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'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.
How much after income taxes, though? I recently learned that after taxes, my salary in Eastern Europe is around average salary in a few US states, although on paper (pre-tax) it looks like the US is 4 times richer.
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!
That's uncharitable. Mullenweg has been pretty good for the FOSS ecosystem as a whole, and he's just going after one particular company (arguably one particular board member of such company, the SilverLake guy), that he now sees as parasitical to the ecosystem.
Musk steered a social-networking giant into american-far-right territory for his own vanity, retweets baseless and dangerous conspiracy theories, and supports all sorts of terrible campaigns.
> That's uncharitable. Mullenweg has been pretty good for the FOSS ecosystem as a whole, and he's just going after one particular company
This is actually far from Matt's first rodeo:
He described Movable Type as "desperate and dirty players" for having a section in their docs on how to migrate WordPress content into a Movable Type blog.
When Envato started allowing people to publish themes they had created with a proprietary license, he retaliated by banning any developer on the Envato platform from speaking at any WordPress-related event (sound familiar to punishing the users for a disagreement with a platform?)
Wix was accused by Matt of using WP's mobile text editor in violation of the GPL. Wix showed that they had actually adhered to the license terms, and then forker their own version under the MIT license.
> one particular company (arguably one particular board member of such company, the SilverLake guy), that he now sees as parasitical to the ecosystem.
He went after GoDaddy in 2022 for the same reason, to the same extent.
Interestingly, for someone who has such hatred for Private Equity as "leeches and freeloaders and parasites upon open source software and communities", the ONLY other active member of the WordPress Foundation board (than Matt) is the Managing Partner of a Private Equity firm that Matt himself appointed.
Never said they weren't, but was responding to your comment about him being good for FOSS and this just being a first instance of a straw breaking the camel's back and causing him to lash out.
He lashes out quite regularly. There are other instances too, including him previously rewriting agreements after attacking people.
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.
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!
The offer probably come with some sort of a non-compete clause. Otherwise WPE could pull a Pressable by offering to secure a job for everyone who leaves A8C.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
You begged the question of whether this is rational and I think it’s worth considering that it isn’t. It would not be out of character with other middle-aged guys making bad decisions because there’s something else going on in their life which they don’t control and so they’re going to flex their power where they can – Musk appears to have flushed tens of billions of dollars on Twitter in no small part because his daughter isn’t a robot he can control – but an even simpler explanation I’ve heard is that MM simply hadn’t had anyone tell him no about his business in decades and has gotten used to it. That’s not uncommon for CEO-types in unregulated industries and can be particularly bad if paired with an unwillingness to recognize that you’re making a mistake.
They most certainly did not do a lay-off. Private companies in financial trouble don't do voluntary buy-outs. The "demand for millions of dollars" also explicitly stated "or equivalent investment in WP".
I guess you shouldn't let facts get in the way when you're pushing a narrative...
Unless 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.
They raised $588m across rounds in 2019 and 2021. For a company founded in 2005. They’ve started doing something that’s burning A LOT of cash and I didn’t find public product direction that explains it (in only 20 minutes of googling tbf).
Dwindling runway as a theory to explain squeezing WPE and Matt’s public communications is getting harder to ignore.
I think this is correct. Some people were misaligned, but the majority seemed to be taking advantage of a generous severance for different personal reasons. And anyone on a pip would have a hard time turning it down.
if you've got the resources this is a great way to clear out the dead wood. Most orgs either make life so unpleasant the person leaves to escape, or do nothing and let the poison kill other parts of the company.
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:/...
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 i.e. not being laid low by private equity. We should worry about Automattic's because if WordPress crumbles, Tumblr and a lot of other stuff may too.
Wow I don't think I've ever made someone on Hacker News this upset before. If it makes you feel better, I chose to reply to your comment because you put the most effort into your analysis, and your comment contributed actual information, unlike a lot of the other low effort stuff.
boykie? cookoo, rizz so you are answering to yourself as a sock puppet. People don't talk like this especially not here.
And once again which one it is: you didn't answer me. If you think you did that's because you forgot to switch accounts. https://i.imgur.com/LeF241n.png
I finally have an analogy for the "Open Source company":
A company creates a free buffet and sells seats at a table. They hope a competitor doesn't come and take the free food, slather it in hot sauce, and sell it at their own restaurant, because that would be rude.
Did WPE fork WordPress though? They clearly claim in their legal filing that the WordPress installs they use come directly from the official sources. I don't use WordPress or WPE, but I would (perhaps naively) assume that if they are making a clear statement of fact in a court filing that they are not lying about that fact.
They forked their business, which is WordPress hosting. In the complaint they brag about how they haven't changed a single line of code in WordPress itself. That's way more adversarial than forking the codebase, since the GPL ensures people still give back when they go their own way.
... is that even a thing? How is WPE the bad guy even if it is when there are NUMEROUS other wordpress hosting companies?
> GPL
The GPL specifically allows you to even SELL the GPL'd code to people, so I don't see how they are even violating the _spirit_ of the license.
More to the point, it's not like WPE is a black hole. They _are_ engaging and spending money on the community from what their court filing claims. Is it all self serving? Of course it is! A for-profit corporate entity rarely (never?) does things not in it's self interest.
I will freely admin I'm not a part of the WP community and have zero investment on either side of this fight. I will also say that just from reading what has been posted by all parties, I feel really strongly that Matt needs to stop talking/acting and let the lawyers sort things out at this point.
As an aside, as I was thinking about it this morning, Matt claims that WPE is causing him personally due to excessive usage of wordpress.org, right? But, if WPE goes away today, all those sites they were hosting are suddenly going to other hosting companies and the SAME amount of traffic will still hit the wordpress.org site. Trying to claim that WPE is causing undue traffic is just saying the WP as a whole causes too much traffic. So, are ANY hosting companies beyond Matt/Automattic funding the wordpress.org website? It's clear from the WPF financial filings that they don't contribute to funding that critical resource. And it's clear from Matt's posts that he prefer that every WP install uses those resources as he's expressly questioned why he would make it easy to point to another resource.
Every dollar WPE makes is a dollar Automattic doesn't. If you're David, and Goliath wants to use your platform and trademark to make you poorer, would you let him? All the stuff you're talking about is a distraction, because this is an unnatural relationship, and they're going to come up with whatever excuses they can to rectify that.
If you are saying this is just Automattic being mad that WPE is making money and they want some of it, that's a major concern for any professional services company in the WP space. Once they are done with WPE, who's next on the list? This is not hyperbole. Any company that is a similar line of business would be foolish not to asses this as a high risk.
Being mad that someone is using the open source software EXACTLY as the license allows them to is indicative of very poor planning. If you didn't want anyone else to make money off the software, then why open source it in the first place?
They can claim all day long that WPE was misusing the WordPress marks and the courts will resolve that complaint. Their use of WP was expressly allowed as WordPress expressly disclaimed WP as a trademark.
They can cry about WPE's usage of the wordpress.org services and say they are abusing them. Until they change the code and make the update URL configurable, they are being highly disingenuous. Considering that Cloudflare has offered to provide free CDN services to WPF for this, it seems like the best solution for the community would be for Matt to give wordpress.org to the foundation and let them use the freely offered services.
