway, it was a good motivator for them.
Are you an employee? I’ve seen a bunch of comments like this on various forums. Is Matt telling his employees to spin the folks who left?
Edit: it seems like he is. Wow.
What’s the problem here? This is a common scenario in every company out there. I was in the same exact position myself 3 years ago.
This isn’t that bad, but I’ve been seeing comments on Reddit that sound like they’re from an employee perspective which are effectively saying the folks who left are almost all bad employees and implying the people shouldn’t hire them. If that’s something Matt is encouraging or tolerating it’s very gross, but I’m not sure if they are or not. This comment reminded me of those, but you’re right that on its own it’s not too bad.
Of course he is.
I'm surprised more didn't take the offer. Maybe they have a better package of shares in the company that's worth the wait? Otherwise it seems like a great offer to take even if you've enjoyed working there and support Matt and his public meltdowns.
I thought the same, but the thing to remember is that 80% of the employees who took the offer were in the WordPress part of the company. Automattic is at this point a bunch of loosely related companies, it’s understandable that the Pocket Casts team for example are probably quite disconnected from WordPress and the drama.
In other words, for those actually affected by the drama, a much higher percentage left.
Right, but I think coalface’s point is that it’s a good deal regardless of the drama. I’ve never really hated a job in my career, but if at any point I had a chance to take a paid break and then get paid two salaries for a bit, I’d probably have taken it more times than not.
It’s a tough job market, so I’m not surprised. Demand for developers/other tech roles and overall economy isn’t great right now.
Automattic is a fully remote company, getting jobs in APAC, Africa, and europe is tricky, not a lot are going to throw that away and hunt for a job for 6 months.
Stupid question but where exactly in the world is getting a remote job not tricky?
Getting remote jobs in general is tricky if you're not from certain countries. I'm from Algeria, Automattic was one of the few companies that hired there. Every other country would ask you to be in the US, or US timezone, or in a certain European country. Not all remote is built equal.
I think in the US it's less tricky. There are much more openings without time zone issues.
I may be wrong but I understand the comment above as saying that "getting jobs" in those places is now tricky. Not "getting remote jobs", just "getting jobs". In the sense that people who got now have a remote job at Automattic would have a hard time finding another job, even a non-remote one.
We have a special stock program called A12, and one cool feature of it is that you can still sell stock after you've left, with windows every six months. (You can only buy if you're currently employed, and it's downside protected, so you effectively have a 1x liquidation preference just like sophisticated investors.
Unless you have another job lined up the job market currently is not where everyone would just quit in my opinion.
I can think of very few jobs where I wouldn’t take this offer immediately and have a few month sabbatical.
Fun part, Automattic already gives you 3 months sabbatical every 5 years. For the people who were going to take sabbatical, they got those 3 months off.
Paid or unpaid sabbatical?
A university in Pennsylvania made a similar offer this summer. 40% of the employees accepted it, including the president.
May I ask which university?
>Matt Mullenweg is returning from his 3 month sabbatical, dubbed “Samattical”, which kicked off February 1, 2024.
Does he replace every "-at" sound with his name as a discipline? Actually unhinged.
I love a good pun. :)
Given I have a broad range of nerdy interests and am also polyamorous, my handle on old-okcupid was 'polymatt.'
mattually*
>So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher. But you’d lose access to Automattic that evening, and you wouldn’t be eligible to boomerang (what we call re-hires). HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.
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...
Being made to make that kind of decision in such a short time clearly isn't fair.
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.
> In many jurisdictions it would be an unfair contract.
Can you talk more about this? What jurisdictions? Is an unfair contract a legal term?
I'm not a lawyer, but there is the concept in English law of duress which can invalidate contracts that had undue pressure.
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.
The offer had no limits (someone who was at the company for 2 days took it). Matt was also willing to continue sponsoring visa for the 6 months for whoever is on an work visa.
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.
This was more generous than both the Basecamp and Coinbase buyout offers, I'm curious why you say I'm a petty tyrant. I can be a little ASD so sometimes my written communication doesn't come through the best.
>I'm curious why you say I'm a petty tyrant.
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.
It looks to me like passive aggressive lynch mobbing. Putting the issues aside, you seem to be doing a good job not letting the comments that charge you with medical and psychological issues get to you.
Figured I'd throw at least one positive comment your way.
My guy, I know lots of autistic people. You're not coming across as autistic, you're giving straight up Napoleon marching into Russia with this one.
Thank you for the feedback. I'll try to do better.
You’re obviously not trying to improve or you’d have shut up by now.
Clearly there’s something broken with you since you’ve been unable to do that, despite everyone else knowing it’s the only rational sane thing to do in your position. You are defective.
