I apologize for my erratic behavior which has tarnished our brand and created unnecessary turmoil within our organization. Regrettably, we will need to implement a 16% reduction in headcount to address the financial challenges we now face. I have decided to step aside and hand over control to my deputy, who I believe will provide the steady leadership needed to rebuild trust and restore our company's vision.
He'll never admit he was wrong or step down. He'll drive Automattic into the ground and Wordpress along with it (until someone forks it, like say...WP Engine, heh. Or Redhat, or IBM, or some huge web design firm, etc.)
He considers Wordpress "his" even though...he took it over from the original author who was abandoning the project.
It reminds me of the rage-bender Jamie and Jim Thompson went on, attacking OPNsense for "stealing" their work and doing a lot of immature things taking over opnsense's domain, their subreddit, etc. via legal actions. And at least one lawsuit. They lost on every front - reddit gave the subreddit back to the opnsense developers, ICANN gave them back their domain name, etc.
Attacking OPNsense for "stealing" pfSense was pretty rich given pfSense's origin; netgate slapped their logo on m0n0wall and started working on their fork. Which is exactly what opnsense did that enraged them...
Especially as pfsense software started getting more user-hostile and shifting functionality into the paid versions, pfsense has rapidly become less and less popular. I almost never see anyone recommend it anymore.
> He considers Wordpress "his" even though...he took it over from the original author who was abandoning the project.
Non Wordpress user here, not a blogger, don’t use CMSs. Curious about this line. Reading the history on Wikipedia, the original b2 was the precursor. It was pretty small and being abandoned. Matt proposed forking it in January 2003, and worked with Mike to bring the first version to fruition a few months later. 22 years later it’s a goliath.
Given that history it seems totally fair for Matt to consider WP his thing. You don’t seem to think so, can you explain?
>> There are no layoffs plans at Automattic, in fact we're hiring fairly aggressively and have done a number of acquisitions since this whole thing started, and have several more in the pipeline.
That was important posturing to make sure that everyone knew that his nuclear war on WP Engine was absolutely not going to impact his ability to run the business and the WordPress project. Whether it was true or not it didn't matter at the time, the important thing was to keep up appearances and not let anyone on Reddit think they knew better than Matt.
Yeah. I was made a manager in Feb 2022 with 5 directs and 9 headcount to fill. Hired 5, and then by June 2022 all remaining headcount was cut. In January 2023 we had our first-ever layoffs in the company's 25-year history.
How infuriating for anyone recently hired caught in this trap.
It seems to me the obvious, from both a business & human perspective, is to stop hiring at first signs of trouble, before layoffs. To do so otherwise is cruel.
I doubt Matt had zero idea about this possibility two months ago.
The business world changes direction faster than companies can adapt. That was my biggest lesson as an entrepreneur: entrepreneurs don't really pivot into product-market fit, the market pivots into them. The reason capitalism works is because there's this huge sea of dream-chasers out there, most of whom will go bankrupt, so that when the market's needs change there is somebody out there to service them, and everybody who's not effectively servicing them goes to hell and gets another job.
Corporations and management basically exist to buffer this uncertainty. Employment is actually a really bad deal in good economic times; owners reap almost all the windfall of having a successful product. But in bad times, the company keeps paying you even if they're losing money, at least up until they don't. You get a raw deal, but not as raw a deal as the people paying you.
Likewise with strategic direction. The market's needs change faster than senior executives can adapt: if they always produced what the market was actually clamoring for, the company would run around like a chicken with its head cut off (this actually happens when the CEO panics, and a key CEO skill, and part of the reason they're paid so much, is the ability to ignore every piece of market data saying "You're not hot anymore. Nobody wants you, and the market has moved on" and keep doing what you're doing even though your intuition is telling you that you're doomed and going to lose your cushy $20M/year job). Much of the job of middle management is to buffer senior management's freakouts and tell the ICs "Keep calm and carry on; let's see if he still cares about this new hotness next week."
The median position is to be hiring, just to backfill attrition. "Trouble" might be temporary; it might be noise. Hiring is always slow, with cycles longer than "trouble" might last.