As I don't know you personally Justine and just go on what I've seen you contribute to the world, I must say I'm actually surprised at your apparent hard line on this. As I have said a few times, I have zero involvement in this debacle and I think both parties are likely bad actors. But what I've seen Matt post during this would make me 100% never get involved with him in any kind of business. He's displayed a shocking lack of self-restraint and level of malice towards those he feels have wronged him or are in his way.
The world needs Matt and Automattic. It doesn't need WPE. The WordPress community should be more worried about what'll happen to them when no one is developing WordPress anymore, than what'll happen if Matt goes to war with everyone else too. He's so self-sacrificing that he didn't fight back against WPE until WPE alone was threating his survival. Apple would have never let someone in their App Store in the first place who directly competes with them, and Matt looked the other way for ten years. Matt is obviously guileless considering how he behaves. That would make me not very afraid of him if I were a business in this space. The fact is though that Matt is one of the people who gives to the community more than he's taking, and WPE is the opposite. You won't have a community anymore if the takers demoralize and alienate all the helpers. What's happening now is completely WPE's fault. As the most profitable entity in the WordPress space, they have a duty to help lead the community and fund its development. Asking for 8% isn't unreasonable.
Is the Wordpress community so weak that after all these years they couldn't weather Matt retiring?
And if Automattic is such a business which can only exist as a monopoly then it shouldn't exist. Because that's what you are implying.
Once again: if WP Engine misuses trademarks which Matt holds then by all means send a C&D to them and if they resist then sue them. That's a completely normal business behavior. What's happening here is lunacy.
> Every dollar WPE makes is a dollar Automattic doesn't.
This is the same fallacy as "immigrants are taking our jobs".
No, this is not true. The market can expand, competition spurs innovation, they put in marketing and so forth. The income of Automattic in a world where WPE doesn't exist is less , likely much less than the income of real Automattic plus WPE.
You have been posting nonsense ever since you started, just stop.
Whether the factual claims of WPEngine are true is the matter of the lawsuit but it's incredibly well put together. What have you found illogical in there? Your tone doesn't fit at all a serious discussion. "rizz" "cuckoo" , I detest your garbage is posted as an answer to my rather detailed post.
> 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.
This is the big one. I believe his argument was that when WPE customers updated they were using WP.org bandwidth for free.
That's a reasonable point.
But...doesn't that also apply to nearly everyone else who is running WP somewhere other than via a paid plan on WP.com?
If I download the install zip from WP.org and install WP on my own server, won't it get updates from WP.org?
If I get shared hosting at one of the zillion shared hosting companies that include cPanel or something similar, and click the button to set up WP, won't that then get its updates from WP.org?
What about if I use the Wordpress docker image from docker.com? That comes configured by default to just do the initial install from the WP that is included in the image and then update that as needed, so it seems that if I go that way and don't explicitly change it to be static (and then do updates by redeploy when new images are available) I'm going to be hitting WP.org.
Do I need to be worrying that if I use WP in any of those ways I'm going to be cut off from updates because WP.org isn't getting paid when I update?
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.
Why 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.
> (which is not even OSS if you can ban people you don't like)
You're hallucinating that part of OSS. There's no requirement in any open-source software to interact with people you'd rather not interact with, for whatever reason you have, and there are extremely low limits to your continuing obligations for past interactions if you decide to "ban" them. (I'm using my non-lawyer understanding/memory on OSI-approved licenses, but I'd appreciate counter-examples to what I'm saying here if anyone knows of them.)
Technically you can of course discriminate in other ways and remain Open Source, like banning folks from downloading, or interacting with your bug tracker etc. Often those bans will be ineffective, for eg when there are multiple download mirrors that don't have the same bans as you, or people use Tor etc. Some of these sorts of bans don't seem to be in the spirit of the FLOSS movement though.
> ...like banning folks from downloading, or interacting with your bug tracker etc. Often those bans will be ineffective [including because the folks you banned can interact with an intermediary]
You miss the point. I'm not sure if this will help, but I'll see if I can expand and reiterate. Seeing this whole reply now, I apologize for the length. You might go back up to the parent comment and re-read what I was addressing: the claim that one's ability to "ban" is "not even OSS". Regarding ban evasion through Tor or similar, that plays into whether a ban is technologically feasible -- rather than about ability and freedom to make your choice in the first place -- and I won't address it further here.
If I don't want to interact with someone, I make that choice for myself. No open source license prevents me from making and implementing my choice for myself. If I previously chose to interact with someone and am now no longer willing to do so, then open source licenses have either no continuing obligations (eg BSD) or extremely low continuing obligations (eg GPL).
(If someone knows of a license that meets the Open Source Definition, to use a handy threshold, which does in fact require me to interact when I would prefer not to, then I would appreciate the counter-example. In fact, when I wrote "low" in my parent comment, I was thinking specifically and only about the GPL's requirement to provide source code for 3 years after interacting with a party, so I'd appreciate any counter-example that requires more than that.)
If others choose to interact with that same someone, then that is their choice, not mine. I am not a party to their interaction with that same someone. I may even choose to now include them in the list of people with whom I will no longer interact -- but that only goes forwards and does not change prior interactions -- and whether I even desire to make that choice is now getting far away from the topic of ability to make that choice.
My choices not affecting other people is very much in the spirit of open source and FLOSS, as I understand them.
The part that you quoted from the Open Source Definition is that the license cannot have discrimination terms. That has nothing to do with whether I choose to interact with anyone else on any basis that I choose, regardless of whether that basis is socially acceptable or not.
What that OSD requirement does do, however, is prevent my interaction choices from affecting others when I use an open source license. You might imagine a hypothetical license that discriminates against particular nationalities or industries, and contrast that with someone who uses open source licenses while still refusing to interact with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or North Korea, to use two current, real-world examples.
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.
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.
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.
Jurisdiction 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.
I think most of the companies (most likely including Automattic) are not doing it like that for remote employees from other countries. They are just "hiring" them as contractors, that is formally it's just B2B, the employee would register some kind of individual business entity in their country, send invoices, pay taxes. The contract may include things like vacations, sick days, (home office) equipment compensation, N months notice/severance pay, but it has no connection to the laws for normal employees in that country.
I think doing it differently would not be practical, because the company would have to maintain some kind of companies/offices in each country. Another option can be hiring the employee directly at the main company (not sure about US, but I am pretty sure it's possible at least for some countries in Europe), but it's also more complex and I am not sure if this would even make sense for the employee since e.g. they would not be able to access the benefits like healthcare remotely. And as long as the contract is good and the company is trustworthy, being a contractor/self-employed may have some advantages like lower taxes.
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.
This actually makes me really suspicious about Automattic. Companies generally don't refuse to hire outside of certain countries just to be jerks, they do it because complying with international tax obligations while paying employees in dozens of countries is complex and expensive.
Given that, and the behavior we've seen from Matt and Automattic so far, what are the odds that they've actually got a bunch of really great international accountants and are doing everything correctly everywhere, versus they're just ignoring all of the tax laws and winging it, and are therefore at high risk of getting smacked down once the relevant authorities get wind of what's going on there?