If nobody you trust is telling you that, it’s a sign that nobody likes you enough to give you the truth, and they’re only hanging around and yes-manning the narcissist for his money. That’s deeply sad.
It was posted on September 30 ~10pm UTC, so people had about 4 days to decide.
If it was posted Monday, September 30 at 22:00 UTC and the deadline was Thursday, October 3 at 20:00 UTC, that's less than three days.
It's 2 days, 22 hours.
So now we know the lawyers on both sides.
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.
Neal Katyal is a ghoul who argued for Nestle that they weren't liable under the Alien Tort Statute for promoting child slavery on the Ivory Coast.
What has the world gone to - lawyers trying to defend the interests of their customers.
Here is now Automattic is presenting this for an opposing view:
> Neal has been adverse to Quinn Emanuel a number of times, and won every case.
Like, I know they bill by value delivered, but would a $500/hour lawyer really be that much worse?
Do you know the phenomenon of "Tournament wages"? Very prevalent in sports, it's why Ronaldo is worth a billion dollars. Because the lawyer's work is only valuable if they actually win, it's a very binary payout, and that drives up competition for "the best".
My guess is WPEngine looked at the amount being asked from them (the lawsuit says "tens of millions of dollars" based on public posts indeed it seems above thirty million a year), divided it by the hourly rate of the best legal representation they thought they can get and decided it's cheaper. They wanted to take no risks. From the other side, after you are sued by Rachel Kassabian you really have no choice but get the best you can find and they thought a former (Acting) Solicitor General of the United States is it. As they say, that escalated quickly.
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.
I mean, presumably you can look at a history of wins in similar cases instead of hourly rate or reputation?
6 months salary offer means people will take this whether they agree or not
Especially if they were already looking for a way out / unsure if they want to stay.
And the person who accepted 6 months salary/$30k to leave the job he started two days prior... Bravo, that's efficiency.
Seems like another CEO/lawyer misstep. Why offer the same package for someone who started 2 days ago? Someone could've made "Length worked at company" as a factor in the maths.
A 30K budget would make a very nice 6 months vacation indeed...
It would be hilarious of someone started 2 days ago, took the money left and went to WP Engine.
Probably still had another offer
I would assume most Automattic employees are paid substantially more than $60k / year, so few people will be getting only 30k.
At least in big American cities, $60k is a bus driver's salary.
Our current average salary is 149k USD, median is 134k USD.
That’s quite a lot. I imagine you’d be happy if you could get a little more than half as much in Europe.
It's an exaggeration. Starting salary in LA for a bus driver is $53k/year; NYC is $61k. Atlanta is $42k; Seattle $69k; Dallas $48k; Miami $43k. It's really only a very limited amount of cities that have $60k salaries for bus drivers.. and they're all cities where $60k doesn't get you that far.
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.
Netherlands is around €37k/year, and a minimum of 41 holidays xD
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.
Automattic is headquartered in San Francisco, where $60k is a bus driver's salary.
So there are probably very few employees whose 6-month salary would only equal $30k. Most people leaving will be getting a lot more.
> $60k is a bus driver's salary.
...yearly salary
Right. Which is twice the 6-month minimum value (aka a yearly salary) Automattic is giving people if they want to leave.
I dunno, some-one who started 2 days ago may take just as long, or longer, to find their next employer as some-one with years of employment/experience.
If you've just started a job you've probably got an up to date CV, perhaps even some other job offers you turned down.
I’m not sure. The market is still pretty rough.
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!
But they have a job, they're not being compensated for being let go, they're being compensated for voluntarily leaving.
Usually the only thing that can be done during job verification is:
- 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.
If somebody started mere days ago, they can simply omit this job from their CV entirely and nobody would notice the gap.
I assure you that this was considered. People are much smarter than you give them credit for. There’ll be a reason, you just don’t know what it is.
Ah yes, this chap is tanking his company into the ground for Reasons! Like feelings! No one in the entire history of the world has been on a coke bender and made bad life choices!
If you're rich enough or have enough of a cult following, every bad decision is really the work of a genius playing four-dimensional chess.
Is Elon Musk but written in PHP (1) a millionaire? Maybe he thinks 6 months' salary pay-off per person is well worth it to get rid of people who don't believe in his crusade...
1) Someone else's joke I saw on Instagram referring to Matt.
> And the person who accepted 6 months salary/$30k to leave the job he started two days prior...
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.
I don't love the way the dude handled it, but what is preventing you from even considering that it is a genuine gesture to his employees?
He mentions someone taking it had joined only a few days earlier.
> 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.
8.4% or 159 employees is a lot of people, this will be long-remember at this company.