We might argue about the parameters in this situation, but structurally there's a bias towards the low-pass average.
The exuberance and self-assuredness that your plans are going to work out leads to overreach and I think the lag in accounting practices helps make that more acute.
I have had too many experiences where I thought my current employer was about to start circling the drain, and I've ended up some place that was circling faster. At a guess I'm about 50:50, which I suppose I should count as 'lucky' but has never felt that way.
Fish-tailing is a common flame-out mode for startups. VCs are partly to blame. They don't like to discourage you in case you come up with a miracle, but neither do they want to put good money and time after bad if it turns out you're going to be a break-even play or a loss.
You are going to invest significant resources into hiring, onboarding, and injecting new staff into workflows for people that will not be there as soon as they are actually productive.
So its not just the cash burn - its the tieup of 3x team members to getting new people trained to become effective and successful contributor. Time is finite.
It makes no sense to throw away all that time spent by your team, who could have use that same time to get a few more features out, proposals sent , or projects spec'd instead.
So if you took the deal last year you would have gotten 9 months, now the severance is 9 weeks. Way to reward "loyalty". Good thing we're so smart and better than everyone else and we don't need unions.
Financially your best bet is to be in the 1st round of layoffs. Ego-wise, it's best to be in the second round. First round there's still some money and a lot of guilt, so the severance tends to be good.
By the time they lay off truly essential people, you're burnt out, and you're lucky if you don't have to sue to get what you're owed by law, let alone whatever policy they had for paying out vacation time or what have you. You also get to enjoy a fun period of survivor guilt when they laid off people who you think have contributed as much or more than you have, and then know that you'll be next if they laid of <person> already.
IMO, if there is any talk of "loyalty" in that first round of voluntary layoffs, you should always leave. Even if you were previously loyal, the company is changing and you won't like the results.
Not especially surprising, but there’s an awfully large elephant in the room that likely directly contributed to this necessity that goes completely unmentioned.
Matt's only real problem is not owning his ambition openly.
Trying to publicly argue the moral high ground was a stupid, unforced error.
It didn't need to be moralized at all. Just make the changes you want to make, piss off a vocal minority, then get back to winning and making boatloads of money by executing exceptionally.
The problem, I suspect, is that Matt values how certain people perceive him more than he values winning. It's unfortunate, because he's clearly a very good executer and strategist. He's getting in his own way.
Ignore the financial valuations, man is a worm. I'd call him a 'hack' but that might imply talents given where we are.
Through his shitshow, he tried - and failed - to curry favor with an OSS puppet. Not any particular software... like one might think, but the whole "thing".
There was never any moment where WPEngine was beholden for offering WordPress services. Everything was strained to the point he was trying to redefine OSS.
He got in his way, ours as members of the public, and that of WPEngine. Repeatedly... and I don't see enough reflection/reason from Matt to believe this will change. Personally, I'd hesitate to promote his strategies or skills.
Hamfisted is a better message. Or none, take the wind away. We don't want his ambition or to hear about it. It's demonstrably shit.
Edit: just in case this needs saying, I've never been affiliated with either company. Don't waste your limited time looking for me, Matt.
The extremely erratic behavior, the ego, the fixation with vengeance, harassing organizations legally using the Wordpress name, abusing his power at the wordpress foundation, using it to punish Automattic competitors...
He pissed off a lot of people, but worse: he made a lot of people nervous.
The legal threats against WPEngine and their customers, the lawsuits between WP/Automatic/WPF and WPEngine, the banning of several contributors, the takeover of WP Plugins on WP.org, the shenanigans with several check boxes on the login pages of WP.org.
the author of that email has been having a very public breakdown for months now, mostly consisting of being a prick and trying to harm the community and a competitor.
I know this really bugs some people but every tech company these days has a demonym for its employees.
It doesn't mean that employees have some cultlike adoration for the company. It's just very convenient inside the company to have a single short word to refer to all employees of the business.
From Reddit discussions, if they can be trusted, there is nobody who can remove Matt from any position. It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.
I disagree - it's not properly addressed, but it's nice to see it at least brought up.