It feels like you are just piling on really by engaging in such speculation. If I am wrong though please share your expertise on the difficulties of hiring remote in Algeria.
You seem to never been in that shoe (from a country no one hires from). Companies avoid that because it’s too much hassle. Automattic cares and goes through the hassle, simple as that.
You’re also talking without concrete knowledge. We work as international contractors, we handle our own local taxes. Automattic pays us the gross salary and it’s up to you.
Agree. Also I think Automattic was one of the few companies who actually paid a really good salary to even people from generally low income countries instead of paying market salaries and underpaying them.
Kudos to Matt man. Dude has actually done a lot of good stuff. Sure he has his problems. But who hasn't.
> You seem to never been in that shoe (from a country no one hires from).
Why do you say that? I do have sympathy for people in such countries and circumstances, but this isn't about that. It's about corporate compliance. For better or worse, corporations cannot just do something because it's a nice thing to do. They have to comply with the law in both the country they are based in and operate in, as well as in any country any prospective remote workers might be in.
I also never claimed to have any concrete knowledge. It's entirely possible they are doing everything correctly. I just find it odd that they are reportedly doing something that many companies do not do due to it being legally complex, and also their CEO is spouting off a bunch of unwise statements on public forums while being actively sued, which any sane corporate lawyer would strongly advise them not to do.
we do this in Poland. While they're technically contractors everyone is treated like employees as much as possible. Hiring globally is really expensive, slow and risky for all but the largest companies. It's hard to be an expert in one system, let alone dozens, and that's before state/province/territory/etc differences.
My understanding is that it's a lot more work for a company to have employees across many different countries.
Things like payroll, insurance, health benefits, retirement benefits, equity, unions, etc. all need to be done differently for different countries. This means that there's a lot of "extra stuff" that's specific to each country. For example, US employees expect a 401(k) plan and health insurance. For a US company, that's par for the course, but for a French company (for example), you need local expertise to navigate all the laws and protocols.
There are middlemen like Rippling that help centralize some of those things, and paper over the differences. But it's still a lot of added complexity. Not insurmountable, but smaller companies may decide to not burden themselves with it.
And if you think that AI is going to eat away at dev jobs around the margins going forward, maybe you're thinking that you can't find another job within 6 months and even if you do it's likely to face an even more uncertain future.
This is a great offer but "a bird in the hand" etc.
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.
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.
With the current job market, I'm surprised so many took it. Some people in my Linkedin network have been searching for tech and developer jobs for over 6 months.
If it were me I would have stayed while I kept looking. It's always better to search for a job when you already have one, and you really don't know when/if the right thing will come along.
On the other hand, it's a great mini-runway for people who want to start their own company.
I was effectively forced to take a similar "offer" recently (iow laid off with six months severance), and while I did end up getting another job relatively soon it was an extremely stressful time. I do not think I would have taken it voluntarily in the current economy, even if it did happen to benefit me in the end.
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.
The people who said that had no idea what extent the Twitter tech team had gone to to build a robust application that wouldn't fall over. The fact it withstood 75% of the staff being removed is a testament to the good work they did, not a sign that they weren't needed in the first place.
> 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.
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).
>By nearly every measure Twitter is doing a lot worse than it was before those people were fired.
Care to share which measures are those you speak of?
From what I saw, Twitter's revenue went down only due to the post pandemic economic slump following the pandemic bubble, and due to advertisers leaving en-masse because Musk won't purge the platform of hate speech and other content that's non advertiser friendly, not due to the workers who got fired leaving.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not network effect. There is nothing valuable that happens on twitter that doesn't make it's way out of twitter to the rest of the internet and reality. Avoiding twitter is actually a great way to filter out literal nation-state produced misinfo and propaganda that doesn't pass the smell test, but seems rampant on twitter.
People are addicted to twitter because of FOMO, because god forbid they learn about breaking news an hour later than anyone else.
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.
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.
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.
Do you know when they stopped being frictionlessly open? I’m curious when they started doing the to continue you have to log in pop overs. It preceded musk, as I said. I think every link still worked, but scrolling and navigating twitter like a typical website instead of typing in a link had log in gates.
That is NOT true. As a Twitter addict, I know that was not the case.
Also, Twitter had two notable Spaces problems, when launching the DeSantis campaign (into the ground) and the second fiasco, which I actually forget what it was, just recently. The system just cannot handle truly planet-scale traffic like before.
As someone who wasn’t a twitter addict, I know it was true because people would link me to twitter, I would see the tweet but attempting to scroll too much would result in a log in popover years before the musk buyout.
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.
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.
> 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 quite a few problems early post-change, but managed to recover.
- 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.
The spam filtering system sure as shit isn't working. The amount of spam DMs I get is crazy. The trends section has also been busted for ages. Click on the "Show more" link and it shows you less.
When 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.
Well, 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.
Any 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.
When 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.
Could you please stop posting comments in the flamewar style? You've been posting a ton of them lately, and breaking HN's rules quite badly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, regardless of who you're talking about or how you feel about them.
if 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.
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.
Everyone is ethically responsible for their own actions. As a software developer I don't work for ad companies. Why would a lawyer accept any client regardless of ethical concerns unless said lawyer is a scumbag?
>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.
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.
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.
I don't care about wordpress or this situation. I may be, just maybe, being too generous. Somehow people feel it's proper to question someone's sanity, provide armchair legal advice, and even suggest carbon monoxide intake is involved. Maybe people should be a little self aware of their critiques of others. Maybe.
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.
So what you're saying is that Matt is a tyrant because he isn't as an effective communicator as DHH is? That's quite an unusual take on tyranny.
Or perhaps that's not what you are saying at all, but are just a poor communicator yourself? If that's the case, I am surprised you are not more sympathetic to the folly of interpreting such statements without other context. Dunning-Krueger effect strikes again, I suppose.
There is no objective measure of what makes a tyrant. If one comes across as a tyrant, they are a tyrant!
You did say, as interpreted by the reader, that his poor communication skills makes him come across as a tyrant, and therefore that is what makes him a tyrant.
That may not be what you meant, but in that case we're right back to you and the poor communication skills of your own.
They stopped engaging because you seem either unwilling or incapable of understanding the difference between personal attacks and criticism of an artifact.
To try and take the emotion out of it, it's the difference between saying "I am tired" versus "this comment I wrote makes me sound tired"
What personal attacks are you referring to? There are no personal attacks found anywhere in this thread, nor would there be any logical reason to bring emotions into it at all.
But perhaps I have failed to understand what you are trying to say? Such is the trouble with communication.
The whole point of this thread is that you're defending what you perceived to be a personal attack against Matt (calling him a tyrant) and the other poster was trying to explain that it was not, in fact, a personal attack.
So if you agree there's no personal attacks, I guess that settles things!
I understand that things get emotional and things happen. Especially in business. If you’re looking for perfection, you will not find it in me.
But, this is extreme. It’s tremendously unkind and terribly unprofessional. The worst part is that they claim they can’t tell what division they are in. It leaves the impression that trashing > 100 people is fine, but being identifiable is a problem.
Can you please do something about this? We can part ways with people, feel sad about it but not destroy their lives.
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.