On the other hand, most companies easily have at least 20% headcount overhead, so it'll be okay.
twitter fired a lot more % and it's still working
By nearly every measure Twitter is doing a lot worse than it was before those people were fired. It was growing in revenues and profit and since then has shrunk drastically in both measures.
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.
>By nearly every measure Twitter is doing a lot worse than it was before those people were fired.
Which measures are those you speak of?
From what Is aw Twitter's revenue went down only due to advertisers leaving en-masse because Musk won't purge it of "hateful comments", not due to the workers who got fired leaving as that didn't negatively impact the functionality that brought in money.
People were claiming at the time that twitter would shutdown and close shop.
> 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.
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.
> By nearly every measure Twitter is doing a lot worse
> 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?
From the 2019 annual report (one of the only years where Twitter posted any net profit):
> 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.*
This is standard boilerplate that every public company puts in their official statements to pre-empt any shareholder lawsuits in case something goes wrong.
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).
It is actually quite remarkable that Twitter has kept functioning at a technical level. A lot of people expected the massive loss of engineering talent to doom them, but it seemingly hasn't.
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.
On a technical level, I tend to agree. Never underestimate the skill of the employees to save their boss from horrible decisions.
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.
That might be true about the traffic, but twitter wasn’t open before the musk purchase either, it would stop you from seeing posts if you weren’t logged in if you tried to scroll more than a few times. Its current behavior of showing just a few posts sorta, uh, randomly selected might be easier on the server, idk.
For most of its life, Twitter was completely open. You could see any tweet or user page with the URL, whether or not you were logged in. The only exception was if someone had “protected” their account.
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.
> A lot of people expected the massive loss of engineering talent to doom them, but it seemingly hasn't.
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 write a few problems early post-change, but managed to recover.
I'm skeptical, honestly. Within the first few months of the acquisition, it seemed pretty clear to my tech-friend group that Twitter was on its way out and was going to fail. But it's been 2 years, and many of those same people still use Twitter quite a lot. Maybe it'll still fail, of course... it'll just take longer than anyone expected.
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.
My friends who were passing around twitter links still seem to do it. And the content of those links hasn't changed (random nature/technical info that geeks like) so the twitter posters haven't left either.
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.
I don't get why whole developer circles didn't leave the platform yet. You can't ask people something via DMs without paying for the blue checkmark and it's totally unhelpful, plus it sends the message you care not enough about the right wing messaging that is send by the platform now. Or these people are just ok with that, I don't know.
They have. Lots and lots of developers are now on the Fediverse. But there's a cultural schism between the types of developers that frequent Silicon Valley cafes and the ones that frequent the Chaos Computer Club.
Network effects are a hell of a drug.
I don't expect it to "fail" in a financial way because Elon Musk can just bankroll his political addiction.
Software can work for a very long time with minimal maintenance. A different question is if it can keep making revenue without investing.
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.
Uh, it has doomed them. Have you not heard about their massive drop in revenue as advertisers leave?
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.
When SWEs in tech want to flex, they code Twitter on a whiteboard as an interview question. Major respect for the the work they're doing at xAI, but the hardest challenges building Twitter itself are social.
Twitter revenue is down 84% and is continuing to collapse every month. If that is "Working", then I'd love to laugh at your definition of failing :D
The revenue problem is mostly because of Twitter's new leadership, on the technical side the few people that remained have managed to keep the platform running quite well.
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.
Twitter was profitable just before Elon purchased it and gutted it. So far his plan is not working.
I was curious if this is true or not. Found this: https://www.investing.com/academy/statistics/twitter-facts-s... which came from before Twitter went private. It's technically correct that they did make a profit (e.g. 2022 Q1), but also made a lot of loss (e.g. 2022 Q2).
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.
The massive debt Elon has set Twitter up with is probably driving their current losses. Advertisers wanting nothing to do with him after telling them to fuck off is one thing, but the interest on those billions of borrowed money aren't cheap to hold on to.
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.
Elon made substantial cuts but he has debt servicing that itself is a very large cost.
I assume that firing was a bit more selective in who they wanted to keep.
Define working.
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.
Unless onlyfans has changed, there seems to plenty to enjoy outside of musk / the right wing.
It just makes the site NSFW.
If I want to enjoy Only Fans, I know where to find it.
Yeah. It works
- 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.
> In a blog post, Mullenweg said the package offered $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher, but the employees who took it would not be eligible to be re-hired by Automattic.
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.
AFAIK this kind of permanent shitlist is common practice in American tech companies, including the MAANG.
They may call it “non-regretted attrition” or something similar, but the purpose is the same.
Why would you want to go back there anyway?
