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Ok, I think Matt’s goofy for various reasons. From just what this article says, I think he’s right on this one. This is my understanding of it: * The dev team

Ok, I think Matt’s goofy for various reasons. From just what this article says, I think he’s right on this one. This is my understanding of it: * The dev team has a disagreement about putting one of the company’s own projects on the available plugins carousel or whatever inside their main product. * They eventually decide not to. * The CEO says “this has been an important part of our product for 20 years. It’s silly that we’re even debating this”, and put it there anyway. And that’s about it? Based only on what I read here, there wasn’t any compelling engineering reason not to do a thing, and the CEO made a product decision to do it. That sounds like something I’ve heard 1,000 times at different shops and I’m not sure what the problem is. Perhaps I’m misreading this, and the main point isn’t “CEO overrides valiant dev team”, but “CEO makes recalcitrant dev team stop bikeshedding”. I say this out of no love for Matt’s… “interesting”… decision making the last couple of years. This sounds reasonable to me though.

AnonEM00se 6mo ago
Leaving out the optics and personalities and internal politics, the biggest issue I see is that they added this during the RC phase, which is against their policy. It should have been pushed to 7.1.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6mo ago
  Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict, at least if you're a business owner who wants to make money.
  - stackghost 6mo ago
    >Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict, at least if you're a business owner who wants to make money. This bush league kind of attitude is why people insinuate that most software development is not "real engineering". When Boeing or NASA lets making money get in the way of good engineering practice, people die.
    - mooreds 6mo ago
      > most software development is not "real engineering". Most software development doesn't have anywhere near the real world impact of the Boeing/NASA engineering you reference. Good engineering practice recognizes the risks and scales the effort to match it. A CRUD app for internal users has a different set of requirements than a revenue generating SaaS app, just like a backyard fence has different building criteria than a highway bridge.
      - stackghost 6mo ago
        Sure, I understand the stakes are lower for blog plugins than for aircraft. But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low. You don't decide to cut corners because you feel like it, or because it's more profitable. Mullenweg is not professional.
        zephen 6mo ago
        > But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low. Being a professional means that you adjust what things you do according to the stakes. For example, in software dev, you usually have tests for the code. Do you have tests for the tests? No? Why not? Why aren't you doing "the thing?" In chip development, I usually had tests for the tests, because the stakes were higher. But I didn't usually have tests for the tests for the tests.
        tomnipotent 6mo ago
        What does cutting corners have anything to do with the topic at hand? The situation isn't about devs getting the time to do something right, it's about programmers making a non-engineering decision that was overruled by the business in the businesses best interest. That's perfectly reasonable.
        asdfasgasdgasdg 6mo ago
        > But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low. Not the way I understand "being a professional." All engineering, and all professions, entail the balancing of interests. There are some hard and fast rules*, like "don't do things that will kill your users." And there are some other things that are more guidelines than absolutes, such as "we don't ship feature changes in release candidates." Serious organizations understand that sometimes guidelines like the latter need to be violated for overriding business purposes. *Even the "don't kill your users" thing is not an absolute. No car is perfectly safe, for example. We could add three more feet of crumple zone to the front and the back, but we don't, because even in safety tradeoffs have to be considered.
  - kstrauser 6mo ago
    > Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict This is an excellent way to get stuck with only the engineers sucky enough to have to put up with that, which is not the norm. However, in this specific case, it looks like engineers were making a product decision, not an engineering one, and management decided to make a different product decision. That feels categorically different than "mauve has more RAM".
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
  - luckylion 6mo ago
    Business is wordpress.com, this is wordpress.org -- explicitly not part of Automattic but an "independent" open source project. Obviously it isn't, but that's what Matt likes to pretend.
    - graemep 6mo ago
      This is something people seem to miss. His position as CEO of Automattic creates a huge conflict of interest with his position at the non-profit foundation. This is an example: the foundation's code gives special treatment to an Automattic product.
      - kstrauser 6mo ago
        I don't think anyone but Matt is missing the significance of that.
        graemep 6mo ago
        People do not know about it. Look at the current top rated comment on this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47824925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47824925
        kstrauser 6mo ago
        I wrote that comment.
        graemep 6mo ago
        Oops, sorry, did not notice. Were you aware of it and its relevance to this decision at the time you wrote the comment? My interpretation of your defence of it as just the CEO making a product decision was that you did not know. If you did know it seems to miss the point which is that he made a decision that was better for his company but worse for Wordpress. It would be fine if Wordpress was developed by Automattic, but its not.
- qingcharles 6mo ago
  They just wound back half the RC for Wordpress 7 at the last second to tweak some features for Matt. I don't know if he's right about it, but they did it.
ookblah 6mo ago
goofy is a pretty nice way of say he has a history of dressing up his shenanigans by literally... lying lol. the fact that wpengine debacle was framed as a defense of OSS should tell you a lot, probably don't even need to look at the details to know that it's usually him trying to profit while framing it as something moral.
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  Notice the distinct lack of me sticking up for him outside this very specific case.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
gmays 6mo ago
Agree. And the meta point, after reading through to the core committer channel on the WP slack is that it's clear he's now more involved in the project again and making decisions. I haven't been involved for years, but while I was it seems he had other priorities (understandable). But the rapid changes from AI are an existential threat to the long-term viability of WP. Rather than bike shedding about something relatively trivial, they need to focus on the bigger issues, which it's apparent he's trying to do. Interestingly, the culture that sustained WP over the last 2 decades may now be working against it. Culture is really hard to change, but he now seems to have his 'wartime CEO' hat on trying to do it, which is the right move.
graemep 6mo ago
What you are missing here is that Matt (in his role running the project for the non-profit Wordpress Foundation) made a decision to overrule everyone else and favour a product from Automattic (CEO, Matt).

