Restructuring Announcement

> He considers Wordpress "his" even though...he took it over from the original author who was abandoning the project.

Non Wordpress user here, not a blogger, don’t use CMSs. Curious about this line. Reading the history on Wikipedia, the original b2 was the precursor. It was pretty small and being abandoned. Matt proposed forking it in January 2003, and worked with Mike to bring the first version to fruition a few months later. 22 years later it’s a goliath.

Given that history it seems totally fair for Matt to consider WP his thing. You don’t seem to think so, can you explain?

We do, but the sociopaths outcompete them.

You can trust me, facile3232, instead. I will improve upon all things the leader of automattic.com failed to improve upon.

Yeah. I was made a manager in Feb 2022 with 5 directs and 9 headcount to fill. Hired 5, and then by June 2022 all remaining headcount was cut. In January 2023 we had our first-ever layoffs in the company's 25-year history.

This will continue until there are actual consequences for those responsible.

I'm of the mindset that any time a company does layoffs, they should start from the top And work down.

The median position is to be hiring, just to backfill attrition. "Trouble" might be temporary; it might be noise. Hiring is always slow, with cycles longer than "trouble" might last.

We might argue about the parameters in this situation, but structurally there's a bias towards the low-pass average.

Those lacking empathy don’t know how to not be cruel. They keep filtering to the top unfortunately. Something that remains to be solved for.

The business world changes direction faster than companies can adapt. That was my biggest lesson as an entrepreneur: entrepreneurs don't really pivot into product-market fit, the market pivots into them. The reason capitalism works is because there's this huge sea of dream-chasers out there, most of whom will go bankrupt, so that when the market's needs change there is somebody out there to service them, and everybody who's not effectively servicing them goes to hell and gets another job.

Corporations and management basically exist to buffer this uncertainty. Employment is actually a really bad deal in good economic times; owners reap almost all the windfall of having a successful product. But in bad times, the company keeps paying you even if they're losing money, at least up until they don't. You get a raw deal, but not as raw a deal as the people paying you.

Likewise with strategic direction. The market's needs change faster than senior executives can adapt: if they always produced what the market was actually clamoring for, the company would run around like a chicken with its head cut off (this actually happens when the CEO panics, and a key CEO skill, and part of the reason they're paid so much, is the ability to ignore every piece of market data saying "You're not hot anymore. Nobody wants you, and the market has moved on" and keep doing what you're doing even though your intuition is telling you that you're doomed and going to lose your cushy $20M/year job). Much of the job of middle management is to buffer senior management's freakouts and tell the ICs "Keep calm and carry on; let's see if he still cares about this new hotness next week."

The exuberance and self-assuredness that your plans are going to work out leads to overreach and I think the lag in accounting practices helps make that more acute.

I have had too many experiences where I thought my current employer was about to start circling the drain, and I've ended up some place that was circling faster. At a guess I'm about 50:50, which I suppose I should count as 'lucky' but has never felt that way.

Fish-tailing is a common flame-out mode for startups. VCs are partly to blame. They don't like to discourage you in case you come up with a miracle, but neither do they want to put good money and time after bad if it turns out you're going to be a break-even play or a loss.

Its not even cruel. Its just dumb. Really dumb.

You are going to invest significant resources into hiring, onboarding, and injecting new staff into workflows for people that will not be there as soon as they are actually productive.

So its not just the cash burn - its the tieup of 3x team members to getting new people trained to become effective and successful contributor. Time is finite.

It makes no sense to throw away all that time spent by your team, who could have use that same time to get a few more features out, proposals sent , or projects spec'd instead.

If you believe you need more people to get out of trouble isn’t it cruel to not follow through?

IMO, if there is any talk of "loyalty" in that first round of voluntary layoffs, you should always leave. Even if you were previously loyal, the company is changing and you won't like the results.

Your also competing with fewer people when looking for a new job.

I know this really bugs some people but every tech company these days has a demonym for its employees.

It doesn't mean that employees have some cultlike adoration for the company. It's just very convenient inside the company to have a single short word to refer to all employees of the business.

I wonder if it's better or worse than the voluntary termination deal they offered to employees last year (first 6 months, then 9 months pay).