The whole drama is not done, but the colleagues and friends leaving all at once is done, and that was stressful, you don't know who's leaving next until you see their name.
To OP's point, I don't think the provided buyout window was long enough to determine that. If a bunch of other shoes drop, like more stuff comes out of discovery with the WP Engine lawsuit, knowing that you only had 4 days to accept or GTFO might still leave a bunch of on the fence employees.
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.
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.
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.
I'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.
Overcast 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.
there are a few choices that were made that are very odd. Like the old interface where you could swipe on the 'poster' to get the episode info was nice, they switched it to a button, but it looks like the recently undid that one and it's back to swipe.
Hard to say now but I was coming from AntennaPod on Android, and when I switched to iPhone I needed a new podcast app, and Overcast was different in annoying ways and with Pocket Casts I was able to change some settings to get it to be more like AntennaPod. I think part of it was having a download button on each episode in the list.
It's obvious that you're somehow personally involved in this situation, since you have filled this thread with multiple comments which range from dismissive to plain rude. And the whole thread reeks of comments who just try to frame company's CEO as irrational, which contribute next to nothing to understanding the two companies' dispute, while raising some disbelief for their motive in the first place.
This particular matter also affects me professionally (although not directly, but by precedent), so as a matter of principle, I'll find another solution.
20% of the employees across all campuses took the buyout. The percentage of staff (not faculty) that accepted it varied across campuses from 8% to 41%.
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.
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 = 1892.85714
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.
It depends on how you assess the risk. If one is certain that within six months they will find a new job that is as good as, or better, than their current job – sure, why not? But some people might come to the conclusion that the risk is too high. Especially if they like the role/team/company.
Switching jobs also carries “transaction costs”. Doing interviews, perhaps LeetCode tests, etc, can be exhausting.
Another factor to weigh in: Many companies do RTO now, so if Automattic offer 100% remote work, that itself is a pretty good selling point.
With these considerations in mind, I can see why some employees will opt to decline the offer.
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.
> 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.
Serious 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.
> The whole reason you are leaving is because you think the CEO is worse at adulting than a grade-schooler.
That doesn't make sense to me. People stay in jobs they don't like all the time, with leadership they don't agree with all the time. Here's the reason: it's because they pay you to go to work. Like, money. If everyone just pulled up stakes every time the thought occurred to them that their CEO might be a petty tyrant, there would be tumbleweeds blowing through every Slack channel in the world.
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/
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.
There's nothing to indicate that they're hiring a lawyer to deal with this situation. That was just speculation on the part of the parent comment. They probably just need to fill a vacancy in their legal division.
The job specifically asks for a JD with 8+ years of experience. The position will lead corporate, securities and governance work. This is not a junior attorney.
Yup, that’s what I was referring to - but they’re already doing a lot of weird stuff, so hiring someone internally to handle litigation (or similar) would be the kind of dumb I would expect.
And, while I'm not invested in this in any aspect, I feel: About time! I appreciate an executive with the passion/guts/ignorance to push a direction that's controversial and not safe. I'm really sick of working for companies that have no opinion or passion, and do a bunch of boring things.
Please don't make assumptions on time zones, it's rude.
Also, I am very much listening to the advice from my friends and lawyers, and even some random internet strangers. Happy to change my mind if presented with new information.
While I don't deny CMSs has been a big part of my money income for decades, and CMS are a great entry both for designers, developers and business, Wordpress is probably the most horrible one. His popularity IMHO is just a matter of timing and good usability (which I won't deny), but not is not backed by a good code design and implementation behind.
Drupal or even PHP Nuke was much better designed. I.e: Wp calls every published object post as it was designed as blog for posting.
Almost all CMS provide class oriented architecture, object caching, multilanguage, clean separation between base code, customer code and customer data, safe defaults (like all forms for commenting enabled),...
Edit: I stand corrected. OP is asking how many employees are in the WordPress "division", which I cannot find a public source for and is kind of hard to tally.
Matt said yesterday[1] that ~100 employees work on wordpress.org, one chunk of what encompasses the WordPress "division".
there's another comment above from someone who appears to work there, stating approx 80% of total staff work on WP and 20% on the other properties, so the percentage seems inline across the company & "divisions"
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).
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.
The case could go to trial but most cases are settled outside of court. You need to ensure the other side sees how much they have to lose should the case proceed to trial. In many ways this is a game of chicken.
If you are saying it’s essentially random, why would you go with an expensive lawyer when you can hire basically anyone (competent). Is it just virtue signalling?
2. If it does go to court presentation will matter an awful lot. There are really technical topics involved which for us are easy to understand but not so much for a jury of peers. Translating well the facts for the jury involves experience, a very good team and talent.
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".
I'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.
The 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.
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.
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.
412 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadAnd the person who accepted 6 months salary/$30k to leave the job he started two days prior... Bravo, that's efficiency.
A 30K budget would make a very nice 6 months vacation indeed...
At least in big American cities, $60k is a bus driver's salary.
...yearly salary
For a comparison, starting salary for a bus driver in Paris is 30k euros (with no prerequisites, they will send you to learn how to drive a bus). I'd imagine the conditions are much better (a lot more time off, lower working hours), and the cost of living is lower, so those compensate for some of the difference.
So there are probably very few employees whose 6-month salary would only equal $30k. Most people leaving will be getting a lot more.
While you are learning it’s only €22k though.
I guess the fact you get free insurance helps, and it’s not quite as bad as I thought, but with an income like that you can get a mortgage of around 170k, which will net you around 40% of a house.
Musk steered a social-networking giant into american-far-right territory for his own vanity, retweets baseless and dangerous conspiracy theories, and supports all sorts of terrible campaigns.
The ballparks are very different.
This is actually far from Matt's first rodeo:
He described Movable Type as "desperate and dirty players" for having a section in their docs on how to migrate WordPress content into a Movable Type blog.
When Envato started allowing people to publish themes they had created with a proprietary license, he retaliated by banning any developer on the Envato platform from speaking at any WordPress-related event (sound familiar to punishing the users for a disagreement with a platform?)
Wix was accused by Matt of using WP's mobile text editor in violation of the GPL. Wix showed that they had actually adhered to the license terms, and then forker their own version under the MIT license.
> one particular company (arguably one particular board member of such company, the SilverLake guy), that he now sees as parasitical to the ecosystem.
He went after GoDaddy in 2022 for the same reason, to the same extent.
Interestingly, for someone who has such hatred for Private Equity as "leeches and freeloaders and parasites upon open source software and communities", the ONLY other active member of the WordPress Foundation board (than Matt) is the Managing Partner of a Private Equity firm that Matt himself appointed.
This is not his first misstep, by far.
He lashes out quite regularly. There are other instances too, including him previously rewriting agreements after attacking people.
https://pearsonified.com/truth-about-thesis-com/
Then again I’m only speaking from my experience. Fewer companies are interested in interviewing and hiring me than ever in my career right now. If I had a job, I wouldn’t be leaving it.
Maybe other people are having an easier time. I hope so!
- did they work there?
- can they be rehired?
If the second is a "no" it usually isn't good news (usually, that only happens when you're fired 'for cause', at least in the US).
So, it isn't as pretty as an offer as you'd think.