AnonEM00se 6mo ago

Leaving out the optics and personalities and internal politics, the biggest issue I see is that they added this during the RC phase, which is against their policy. It should have been pushed to 7.1.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6mo ago
Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict, at least if you're a business owner who wants to make money.
- stackghost 6mo ago
  >Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict, at least if you're a business owner who wants to make money. This bush league kind of attitude is why people insinuate that most software development is not "real engineering". When Boeing or NASA lets making money get in the way of good engineering practice, people die.
  - mooreds 6mo ago
    > most software development is not "real engineering". Most software development doesn't have anywhere near the real world impact of the Boeing/NASA engineering you reference. Good engineering practice recognizes the risks and scales the effort to match it. A CRUD app for internal users has a different set of requirements than a revenue generating SaaS app, just like a backyard fence has different building criteria than a highway bridge.
    - stackghost 6mo ago
      Sure, I understand the stakes are lower for blog plugins than for aircraft. But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low. You don't decide to cut corners because you feel like it, or because it's more profitable. Mullenweg is not professional.
      - zephen 6mo ago
        > But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low. Being a professional means that you adjust what things you do according to the stakes. For example, in software dev, you usually have tests for the code. Do you have tests for the tests? No? Why not? Why aren't you doing "the thing?" In chip development, I usually had tests for the tests, because the stakes were higher. But I didn't usually have tests for the tests for the tests.
      - tomnipotent 6mo ago
        What does cutting corners have anything to do with the topic at hand? The situation isn't about devs getting the time to do something right, it's about programmers making a non-engineering decision that was overruled by the business in the businesses best interest. That's perfectly reasonable.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 6mo ago
        > But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low. Not the way I understand "being a professional." All engineering, and all professions, entail the balancing of interests. There are some hard and fast rules*, like "don't do things that will kill your users." And there are some other things that are more guidelines than absolutes, such as "we don't ship feature changes in release candidates." Serious organizations understand that sometimes guidelines like the latter need to be violated for overriding business purposes. *Even the "don't kill your users" thing is not an absolute. No car is perfectly safe, for example. We could add three more feet of crumple zone to the front and the back, but we don't, because even in safety tradeoffs have to be considered.
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  > Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict This is an excellent way to get stuck with only the engineers sucky enough to have to put up with that, which is not the norm. However, in this specific case, it looks like engineers were making a product decision, not an engineering one, and management decided to make a different product decision. That feels categorically different than "mauve has more RAM".
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- luckylion 6mo ago
  Business is wordpress.com, this is wordpress.org -- explicitly not part of Automattic but an "independent" open source project. Obviously it isn't, but that's what Matt likes to pretend.
  - graemep 6mo ago
    This is something people seem to miss. His position as CEO of Automattic creates a huge conflict of interest with his position at the non-profit foundation. This is an example: the foundation's code gives special treatment to an Automattic product.
    - kstrauser 6mo ago
      I don't think anyone but Matt is missing the significance of that.
      - graemep 6mo ago
        People do not know about it. Look at the current top rated comment on this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47824925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47824925
        kstrauser 6mo ago
        I wrote that comment.
        graemep 6mo ago
        Oops, sorry, did not notice. Were you aware of it and its relevance to this decision at the time you wrote the comment? My interpretation of your defence of it as just the CEO making a product decision was that you did not know. If you did know it seems to miss the point which is that he made a decision that was better for his company but worse for Wordpress. It would be fine if Wordpress was developed by Automattic, but its not.
qingcharles 6mo ago
They just wound back half the RC for Wordpress 7 at the last second to tweak some features for Matt. I don't know if he's right about it, but they did it.

ookblah 6mo ago

goofy is a pretty nice way of say he has a history of dressing up his shenanigans by literally... lying lol. the fact that wpengine debacle was framed as a defense of OSS should tell you a lot, probably don't even need to look at the details to know that it's usually him trying to profit while framing it as something moral.

kstrauser 6mo ago
Notice the distinct lack of me sticking up for him outside this very specific case.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]

gmays 6mo ago

Agree. And the meta point, after reading through to the core committer channel on the WP slack is that it's clear he's now more involved in the project again and making decisions. I haven't been involved for years, but while I was it seems he had other priorities (understandable). But the rapid changes from AI are an existential threat to the long-term viability of WP. Rather than bike shedding about something relatively trivial, they need to focus on the bigger issues, which it's apparent he's trying to do. Interestingly, the culture that sustained WP over the last 2 decades may now be working against it. Culture is really hard to change, but he now seems to have his 'wartime CEO' hat on trying to do it, which is the right move.

graemep 6mo ago

What you are missing here is that Matt (in his role running the project for the non-profit Wordpress Foundation) made a decision to overrule everyone else and favour a product from Automattic (CEO, Matt).