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Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer
- senadir 2y agoPlenty of people who took the offer were on the fence already or looking to switch companies anyway, it was a good motivator for them.
- fhfhfhjfnfnfmf 2y agoAre 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.
- johnbellone 2y agoOf course he is.
- cromka 2y agoWhat’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.
- fhfhfhjfnfnfmf 2y ago[flagged]
- John_Cena 2y agoWhen it happened to me I was surprised to see what was being commented. There was nothing about the actual business decisions that led to the exodus, it was just vitriol about anyone who left was an imposter and now finally the real engineers can get to work.
- DowagerDave 2y agoWell, IMO you were a big part of why the WWE was successful, and they're declining while your career in movies is really taking off, so your personal success should provide you with a lot of validation.
- senadir 2y agoYes I am. I’m not spinning anyone. Several of my friends took the offer, they were unhappy, it was great timing. I support them 100%.
- fhfhfhjfnfnfmf 2y ago[flagged]
- debo_ 2y agoThis is really not appropriate. Edit: thanks for removing the attacking language that was previously at the end of your post.
- senadir 2y agoAny company has low perfomers, if you denay that, then I can't really engage with you here. 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.
- John_Cena 2y agoWhen I got laid off from DISH that kind of talk was all I saw on anon forums that had discussions about it. That was 5 years ago and last I heard they were being bought out. 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.
- 2y ago
- DowagerDave 2y agoif you've worked at the management level you've seen that GOOD attrition for a software company is maybe around 10% annually (we saw well above 25% coming out of Covid). There's always around this number leaving, looking to leave, or about to. If this flushed out 8.4% with very generous terms that seems low. We should watch the next 6-12 months to see if the expected level of departures continues, or there's a respite.
- JohnMakin 2y agoI can think of very few jobs where I wouldn’t take this offer immediately and have a few month sabbatical.
- Mistletoe 2y ago>Matt Mullenweg is returning from his 3 month sabbatical, dubbed “Samattical”, which kicked off February 1, 2024.
- assmatt 2y ago[flagged]
- photomatt 2y agoI love a good pun. :)
- mst 2y agoGiven I have a broad range of nerdy interests and am also polyamorous, my handle on old-okcupid was 'polymatt.'
- danillonunes 2y agoAutomattic's name is brilliant.
- immibis 2y agomattually*
- moeffju 2y agoNo matter how the court case goes, there's enough goodwill destroyed that he could rename himself Hazmatt by now.
- bachmeier 2y agoA university in Pennsylvania made a similar offer this summer. 40% of the employees accepted it, including the president.
- talideon 2y agoTBH, I'm surprised they had almost 2000. I would've thought they'd be around the 500 mark.
- photomatt 2y agoAs 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/ https://automattic.com/work-with-us/
- Boltgolt 2y agoSeems rather desperate, please give this whole situation a once-over Matt
- kotaKat 2y ago[flagged]
- preommr 2y agoThe 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.
- arethuza 2y agoMaybe that's why they are hiring an "Associate General Counsel"?
- lazide 2y agoThat’s really not the right way to hire a lawyer you need right now. 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?
- physicsguy 2y ago6 months salary offer means people will take this whether they agree or not
- sofixa 2y agoEspecially 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.
- LisaDziuba 2y ago[dead]
- netsharc 2y agoSeems 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...
- pavlov 2y agoI 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.
- photomatt 2y agoOur current average salary is 149k USD, median is 134k USD.
- hashtag-til 2y ago> $60k is a bus driver's salary. ...yearly salary
- kelnos 2y ago
- 2Gkashmiri 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ChocolateGod 2y agoI hope the legal team isn't included as part of that 159 employees, because god forbid they'll be needed.
- labster 2y agoBased 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- killingtime74 2y agoGenerally 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.
- ChocolateGod 2y agoAny professional outsourced lawyer would be telling the client to shut up on talking about the case on a public forum and incriminating themselves.
- Sebb767 2y agoThe 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.
- kreetx 2y agoLooks like the 2021 situation at 37signals.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- coalface 2y agoThat 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.
- cpach 2y agoI’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.
- Sammi 2y agoThe founders Jason and David talked about this in a recent podcast two weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d39Q48KPV4 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.
- benjaminwootton 2y agoI suspect it was the 6 months salary rather than any major philosophical agreement.
- yellow_lead 2y agoIt 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?
- lobsterthief 2y agoIf they were strapped for cash, they would’ve made the severance amount much lower.