I would expect you have to have been there for X months or Y years already in order to be given the deal. Unless Mullenweg is really that desperate to get rid of anyone who doesn't agree with his hissy fit.
Given his quite emotional outbursts, this does not seem that unlikely.
They say that before the layoff in 2021 they had been trying to grow aggressively. And since the layoff they have decided to stay small and not rehire. They say they were 83 and now they are 60. Specifically they have not hired anyone to be a full time manager since. Now everyone works on non-managerial tasks. Management is only part of your work.
I did see David post that they had 1500 applicants for a recent job posting. They offer extremely good pay for remote jobs outside SF and the US so it makes sense that lots of people are interested.
Is this Matt being a mercurial, megalomaniacal jerk, or is there some darker motivation that makes his behavior here borderline-rational?
It kinda doesn't matter, but it would be interesting to know. OTOH, I'm well past being surprised when some super wealthy tech bro shows his ass, so...
I guess you shouldn't let facts get in the way when you're pushing a narrative...
All of Matt's discourse suggests that there will be no settlement because he sincerely believes (in the face of all released evidence) he's in the right, so this very well could be them preparing for the long haul.
Dwindling runway as a theory to explain squeezing WPE and Matt’s public communications is getting harder to ignore.
Based on public posts only, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, founder of Wodpress completely lost his mind and went into war against WPEngine for unclear reasons (many suspect it's money pressure perhaps from investors). He claims they don't contribute to Wordpress and WPEngine says while they don't contribute to the core product they contribute aplenty to plugins, sponsor camps and documentation. He claims WPEngine "butchers" WordPress, WPEngine claims they host an unchanged version. (Note: WordPress is a codebase under GPL, you can change it). He claims WPEngine disables revisions and indeed they do and you need to contact support to get it switched on -- but the ability to disable revisions is included with WordPress although normally it's a simple setting. WPEngine claims they do this for performance reasons while Matt claims this is done only because of greed. He claims they violate trademarks, WPEngine says they didn't change how they use trademarks over more than a decade and their usage is referential (nominative) which is legal.
Further, WPEngine points out as recently as 2023 Matt had a positive opinion of them at a fireside chat at DE{CODE} 2023 "when you support companies like a WP Engine, who don’t just provide a commercial service, but are also part of a wider open source community, you’re saying, hey, I want more of this in the world". https://wpengine.com/resources/decode-2023-fireside-chat-mul...
This was merely an argument between the two but then Matt decided to cut WPEngine off from wordpress.org making installing and updating a much more arduous manual process for every WPEngine customer. He did this without any notice to WPEngine. Dragging users into this seriously and negatively impacts WordPress itself and calls have mounted for a WordPress governance overhaul eg https://x.com/QuinnyPig/status/1839340016738480226
That he is not acting rationally was crystal clear when the lawsuit got filed because he came to this very place and started commenting on it while multiple people begged him to just stop because he is digging himself deeper into a hole. Everyone knows you shut up the moment you are sued.
And after that he cut off the Advanced Custom Fields plugin team who is employed by WPEngine from wordpress.org. This plugin has a few million users. https://x.com/wp_acf/status/1841843084700598355
My personal take on this is obviously not positive. This entire debacle hurts open source itself. Mind you: I do not know whether Matt is right or not but there was no need for any of this. If Matt thinks WPEngine violated his trademarks? Asking for a license fee, sending a C&D and suing them are what a trademark holder normally does. Indeed, it might even be beneficial for us all to get judicial review on trademark usage like this, mostly these open source trademarks operate on "gentleman's agreements", I don't think they have ever been tested in court. If Matt has a beef with WPEngine using too much wordpress.org resources? 1) he could've announced that in say three months there will be a cutoff so WPEngine can implement a proxy 2) either fastly or cloudflare would've been happy to take that traffic off his hands (indeed, Matt said after the cutoff both reached out to him). For both of them a thriving web ecosystem means more business and it has a nice marketing value too. Finally, if he has a problem with the amount WPEngine contributes? That's a very hard problem, some ideas are at https:/...
And once again which one it is: you didn't answer me. If you think you did that's because you forgot to switch accounts. https://i.imgur.com/LeF241n.png
A company creates a free buffet and sells seats at a table. They hope a competitor doesn't come and take the free food, slather it in hot sauce, and sell it at their own restaurant, because that would be rude.
You are constantly talking nonsense. This is simply not a thing. Much as "rizz" and "cuckoo" is not in this context.
... is that even a thing? How is WPE the bad guy even if it is when there are NUMEROUS other wordpress hosting companies?
> GPL
The GPL specifically allows you to even SELL the GPL'd code to people, so I don't see how they are even violating the _spirit_ of the license.
More to the point, it's not like WPE is a black hole. They _are_ engaging and spending money on the community from what their court filing claims. Is it all self serving? Of course it is! A for-profit corporate entity rarely (never?) does things not in it's self interest.
I will freely admin I'm not a part of the WP community and have zero investment on either side of this fight. I will also say that just from reading what has been posted by all parties, I feel really strongly that Matt needs to stop talking/acting and let the lawyers sort things out at this point.
As an aside, as I was thinking about it this morning, Matt claims that WPE is causing him personally due to excessive usage of wordpress.org, right? But, if WPE goes away today, all those sites they were hosting are suddenly going to other hosting companies and the SAME amount of traffic will still hit the wordpress.org site. Trying to claim that WPE is causing undue traffic is just saying the WP as a whole causes too much traffic. So, are ANY hosting companies beyond Matt/Automattic funding the wordpress.org website? It's clear from the WPF financial filings that they don't contribute to funding that critical resource. And it's clear from Matt's posts that he prefer that every WP install uses those resources as he's expressly questioned why he would make it easy to point to another resource.
Being mad that someone is using the open source software EXACTLY as the license allows them to is indicative of very poor planning. If you didn't want anyone else to make money off the software, then why open source it in the first place?
They can claim all day long that WPE was misusing the WordPress marks and the courts will resolve that complaint. Their use of WP was expressly allowed as WordPress expressly disclaimed WP as a trademark.
They can cry about WPE's usage of the wordpress.org services and say they are abusing them. Until they change the code and make the update URL configurable, they are being highly disingenuous. Considering that Cloudflare has offered to provide free CDN services to WPF for this, it seems like the best solution for the community would be for Matt to give wordpress.org to the foundation and let them use the freely offered services.
As I don't know you personally Justine and just go on what I've seen you contribute to the world, I must say I'm actually surprised at your apparent hard line on this. As I have said a few times, I have zero involvement in this debacle and I think both parties are likely bad actors. But what I've seen Matt post during this would make me 100% never get involved with him in any kind of business. He's displayed a shocking lack of self-restraint and level of malice towards those he feels have wronged him or are in his way.
Is the Wordpress community so weak that after all these years they couldn't weather Matt retiring?
And if Automattic is such a business which can only exist as a monopoly then it shouldn't exist. Because that's what you are implying.
Once again: if WP Engine misuses trademarks which Matt holds then by all means send a C&D to them and if they resist then sue them. That's a completely normal business behavior. What's happening here is lunacy.
This is the same fallacy as "immigrants are taking our jobs".