> how much

With so many countries and legal frameworks to comply with, there's never going to be a single answer for this.

> It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.

My understanding is that the investors signed proxy voting rights over to Matt. They are mostly ordinary shares, and may be revocable. [1]

[1] https://ma.tt/2021/08/funding-buyback-hiring/

I am confused -- so if investors don't like the CEO, there is nothing they can do? Other than maybe taking their part of the money out?

he'd already be out if it was simple to force him out

L'etatt, c'est M'att.

wait, did he put his name in the company name?

if so, that's what we in the narcissist-identifying business call a "tell".

> he's clearly a very good executer and strategist. He's getting in his own way.

Apparently not. I'd argue he was perceived as such but has thoroughly proven the opposite by now. There were so many stations to get off the train.

IMHO moralizing wasn't really the problem.

The extremely erratic behavior, the ego, the fixation with vengeance, harassing organizations legally using the Wordpress name, abusing his power at the wordpress foundation, using it to punish Automattic competitors...

He pissed off a lot of people, but worse: he made a lot of people nervous.

If more people valued how others perceive them more than they valued winning, the world would be a better place.

Ignore the financial valuations, man is a worm. I'd call him a 'hack' but that might imply talents given where we are.

Through his shitshow, he tried - and failed - to curry favor with an OSS puppet. Not any particular software... like one might think, but the whole "thing".

There was never any moment where WPEngine was beholden for offering WordPress services. Everything was strained to the point he was trying to redefine OSS.

He got in his way, ours as members of the public, and that of WPEngine. Repeatedly... and I don't see enough reflection/reason from Matt to believe this will change. Personally, I'd hesitate to promote his strategies or skills.

Hamfisted is a better message. Or none, take the wind away. We don't want his ambition or to hear about it. It's demonstrably shit.

Edit: just in case this needs saying, I've never been affiliated with either company. Don't waste your limited time looking for me, Matt.

The legal threats against WPEngine and their customers, the lawsuits between WP/Automatic/WPF and WPEngine, the banning of several contributors, the takeover of WP Plugins on WP.org, the shenanigans with several check boxes on the login pages of WP.org.

https://mullenweg.wtf/

https://web.archive.org/web/20241026031947/https://bullenweg...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2y7eyp3zpo

Matt Mullenweg is the elephant.

the author of that email has been having a very public breakdown for months now, mostly consisting of being a prick and trying to harm the community and a competitor.

> they no longer have to pretend we care about you at all and will instead try to cater to Wall Street

The company isn't "catering" to wall street, wall street is their boss. The owners of the company vote on what they want the company to do, and hire the person in charge of the company. And besides, do you care about your company? If you got a job offer to make twice your salary doing something you'd enjoy more than what you do now, would you stay with your current company out of care for them? Maybe you would, but I know of almost no one who feels that way towards their employer, outside of those working for small tech startups with their friends.

For almost everyone I know, their mindset is that they're going to do the best job they can right up until something better comes along, at which point they'll switch to something better. And I fully expect that if my best work is no longer worth more to them than my salary, they'll lay me off. In the meantime, they're paying me a ridiculous amount of money to do a job I enjoy. It's a deal that 99% of the world is envious of, and I don't think it should inspire bitterness and cynicism

In this case, the "our revenue continues to grow" is not transparency, it's deliberately obfuscating the increase in expenses that led to layoffs being necessary. Not mentioned is the insanely expensive legal battle that they launched with WP Engine, which is already a massive drain on resources and a huge financial risk given how strong WP Engine's case is.

"Our revenue continues to grow" doesn't matter if unnecessary expenses outstrip it.

I might agree with you, if the "why we're making changes" section had listed even one reason to lay people off.

When was anyone naive enough to think their company cared about them?

On the other hand, why should a company keep people around that they don’t need?

And the last point, speaking more about Microsoft/Amazon/Google, if you have worked for either company for any length of time, there is no excuse for you not to have a nice nest egg to tide you over especially considering the severance amounts they give you.

You might be forced to sully yourself and become an “enterprise developer” and make around what most of the 2.8 million developers in the US.

And yes, I did a bid at Amazon and within three years, I paid off some debt, saved a chunk of change, got my 3.5 months severance package and found another job quickly that was my target compensation (not enterprise dev).