- lolinder 2y agoUnless the lack of cash is expected to manifest 6 months in to a very costly and lengthy lawsuit. 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.
- immibis 2y agoThe 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.
- shepherdjerred 2y agoI think we're far past rational behavior
- ubermonkey 2y agoI mean, that's the question. 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...
- arromatic 2y agoI am a bit out of the loop does any one have a summary of what is happening with automattic and wpengine ?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chx 2y agoWe 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-mullenweg-ventura/ 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 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 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 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.
- jokethrowaway 2y agoSo 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.
- ItCouldBeWorse 2y agoIts everyones freedom to build a parallel open-source eco-system, that cooperations can not legally leech on.
- fhfhfhjfnfnfmf 2y agoThey’ll need to start from a new code base that isn’t GPL, then.
- pabs3 2y agoThat wouldn't be Open Source. There is an alternative movement called "Fair Source" though: https://fair.io/ https://fair.io/
- ItCouldBeWorse 2y agoWhy the source is open- you can get all the ideas and copy it one way just like open source. Its differs from other "One-way-street-source" only by ownership of the public rights.
- pabs3 2y agoSee the Open Source Definition, it mentions "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups". https://opensource.org/osd/ https://opensource.org/osd/
- coalface 2y agoI'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.
- senadir 2y agoAutomattic 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.
- hshshshsvsv 2y agoStupid question but where exactly in the world is getting a remote job not tricky?
- genezeta 2y agoI 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.
- yellow_lead 2y agoI think in the US it's less tricky. There are much more openings without time zone issues.
- tzs 2y agoJurisdiction issues are also probably a big factor. 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.
- Maro 2y ago8.4% 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- user90131313 2y agotwitter fired a lot more % and it's still working
- izacus 2y agoTwitter 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
- jeroenhd 2y agoThe 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.
- toyg 2y ago> hire strategic H1B employees [so that] you can maintain operations with desperate staff that can't afford to leave In other words: slavery has only upsides for slaveowners.
- LightBug1 2y ago[flagged]
- chx 2y agoSo 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.
- Aeolun 2y agoLike, I know they bill by value delivered, but would a $500/hour lawyer really be that much worse?
- chx 2y agoMy 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.
- bravetraveler 2y ago[flagged]
- mtlynch 2y ago>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-hands-meeting-employee-resignations-buyouts-implosion https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hand... [1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e
- closewith 2y agoTIL Pocket Casts is an Automattic product. Anyone have recommendations to switch (and not to the disaster that is Overcast)?
- jasonvorhe 2y agoA 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.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoWe have such different experiences. Pocket Casts works, but I find nothing about it amazing. Too much Apple-like simplification in managing my queue. I found Podcast Addict to be significantly superior.
- jasonvorhe 2y agoI've checked it out here and there. UI is way too convoluted for my taste and the legacy Android UI elements shine through way too often. Looks like Material Design on a pig. If it works for you, all good though. While not necessary, especially because of the proprietary sync stuff you can't self host, Pocket Cast is open source.
- corobo 2y agoWithout knowing why you consider overcast a disaster, no What features are you looking for? What features are you avoiding?
- closewith 2y agoOvercast had an update earlier this year which made it completely unusable (for my use case, at least). The developer's reaction to feedback from and apparent contempt of users was so poor that I wouldn't use a product they created again.
- mdrzn 2y ago[flagged]
- cpach 2y agoHow did you infer this…?
- Sammi 2y ago159 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 = 1892.85714
- cpach 2y agoSo 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?
- Sebb767 2y agoOn 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).
- lupusreal 2y agoPeople 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.
- surgical_fire 2y agoI 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.
- tyingq 2y ago> 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pavlov 2y agoAFAIK 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.
- rnweiher 2y agoSerious question: What is the percentage of people intending to get re-hired at a previous place? Or at least definitely not rejecting that idea? 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.
- Aeolun 2y agoWhy 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?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lupusreal 2y ago> 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.
- croes 2y ago>we called it an Alignment Offer.” That sounds bad
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- iIiIlIiiI 2y ago[flagged]
- maybeonecream 2y agoI'm really surprised that we don't have term limits for CEO's of companies. Since they occupy power positions, all top power positions should have term limits. That would fix a lot of problems in our societies.
- John_Cena 2y agoThe CEOs/Corpos have way more representative power than any real person these days since bribery is legal. I'm surprised this isn't a common issue being raised all the time; well besides the lack of civics education in general.
- Hnrobert42 2y agoI 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.
- criddell 2y agoDay 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.