No, this is not true. The market can expand, competition spurs innovation, they put in marketing and so forth. The income of Automattic in a world where WPE doesn't exist is less , likely much less than the income of real Automattic plus WPE.
You have been posting nonsense ever since you started, just stop.
This is the big one. I believe his argument was that when WPE customers updated they were using WP.org bandwidth for free.
That's a reasonable point.
But...doesn't that also apply to nearly everyone else who is running WP somewhere other than via a paid plan on WP.com?
If I download the install zip from WP.org and install WP on my own server, won't it get updates from WP.org?
If I get shared hosting at one of the zillion shared hosting companies that include cPanel or something similar, and click the button to set up WP, won't that then get its updates from WP.org?
What about if I use the Wordpress docker image from docker.com? That comes configured by default to just do the initial install from the WP that is included in the image and then update that as needed, so it seems that if I go that way and don't explicitly change it to be static (and then do updates by redeploy when new images are available) I'm going to be hitting WP.org.
Do I need to be worrying that if I use WP in any of those ways I'm going to be cut off from updates because WP.org isn't getting paid when I update?
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt
Since then, WPE filed a lawsuit against Automattic.
https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
I think these people really overestimate how much people give a shit about their company and what they are doing. Automattic is a sweet remote first shop which pays well - albeit I've heard you have to drink plenty of BS in day to day job.
Attacking WP Engine and preventing them to access OSS (which is not even OSS if you can ban people you don't like) was moronic enough, but this tops that.
I wonder who the hell advises these people - or maybe they're rich enough they just don't listen to anyone.
https://fair.io/
https://opensource.org/osd/
You're hallucinating that part of OSS. There's no requirement in any open-source software to interact with people you'd rather not interact with, for whatever reason you have, and there are extremely low limits to your continuing obligations for past interactions if you decide to "ban" them. (I'm using my non-lawyer understanding/memory on OSI-approved licenses, but I'd appreciate counter-examples to what I'm saying here if anyone knows of them.)
https://opensource.org/osd/
Technically you can of course discriminate in other ways and remain Open Source, like banning folks from downloading, or interacting with your bug tracker etc. Often those bans will be ineffective, for eg when there are multiple download mirrors that don't have the same bans as you, or people use Tor etc. Some of these sorts of bans don't seem to be in the spirit of the FLOSS movement though.
You miss the point. I'm not sure if this will help, but I'll see if I can expand and reiterate. Seeing this whole reply now, I apologize for the length. You might go back up to the parent comment and re-read what I was addressing: the claim that one's ability to "ban" is "not even OSS". Regarding ban evasion through Tor or similar, that plays into whether a ban is technologically feasible -- rather than about ability and freedom to make your choice in the first place -- and I won't address it further here.
If I don't want to interact with someone, I make that choice for myself. No open source license prevents me from making and implementing my choice for myself. If I previously chose to interact with someone and am now no longer willing to do so, then open source licenses have either no continuing obligations (eg BSD) or extremely low continuing obligations (eg GPL).
(If someone knows of a license that meets the Open Source Definition, to use a handy threshold, which does in fact require me to interact when I would prefer not to, then I would appreciate the counter-example. In fact, when I wrote "low" in my parent comment, I was thinking specifically and only about the GPL's requirement to provide source code for 3 years after interacting with a party, so I'd appreciate any counter-example that requires more than that.)
If others choose to interact with that same someone, then that is their choice, not mine. I am not a party to their interaction with that same someone. I may even choose to now include them in the list of people with whom I will no longer interact -- but that only goes forwards and does not change prior interactions -- and whether I even desire to make that choice is now getting far away from the topic of ability to make that choice.
My choices not affecting other people is very much in the spirit of open source and FLOSS, as I understand them.
The part that you quoted from the Open Source Definition is that the license cannot have discrimination terms. That has nothing to do with whether I choose to interact with anyone else on any basis that I choose, regardless of whether that basis is socially acceptable or not.
What that OSD requirement does do, however, is prevent my interaction choices from affecting others when I use an open source license. You might imagine a hypothetical license that discriminates against particular nationalities or industries, and contrast that with someone who uses open source licenses while still refusing to interact with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or North Korea, to use two current, real-world examples.
Forcing interactions with additional parties you aren't already interacting with is usually considered a non-free license condition.
For example Debian has the dissident and desert island tests for this reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guideline...
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.
I think doing it differently would not be practical, because the company would have to maintain some kind of companies/offices in each country. Another option can be hiring the employee directly at the main company (not sure about US, but I am pretty sure it's possible at least for some countries in Europe), but it's also more complex and I am not sure if this would even make sense for the employee since e.g. they would not be able to access the benefits like healthcare remotely. And as long as the contract is good and the company is trustworthy, being a contractor/self-employed may have some advantages like lower taxes.
Given that, and the behavior we've seen from Matt and Automattic so far, what are the odds that they've actually got a bunch of really great international accountants and are doing everything correctly everywhere, versus they're just ignoring all of the tax laws and winging it, and are therefore at high risk of getting smacked down once the relevant authorities get wind of what's going on there?
You’re also talking without concrete knowledge. We work as international contractors, we handle our own local taxes. Automattic pays us the gross salary and it’s up to you.
Kudos to Matt man. Dude has actually done a lot of good stuff. Sure he has his problems. But who hasn't.
Why do you say that? I do have sympathy for people in such countries and circumstances, but this isn't about that. It's about corporate compliance. For better or worse, corporations cannot just do something because it's a nice thing to do. They have to comply with the law in both the country they are based in and operate in, as well as in any country any prospective remote workers might be in.
I also never claimed to have any concrete knowledge. It's entirely possible they are doing everything correctly. I just find it odd that they are reportedly doing something that many companies do not do due to it being legally complex, and also their CEO is spouting off a bunch of unwise statements on public forums while being actively sued, which any sane corporate lawyer would strongly advise them not to do.
(Just hiring people as contractors, as it sounds like Automattic does, is another option.)
Think of the worst behaviors you have done which you are probably ashamed to even talk about.
Now imagine us using that worst behaviors to look at everything you do.
Sounds stupid right?
Exactly. That's why Christ was making a good point. Throw stones if you have not committed any sins.
Things like payroll, insurance, health benefits, retirement benefits, equity, unions, etc. all need to be done differently for different countries. This means that there's a lot of "extra stuff" that's specific to each country. For example, US employees expect a 401(k) plan and health insurance. For a US company, that's par for the course, but for a French company (for example), you need local expertise to navigate all the laws and protocols.
There are middlemen like Rippling that help centralize some of those things, and paper over the differences. But it's still a lot of added complexity. Not insurmountable, but smaller companies may decide to not burden themselves with it.
This is a great offer but "a bird in the hand" etc.
In other words, for those actually affected by the drama, a much higher percentage left.
If it were me I would have stayed while I kept looking. It's always better to search for a job when you already have one, and you really don't know when/if the right thing will come along.
On the other hand, it's a great mini-runway for people who want to start their own company.
On the other hand, most companies easily have at least 20% headcount overhead, so it'll be okay.
Now one could reasonably argue that it wasn’t due to the firing. However, the burden of proof lies with the people claiming that the concurrent loss of revenue and profit had nothing to do with the firings.