Layoffs are always awful, but seeing companies talk about "changing economic realities" amongst continuing revenue and profit growth - often all time highs - is a real morale killer for those who are left behind.
Microsoft/Amazon/Alphabet/Google are trillion dollar megacorps who are insanely profitable, but they're firing people because they no longer have to pretend we care about you at all and will instead try to cater to Wall Street (who will never be happy - if I had $10000 for every quarter where a big tech corp "beat expectations" and the stock dropped anyway I'd retire). It's a hard pill to swallow and will increase bitterness and cynicism in the remaining workforce and kill any chance of your employees caring about your vision or putting in any extra effort.
> they no longer have to pretend we care about you at all and will instead try to cater to Wall Street
The company isn't "catering" to wall street, wall street is their boss. The owners of the company vote on what they want the company to do, and hire the person in charge of the company. And besides, do you care about your company? If you got a job offer to make twice your salary doing something you'd enjoy more than what you do now, would you stay with your current company out of care for them? Maybe you would, but I know of almost no one who feels that way towards their employer, outside of those working for small tech startups with their friends.
For almost everyone I know, their mindset is that they're going to do the best job they can right up until something better comes along, at which point they'll switch to something better. And I fully expect that if my best work is no longer worth more to them than my salary, they'll lay me off. In the meantime, they're paying me a ridiculous amount of money to do a job I enjoy. It's a deal that 99% of the world is envious of, and I don't think it should inspire bitterness and cynicism
In this case, the "our revenue continues to grow" is not transparency, it's deliberately obfuscating the increase in expenses that led to layoffs being necessary. Not mentioned is the insanely expensive legal battle that they launched with WP Engine, which is already a massive drain on resources and a huge financial risk given how strong WP Engine's case is.
"Our revenue continues to grow" doesn't matter if unnecessary expenses outstrip it.
When was anyone naive enough to think their company cared about them?
On the other hand, why should a company keep people around that they don’t need?
And the last point, speaking more about Microsoft/Amazon/Google, if you have worked for either company for any length of time, there is no excuse for you not to have a nice nest egg to tide you over especially considering the severance amounts they give you.
You might be forced to sully yourself and become an “enterprise developer” and make around what most of the 2.8 million developers in the US.
And yes, I did a bid at Amazon and within three years, I paid off some debt, saved a chunk of change, got my 3.5 months severance package and found another job quickly that was my target compensation (not enterprise dev).
If opex is growing at a faster rate than revenue, and it’s not a VC situation, then layoffs are a popular way to curtail opex — typically business leadership cannot effect changes that would eventually impact themselves, so, the board and executive layer prefer to mass-layoff workers and middle management first and then let the remaining leadership fight for their life to present optimized plans. This is of course a terrible approach, because — as Taskmaster quite enjoyably demonstrates — even the smartest people tend to make a lot of asinine judgment calls under duress and deadlines; but when the alternative is to admit weaknesses of leadership, it’s certainly a logical enough course of action.
> They also have our enduring gratitude for their time with the company.
I hope the RIF'd employees can pay rent with that gratitude.
If I were considering using Wordpress for anything, which I am not, this would end those plans. If they're laying off and keeping the CEO, they must be in dire financial straits. That message says "we're doing all the right things and have good leadership with a track record of making good decisions, but we have no alternative but to fire a sixth of our employees". That's not a good sign.
I used to be a big admirer of Matt and Automattic, but after this whole WP Engine episode I've lost respect. I shut down my old wordpress blog, still working on importing the posts as org-mode files onto my new site, I no longer recommend WP to non-techies that ask me how to build a website.
I hope WordPress (and Automattic) turn the ship around but its not looking good at this point.
I wonder if the CEO throwing a tantrum that another company was using "their" open-source (thus, not theirs) code wasn't the real problem, but it made investors take a closer look, and they noticed that Automattic has less of a moat then they thought.
I'm wondering the same thing. Considering they were just acquired, I'm concerned. Especially since as far as I know, they still are operating under a free model.
Haven't seen any public reporting on this yet, but from internal conversations this seems to include a 60% workforce reduction at Tumblr, which now only has a few remaining engineers.