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?
> The whole reason you are leaving
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.
> The whole reason you are leaving is because you think the CEO is worse at adulting than a grade-schooler.
30k probably has something to do with it.
Just for the money? Why else?
I am a bit out of the loop does any one have a summary of what is happening with automattic and wpengine ?
This covers all the major events up to today:
https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
This is the best explanation I know of:
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt
Since then, WPE filed a lawsuit against Automattic.
We have no idea, really.
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.
Reading WPEngine's legal complaint https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Complaint-WP... they sound like cuckoos. My best guess is WPE's WordPress hosting business grew larger than Automattic and they're lashing out to survive. For example, WPE has 1000 employees and Automattic has 1700, but Automattic has their attention divided on 20 other products too, which left them blindsided when WPE forked their product, made it their core focus, outcompeted them on rizz alone, and cut them out of the profits without contributing to the costs. At that point Automattic is de facto unpaid employees of WPE and they're probably not happy about that. Their WordPress division is either going to be destroyed or have to use its guns. They chose the latter and many of their employees were angry because they signed up to be benevolent open source people. Unfortunately that's only really practical for a business when it possesses great advantage.
Oh, finally a summary of the whole thing I understand.
Looks like the 2021 situation at 37signals.
That was peak tech idiocy. If I remember correctly nearly half the company took the severance package? Generous of them to offer all that free money, but a crazy business decision.
I’m not saying DHH is a great company leader (I don’t know!). But did the business do worse afterwards? Having too many employees can hinder the business, even if they are great people.
The founders Jason and David talked about this in a recent podcast two weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d39Q48KPV4
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.
>we called it an Alignment Offer.”
That sounds bad
I hope the legal team isn't included as part of that 159 employees, because god forbid they'll be needed.
Generally the "real work" is outsourced (briefed out), in house legal only manages the work. In house lawyers don't have the day to day experience of dedicated trial lawyers.
Any professional outsourced lawyer would be telling the client to shut up on talking about the case on a public forum and incriminating themselves.
The professional lawyer telling the client to do so doesn't mean the client will. See the case of SBF for the most in-your-face example.
Based on yesterday’s thread where Matt started answering questions about the lawsuit here on HN, I doubt losing half of the legal team would make any difference.
So whoever is good enough to land a job in this crappy market got a sweet payday and the moat will stay in the company. What a brilliant move!
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.
Its everyones freedom to build a parallel open-source eco-system, that cooperations can not legally leech on.
They’ll need to start from a new code base that isn’t GPL, then.
TIL Pocket Casts is an Automattic product. Anyone have recommendations to switch (and not to the disaster that is Overcast)?
Without knowing why you consider overcast a disaster, no
What features are you looking for? What features are you avoiding?
A competing product would have to at least be on par in terms of quality, licensing, UI/UX, app availability, sync, web interface. They'd have to start sacrificing living animals before I'd consider switching.
They're even still honoring lifelong premium access for first purchases of their apps.
Yeah TIL and now I’m done with that
Overcast is at least independent, so I’ll go back to them for now.
Not sure what you're looking for wrt features, but I've been happy with Podcast Addict for years
What is bad about overcast?
Could be the redesign that was launched a couple of months ago that still some folks seem to dislike.
Let's reframe the title: "1700+ of the original ~1900 employees agree with Automattic CEO decisions"
Or they rely on continued employment for their health insurance (like most working-age people in the US), and even though it's a very good deal, they don't want to have to pay $1k-$4k/mo (depending on the size of their family) out of that severance package in order to pay for COBRA.
They might also be worried about finding a new job, and would prefer to make their exit when they already have another signed offer in hand, even if it means losing out on the extra cash.
People make decisions based on a multitude of factors, and your statement is shallow and ignores much of reality.
How did you infer this…?
159 left and they are 8.4% of the workforce according to the article.
159 is 8.4% of X
Equation: Y = P% of X
Solving our equation for X
X = Y/P%
X = 159/8.4%
Converting percent to decimal:
X = 159/8.4\* 100
X = 1892.85714So we can know for sure that those who stay think that the CEO made a good decision in this regard, simply because they declined this offer?
I don't know.
I really like my current employer, but if they offered half a year of wages as severance I would take the deal without a second thought.
I can't fathom why anyone would refuse such a deal.
On the other hand, people looking to switch jobs or having sufficient options might take the easy cash despite not disagreeing (or not caring about the feud).
People who take their job personally tend to assume other people do too. Basic psychological projection. The CEO is probably doing this too.
A lot of people just view their job as a thing they do for the compensation. Taking the offer or not is about the opportunities and struggles they'll be facing either way, not their personal feelings about the company.