And Twitter being a private company it’s unlikely anyone can ever get the data to support that claim. Further, Twitter’s unique nature as a vanity project for the owner makes even public statements bh thst owner highly suspect, since they have a vested interest in making this look like the right decision and disclosure laws don’t apply to private companies so he can basically lie and still be ok.
> And Twitter being a private company it’s unlikely anyone can ever get the data support that claim
So, only the data supporting your point of view is reliable?
No, if you want to establish correlation or causation, you have to prove it. Don't have access to the data to prove something? Sucks, but then you can't draw that conclusion, at least not definitively.
I can believe, though, that you're at least somewhat correct that the mass firings were responsible for Twitter's decline. But it's plausible that other things are also to blame, and possibly even primarily to blame: questionable product decisions made post-acquisition (Twitter Blue, lax moderation, requiring logins to view, ...), the volatility and offensiveness of the new owner causing advertisers to leave, etc.
> We have incurred significant operating losses in the past, and we may not be able to maintain profitability. Since our inception, we have incurred significant operating losses, and, as of December 31, 2018, we had an accumulated deficit of $1.45 billion. Our revenue has grown from $664.9 million in 2013 to $3.04 billion in 2018. While we were profitable on a GAAP basis in 2018, we believe that our future revenue growth and our ability to maintain profitability will depend on, among other factors, our ability to attract new users, increase user engagement and ad engagement, increase our brand awareness, compete effectively, maximize our sales efforts, demonstrate a positive return on investment for advertisers, and successfully develop new products and services. *Accordingly, you should not rely on the revenue growth of any prior quarterly or annual period as an indication of our future performance.*
Imagine if a company told its investors: “Our growth is guaranteed! Nothing can affect our revenue and margins.” The only companies that give that kind of promises are ponzis (and to-the-moon cryptocurrency projects, which is not categorically too different).
Care to share which measures are those you speak of?
From what I saw, Twitter's revenue went down only due to the post pandemic economic slump following the pandemic bubble, and due to advertisers leaving en-masse because Musk won't purge the platform of hate speech and other content that's non advertiser friendly, not due to the workers who got fired leaving.
Comparatively, it's hard to find information about Twitter now. Most news articles mocks the revenue, but has no information about profit. However, given that Elon said Twitter "will be" profitable in 2024, I think it's safe to assume it isn't profitable yet?
This surprises me, I thought it became profitable from cutting expenses, but the truth is complicated. It used to be both profitable and not profitable at the same time (see the first link), but now it's mostly not profitable.
What also doesn't help Twitter's case is that employees are still fighting to get paid their severance fees. That's a couple hundred million dollars that Elon probably assumes he doesn't need to pay. Other fees on the order of tens of millions of dollars also include the rent that Elon decided he doesn't need to pay, as well as a bunch of other bunch of unpaid stuff.
My guess is that Twitter is banking on not having to pay all of its debts at once, slowly building up a profit and regaining its value so it can have the cashflow to pay back its arrears later, but that's a risky move that may lead to a debt spiral or bankruptcy.
Sure, it has been plagued by the occasional random errors and downtime ever since Musk came in, but I don't expect most companies to remain operational on a technical level when 80% leaves.
An important lesson for tech companies: hire strategic H1B employees throughout your company so when times are real tough, you're sure you can maintain operations with desperate staff that can't afford to leave.
In other words: slavery has only upsides for slaveowners.
However, the site is going through a serious cultural (maybe you could say spiritual) death, and that might have something to do with the lost institutional knowledge of what made Twitter tick at a level deeper than just the code.
I was never a big fan of it, and never used it much, so I can't judge any loss of quality over the past 2 years. And since they now require a login most of the time, and I don't feel like logging in, I don't bother clicking through links to Twitter that people post.
Quality content has disappeared on Twitter and there is a proliferation of Only Fans tweets. However if you love Musk and right wing conspiracies it is still a fine platform to use.
People are addicted to twitter because of FOMO, because god forbid they learn about breaking news an hour later than anyone else.
The only thing that changes is i used to click on those that looked interesting and now i don't because i know i won't see the thread without a login.
That said, Twitter is no longer "open" like it used to be - I bet it just won't handle the public traffic anymore. That is directly tied to cratering revenue but it's hard to untangle from the owner's self-destructive drug-induced behavior.
It's a testament to the quality of the codebase in general. Good code is hard to kill, but it WILL be eroded to the point where it can no longer grow and be better.
Twitter as it runs now is far more locked down. And that happened after it experienced significant, noticeable outages.
Performance is not binary… Twitter is still “up” as a service but with a much smaller public footprint and handling much smaller amounts of traffic.
Also, Twitter had two notable Spaces problems, when launching the DeSantis campaign (into the ground) and the second fiasco, which I actually forget what it was, just recently. The system just cannot handle truly planet-scale traffic like before.
create table users (id integer autoincrement primary key, username varchar(32), password_hash varbinary(32)); create table questions (id integer autoincrement primary key, user integer references users(id), title varchar(256), body bigtext); create table answers (id integer autoincrement primary key, question integer references questions(id), user integer references users(id), body bigtext);
but actually that's just a tiny fraction of actually making Stack Overflow.
Sure, the advertisers say its because of the platform being a cesspool. But I mean anything on Twitter is on FaceBook or YouTube; you might have to look faster or harder. However, that stuff isn't where FaceBook / YouTube sends your ads. The targeting on Twitter is so bad compared to alternatives that advertisers just don't care to use it. This is an engineering problem caused by having nobody to fix it.
Not doomed, but lots of failures did follow. Timeline not loading or repeating forever, SMS auth issue, API performance, going down in Australia, etc. - they experienced quite a few problems early post-change, but managed to recover.
It's is currently on a path of slow but steady decline. It is no longer useful for breaking news and it is full with Only Fans tweets.
However, if you want to read about Elon Musk or are into right wing conspiracy theories, it is still perfect.
If I want to enjoy Only Fans, I know where to find it.
- Scrolling after a while, the sound of a video doesn't stop anymore => force close
- A lot of violence, literally. I keep on blocking them ( recently logged in with another account due to a new phone and I had to do it again). It's nuts how much violence it promotes recently.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people who got fired did censorship and I miss it.
Working in the sense of being a successful purchase that's making a good return on Elon's investment by growing and profiting, not so much apparently.
I was pissed at Musk and his nonsense anyway - but the amount of random spam on there just made it annoying to use.
I mean, no I don't want a discount on a boob job ... but thanks.
Edit: it seems like he is. Wow.
Edit: thanks for removing the attacking language that was previously at the end of your post.
Low performances usually go on a performance improvement plan (which almost half who enter it graduate it successfully to stay).
People on PIP didn't want to take their chances and just took the offer.
This does not mean all 150+ people were low performers, some of the brightest, most intelligent engineers and designers left, and I do miss them greatly and hold so much respect for them. Many of them were dear friends of mine.
For your attacking comment, I'm engaging my actual profile and name, and you're engaging with a throwaway account that's less than a day old, so I don't know who's more spinless.