I actually started paying the subscription for my Tumblr account a couple years ago. I don't get much direct benefit from it, I do it because it's the only social media site I use and enjoy, and I was hoping it would help keep it from shutting down. 60% workforce reduction is not great.
i dont mean to kick a dead horse, but a "few remaining engineers" for what is effectively an outdated clone of a microblogging site, a few engineers, seems like a lot still
That's an unbelievably terrible course of action. If you have financial issues, don't try to get out of it by litigation. Only litigate if you absolutely have to, and you have been wronged. Don't do it because you are trying to improve your bottom line.
Who among us can really say they haven't gone off the deep end, burned every drop of good will that ever existed towards them and their projects, sued a competitor and got hilariously burned by the judge, all while burning hundreds of millions of your companies value (blackrock marked them down 10%, which is 750 million)
This is just a normal thing that happens. It could have happened to anyone.
Many of them are fully depreciated and worth nothing, or nearly so, on paper anyway. Any new employees won't want an old laptop. And it will cost time and money to deal with shipping, storage, cleaning, re-imaging, etc. On average, the bean counters must figure it's cheaper to let people keep them.
It's a huge "depends". Different areas have different recycling opportunities. Some hardware providers have their own buyback/replacement programs. Also some companies may want to reimage and reuse the returned hardware. Finally you want some stock of temporary laptops available for people who are waiting for repairs so some functioning used ones are great for that.
There's a parallel timeline where he admitted he messed up, stepped down, hired a real CEO, put someone else in charge of the nonprofit, and the downward slide he caused started to reverse.
This comment thread is just hilarious. When a CEO of a VC-backed startup that you admire does things you disagree with, you find ways to justify their actions. When a CEO that is running an actually successful business and wishes to defend that business legally, you trash him. Be better.
>A comprehensive package covering severance pay and benefits.
What does this mean in term of monthly wages?
I was a technical lead for the Romanian branch of an US company. They fired me along with my team and other teams. The reason was they were profitable but they missed the ARR by a million or something. Last year they did the first firing round, this the second.
When they announced they will fire us, they also announced they will hire more sales people. The ratio of business people/tech people was already 7:1 before that. They also said a programmer should produce 5 times the money the company spent with him, and we were at 4 point something.
Now I have found a position at a local company which takes care of its people even in harder times.
Judgement aside, I've gotta respect the humane way this org does layoffs. There's some slags in here about founder being "sociopath", but I'm just seeing a really humane founder with maybe some control issues.
Trump, who betrays everyone for personal benefit, there's a sociopath. Mullenwag's just got some personality vices that served him as underdog, and didn't adapt to when he gained power
Tough break for Matt Mullenweg, who unfortunately was caught up in this reduction in force. I am sure this unexpected change will afford him new opportunities. Wishing him the best!
From an alternate universe:
I apologize for my erratic behavior which has tarnished our brand and created unnecessary turmoil within our organization. Regrettably, we will need to implement a 16% reduction in headcount to address the financial challenges we now face. I have decided to step aside and hand over control to my deputy, who I believe will provide the steady leadership needed to rebuild trust and restore our company's vision.
He'll never admit he was wrong or step down. He'll drive Automattic into the ground and Wordpress along with it (until someone forks it, like say...WP Engine, heh. Or Redhat, or IBM, or some huge web design firm, etc.)
He considers Wordpress "his" even though...he took it over from the original author who was abandoning the project.
It reminds me of the rage-bender Jamie and Jim Thompson went on, attacking OPNsense for "stealing" their work and doing a lot of immature things taking over opnsense's domain, their subreddit, etc. via legal actions. And at least one lawsuit. They lost on every front - reddit gave the subreddit back to the opnsense developers, ICANN gave them back their domain name, etc.
Attacking OPNsense for "stealing" pfSense was pretty rich given pfSense's origin; netgate slapped their logo on m0n0wall and started working on their fork. Which is exactly what opnsense did that enraged them...
Especially as pfsense software started getting more user-hostile and shifting functionality into the paid versions, pfsense has rapidly become less and less popular. I almost never see anyone recommend it anymore.