- deergomoo 2y agoExtra odd given how much they tout the ease of having one codebase that scales from the watch to a Mac.
- criddell 2y agoI 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.
- chang1 2y agoI'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.
- lolinder 2y agoThe article says that ~80% of the departures (126 people) were in the WordPress division, but doesn't indicate the size of that division. That's a much more interesting number than 8% of the company as a whole—depending on the size of the division and the sub teams affected that could be an enormous amount of WordPress brain drain. 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-contributions/ https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/09/26/our-wordpress-contribu...
- senadir 2y agoWordPress division doesn’t mean the open source one, it means anyone working on WordPress related products, like jetpack, Woo, VIP, dotcom… The rest work on non-wp like tumblr, dayone, beeper and other apps.
- whateveracct 2y agotumblr's backend is migrating to WP apparently
- DHPersonal 2y agoMost of Tumblr's staff no longer works on Tumblr. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/tumblr-is-reportedly-on-life-support-as-its-latest-owner-reassigns-staff/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/tumblr-is-reportedly... > 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."
- legitster 2y agoI've brought this up in another thread, but what's stopping Automattic from going after anyone making a profit in the WP community? Website developers, plugin makers, theme designers, etc. 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.
- dncornholio 2y ago[flagged]
- spondylosaurus 2y agoWhat happened seven years ago?
- dncornholio 2y agohttps://domain-stories.com/thesis_com/ https://domain-stories.com/thesis_com/
- ubermonkey 2y agoI mean, nothing. It's clear Matt will do whatever Matt wants, which is fine for him, but bad for the community and the platform. 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.
- toyg 2y agoMovable Type never had the foothold that Wordpress has developed over the years. 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.
- petesergeant 2y ago> Mullenweg said the package offered $30,000 or six months of salary 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.
- righthand 2y agoIt will be interesting how many customers start flying the coop. Wordpress can be entrenching software but I have also found that a lot of the plugin heavy sites are just using plugins/customizations for trivial things you could easily eclipse. Migrating off of it is easier done than said in that case. We will be leaving WP Engine and Wordpress behind after we spend 2 months rebuilding on sensible software on a sensible host (WP engine is also terrible) this Q4. 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.
- keiferski 2y agoProbably not too many. The average WordPress site is run by a small business that doesn’t care the slightest bit about tech industry drama, or what open source even means.
- righthand 2y agoThat may be enough, the average Wordpress site probably is subsidized by the larger sites that may leave. I don’t see the amount of employees exiting as a small amount even though it’s not even 20%.
- keiferski 2y agoPretty unlikely. In my experience, WordPress is basically the go-to solution for people that need a cheap website and don't want to think about it too much. Especially for non-technical people running a law firm, consultancy, etc. The technical folks that care about recent events most likely left WP years ago.
- righthand 2y agoI’m not sure what’s unlikely. Customers leaving? My company is a customer, we’re leaving. Or that most free sites are subsidized by paying customers? Why is that unlikely that seems pretty par for the course for free services.
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- shuri 2y agoWP engine should raise and hire these people.
- solarkraft 2y agoAs entertaining as it can be to follow a public meltdown for 5 minutes, this hurts because Automattic was a company I used to look up to. I had the idea that some day I might work for them. Not sure this will still be possible. Maybe on a business unrelated to Wordpress. > 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.
- righthand 2y agoYes using percentages to claim that those people never mattered to Automattic. Classy.
- solarkraft 2y agoI’m not commenting on any other claim - I think it’s an interesting framing that 90% of the company still has its back (perhaps already yes-people? I suppose there were signs of his erratic behavior before this).
- righthand 2y agoPeople still support others like Matt or worse so it’s not surprising.
- mikemitchelldev 2y agophotomatt made a smart move to incentivize the exit of employees who disagreed with him on this important issue (as it would have festered in the company), but I think he offered them too much money.
- DowagerDave 2y agoI agree - he's facing a lot of criticism for reducing diversity or difference of opinion, but you don't promote this in context of your core values and conceptual integrity. You have private debate, reach a decision and then everyone publicly supports the direction. If you don't believe in the decision or can't support it, you need to leave.
- mikemitchelldev 2y agoJob market is very bad for programmers. Strange time to quit.
- codezero 2y agoHow do you quantify that? I only have anecdata but nobody I know in tech is having a hard time finding something they like.
- hluska 2y agoEither the industry has changed dramatically, people have changed or there’s something truly odd going on at Automattic. There is a Reddit user right now: https://www.reddit.com/user/r_mutt1917/ 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.