It is much easier for humans to rationalize hardships around them as something they can control. Nobody can control a monkey suit's decisions, specifically when they exhibit the emperors' new clothes type of issues. This is before you get into any of the usual resentment relationships that occur when companies restructure around their own self interest.
Try not to let the anon vitriol get to you. I understand that's quite a ridiculous thing to ask someone when their job/career is on the line.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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 has been adverse to Quinn Emanuel a number of times, and won every case.
And one of those was a motion for summary judgment that QE's client was not expected to win.
> Automattic releases a blog post in response to the lawsuit and announces that they have hired famous scumbag Neal Katyal
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...
[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e
It's 2 days, 22 hours.
Figured I'd throw at least one positive comment your way.
For the reasons I gave in that same paragraph.
I agree that you made more lucrative offers than Basecamp, but they presented their offers (publicly, at least) in a way that feels more professional and respectful of their employees.
Or perhaps that's not what you are saying at all, but are just a poor communicator yourself? If that's the case, I am surprised you are not more sympathetic to the folly of interpreting such statements without other context. Dunning-Krueger effect strikes again, I suppose.
I didn't say that poor communication is what qualifies someone as a tyrant.
You did say, as interpreted by the reader, that his poor communication skills makes him come across as a tyrant, and therefore that is what makes him a tyrant.
That may not be what you meant, but in that case we're right back to you and the poor communication skills of your own.
To try and take the emotion out of it, it's the difference between saying "I am tired" versus "this comment I wrote makes me sound tired"
But perhaps I have failed to understand what you are trying to say? Such is the trouble with communication.
So if you agree there's no personal attacks, I guess that settles things!
https://www.reddit.com/user/r_mutt1917/
I understand that things get emotional and things happen. Especially in business. If you’re looking for perfection, you will not find it in me.
But, this is extreme. It’s tremendously unkind and terribly unprofessional. The worst part is that they claim they can’t tell what division they are in. It leaves the impression that trashing > 100 people is fine, but being identifiable is a problem.
Can you please do something about this? We can part ways with people, feel sad about it but not destroy their lives.
Also at: https://archive.today/nsBjE
This was a very distracting 4 days, I'm glad it ended quickly, the dust is settling now, and we're slowly going back to work.
Also, as a longtime WP user, my understanding of the product is... pretty different now to say the least.
In many jurisdictions it would be an unfair contract.
To then say "Look at how many people didn't take up the offer so they clearly support us" despite such a short notice on the offer makes a mockery of the company and it's leadership.
Can you talk more about this? What jurisdictions? Is an unfair contract a legal term?
My point was a broader one not a legal one, that the company is acting in a manner that is hostile to a good work environment, putting up this kind of life-changing decision with only a few days to decide and then trying to paint decisions to stay as being a champion of the current direction.
That's treating your workforce with contempt.
Make the same offer with 30 days notice and see how many stay.
They're even still honoring lifelong premium access for first purchases of their apps.
I found Podcast Addict to be significantly superior.
While not necessary, especially because of the proprietary sync stuff you can't self host, Pocket Cast is open source.
What features are you looking for? What features are you avoiding?
Overcast is at least independent, so I’ll go back to them for now.
https://www.psu.edu/news/administration/story/penn-state-off...
20% of the employees across all campuses took the buyout. The percentage of staff (not faculty) that accepted it varied across campuses from 8% to 41%.
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.
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.
It depends on how you assess the risk. If one is certain that within six months they will find a new job that is as good as, or better, than their current job – sure, why not? But some people might come to the conclusion that the risk is too high. Especially if they like the role/team/company.
Switching jobs also carries “transaction costs”. Doing interviews, perhaps LeetCode tests, etc, can be exhausting.
Another factor to weigh in: Many companies do RTO now, so if Automattic offer 100% remote work, that itself is a pretty good selling point.
With these considerations in mind, I can see why some employees will opt to decline the offer.
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.
Like never eligible? That seems kind of petty. I would understand some timeframe, like "not eligible for 3/4/5 years", but a permanent ban seems weird.
Personally, i have never done so, be it because was always leaving by a "voluntary" "termination agreement", and the employers involved being either not attractive, not existent, or plainly incompetent. If you are residing in a major city, there are always other options.
And given 100% remote seems to be a must for many people, even more so.
The whole reason you are leaving is because you think the CEO is worse at adulting than a grade-schooler.
I completely agree it’s petty, but it’s entirely in line with their behavior over the past few weeks.
I guess at least it’s better than Musk?
30k probably has something to do with it.
I imagine for at least some people "$30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher" was the main motivator, and may have stayed otherwise.
That doesn't make sense to me. People stay in jobs they don't like all the time, with leadership they don't agree with all the time. Here's the reason: it's because they pay you to go to work. Like, money. If everyone just pulled up stakes every time the thought occurred to them that their CEO might be a petty tyrant, there would be tumbleweeds blowing through every Slack channel in the world.
They may call it “non-regretted attrition” or something similar, but the purpose is the same.
Matt, please, I know you're not going to listen to some random stranger, but maybe think about distancing yourself from this and getting some perspective from people that aren't as emotionally invested in this and listen to people like your lawyers, pr people, other senior management, etc.
Probably not the right way to hire a lawyer at all, frankly.
How does he expect a junior attorney to help him at all, especially one who is depending on him for his paycheck?
Here’s the job ad:
https://automattic.com/work-with-us/job/associate-general-co...
> Probably not the right way to hire a lawyer at all, frankly.
> How does he expect a junior attorney to help him at all, especially one who is depending on him for his paycheck?
Most large companies outsource the bigger stuff and anything non day-to-day (like trademark enforcement and litigation) to law firms.
Where's today's DHH, Jason Fried or Joel Spolsky?
Please don't make assumptions on time zones, it's rude.
Also, I am very much listening to the advice from my friends and lawyers, and even some random internet strangers. Happy to change my mind if presented with new information.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Drupal or even PHP Nuke was much better designed. I.e: Wp calls every published object post as it was designed as blog for posting.
Almost all CMS provide class oriented architecture, object caching, multilanguage, clean separation between base code, customer code and customer data, safe defaults (like all forms for commenting enabled),...
So, roughly 2,000 employees?
Original post: https://ma.tt/2024/10/alignment/
Edit: I stand corrected. OP is asking how many employees are in the WordPress "division", which I cannot find a public source for and is kind of hard to tally.
Matt said yesterday[1] that ~100 employees work on wordpress.org, one chunk of what encompasses the WordPress "division".
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726197#41726796
The person you are replying to is asking what percentage of the WordPress division, not the company-wide percent.
I mean, you are attempting to destroy your competitors.
For example they own Pocket Casts, a podcast application on Android (bought from NPR - I really wish NPR had decided to keep it, I feel like they would have been much better stewards).
There's not really a measure to say how much worse an $1000 or $500 per hour lawyer would be but no one is taking chances when you have this much money on the line.
Lawsuits are decided on facts if they end up going to court, and every case is unique even if they follow similar fact patterns.
2. If it does go to court presentation will matter an awful lot. There are really technical topics involved which for us are easy to understand but not so much for a jury of peers. Translating well the facts for the jury involves experience, a very good team and talent.
Until Apple does that, I'll likely keep using Day One.