> He considers Wordpress "his" even though...he took it over from the original author who was abandoning the project.
Non Wordpress user here, not a blogger, don’t use CMSs. Curious about this line. Reading the history on Wikipedia, the original b2 was the precursor. It was pretty small and being abandoned. Matt proposed forking it in January 2003, and worked with Mike to bring the first version to fruition a few months later. 22 years later it’s a goliath.
Given that history it seems totally fair for Matt to consider WP his thing. You don’t seem to think so, can you explain?
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If only we had real leaders...
We do, but the sociopaths outcompete them.
You can trust me, facile3232, instead. I will improve upon all things the leader of automattic.com failed to improve upon.
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[dead]
Huh.
>> There are no layoffs plans at Automattic, in fact we're hiring fairly aggressively and have done a number of acquisitions since this whole thing started, and have several more in the pipeline.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1hxnh73/automatt...
That was important posturing to make sure that everyone knew that his nuclear war on WP Engine was absolutely not going to impact his ability to run the business and the WordPress project. Whether it was true or not it didn't matter at the time, the important thing was to keep up appearances and not let anyone on Reddit think they knew better than Matt.
It's not uncommon for companies to be in a hiring mode until they're very much not in a hiring mode any more.
Yeah. I was made a manager in Feb 2022 with 5 directs and 9 headcount to fill. Hired 5, and then by June 2022 all remaining headcount was cut. In January 2023 we had our first-ever layoffs in the company's 25-year history.
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Not uncommon at all, but perhaps a symptom of poor leadership.
How infuriating for anyone recently hired caught in this trap.
It seems to me the obvious, from both a business & human perspective, is to stop hiring at first signs of trouble, before layoffs. To do so otherwise is cruel.
I doubt Matt had zero idea about this possibility two months ago.
This will continue until there are actual consequences for those responsible.
I'm of the mindset that any time a company does layoffs, they should start from the top And work down.
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Those lacking empathy don’t know how to not be cruel. They keep filtering to the top unfortunately. Something that remains to be solved for.
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The business world changes direction faster than companies can adapt. That was my biggest lesson as an entrepreneur: entrepreneurs don't really pivot into product-market fit, the market pivots into them. The reason capitalism works is because there's this huge sea of dream-chasers out there, most of whom will go bankrupt, so that when the market's needs change there is somebody out there to service them, and everybody who's not effectively servicing them goes to hell and gets another job.
Corporations and management basically exist to buffer this uncertainty. Employment is actually a really bad deal in good economic times; owners reap almost all the windfall of having a successful product. But in bad times, the company keeps paying you even if they're losing money, at least up until they don't. You get a raw deal, but not as raw a deal as the people paying you.
Likewise with strategic direction. The market's needs change faster than senior executives can adapt: if they always produced what the market was actually clamoring for, the company would run around like a chicken with its head cut off (this actually happens when the CEO panics, and a key CEO skill, and part of the reason they're paid so much, is the ability to ignore every piece of market data saying "You're not hot anymore. Nobody wants you, and the market has moved on" and keep doing what you're doing even though your intuition is telling you that you're doomed and going to lose your cushy $20M/year job). Much of the job of middle management is to buffer senior management's freakouts and tell the ICs "Keep calm and carry on; let's see if he still cares about this new hotness next week."
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The median position is to be hiring, just to backfill attrition. "Trouble" might be temporary; it might be noise. Hiring is always slow, with cycles longer than "trouble" might last.
We might argue about the parameters in this situation, but structurally there's a bias towards the low-pass average.
The exuberance and self-assuredness that your plans are going to work out leads to overreach and I think the lag in accounting practices helps make that more acute.
I have had too many experiences where I thought my current employer was about to start circling the drain, and I've ended up some place that was circling faster. At a guess I'm about 50:50, which I suppose I should count as 'lucky' but has never felt that way.
Fish-tailing is a common flame-out mode for startups. VCs are partly to blame. They don't like to discourage you in case you come up with a miracle, but neither do they want to put good money and time after bad if it turns out you're going to be a break-even play or a loss.
Its not even cruel. Its just dumb. Really dumb.
You are going to invest significant resources into hiring, onboarding, and injecting new staff into workflows for people that will not be there as soon as they are actually productive.
So its not just the cash burn - its the tieup of 3x team members to getting new people trained to become effective and successful contributor. Time is finite.
It makes no sense to throw away all that time spent by your team, who could have use that same time to get a few more features out, proposals sent , or projects spec'd instead.
If you believe you need more people to get out of trouble isn’t it cruel to not follow through?
So if you took the deal last year you would have gotten 9 months, now the severance is 9 weeks. Way to reward "loyalty". Good thing we're so smart and better than everyone else and we don't need unions.
Financially your best bet is to be in the 1st round of layoffs. Ego-wise, it's best to be in the second round. First round there's still some money and a lot of guilt, so the severance tends to be good.
By the time they lay off truly essential people, you're burnt out, and you're lucky if you don't have to sue to get what you're owed by law, let alone whatever policy they had for paying out vacation time or what have you. You also get to enjoy a fun period of survivor guilt when they laid off people who you think have contributed as much or more than you have, and then know that you'll be next if they laid of <person> already.
IMO, if there is any talk of "loyalty" in that first round of voluntary layoffs, you should always leave. Even if you were previously loyal, the company is changing and you won't like the results.
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Your also competing with fewer people when looking for a new job.
Relevant comment from 24 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43309837
Not especially surprising, but there’s an awfully large elephant in the room that likely directly contributed to this necessity that goes completely unmentioned.
Matt's only real problem is not owning his ambition openly.
Trying to publicly argue the moral high ground was a stupid, unforced error.
It didn't need to be moralized at all. Just make the changes you want to make, piss off a vocal minority, then get back to winning and making boatloads of money by executing exceptionally.
The problem, I suspect, is that Matt values how certain people perceive him more than he values winning. It's unfortunate, because he's clearly a very good executer and strategist. He's getting in his own way.
> he's clearly a very good executer and strategist. He's getting in his own way.
Apparently not. I'd argue he was perceived as such but has thoroughly proven the opposite by now. There were so many stations to get off the train.
Ignore the financial valuations, man is a worm. I'd call him a 'hack' but that might imply talents given where we are.
Through his shitshow, he tried - and failed - to curry favor with an OSS puppet. Not any particular software... like one might think, but the whole "thing".
There was never any moment where WPEngine was beholden for offering WordPress services. Everything was strained to the point he was trying to redefine OSS.
He got in his way, ours as members of the public, and that of WPEngine. Repeatedly... and I don't see enough reflection/reason from Matt to believe this will change. Personally, I'd hesitate to promote his strategies or skills.
Hamfisted is a better message. Or none, take the wind away. We don't want his ambition or to hear about it. It's demonstrably shit.
Edit: just in case this needs saying, I've never been affiliated with either company. Don't waste your limited time looking for me, Matt.
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IMHO moralizing wasn't really the problem.
The extremely erratic behavior, the ego, the fixation with vengeance, harassing organizations legally using the Wordpress name, abusing his power at the wordpress foundation, using it to punish Automattic competitors...
He pissed off a lot of people, but worse: he made a lot of people nervous.
If more people valued how others perceive them more than they valued winning, the world would be a better place.
Drupal's sudden popularity?
Is the elephant in the room with us now? (Mind filling in?)
The legal threats against WPEngine and their customers, the lawsuits between WP/Automatic/WPF and WPEngine, the banning of several contributors, the takeover of WP Plugins on WP.org, the shenanigans with several check boxes on the login pages of WP.org.
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https://mullenweg.wtf/
https://web.archive.org/web/20241026031947/https://bullenweg...
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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2y7eyp3zpo
Matt Mullenweg is the elephant.
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the author of that email has been having a very public breakdown for months now, mostly consisting of being a prick and trying to harm the community and a competitor.
> This restructuring will result in an approximately 16% workforce reduction
Probably the most salient detail for non-Automattic employees. Everything else was generic fluff.
> non-Automattic employees
non-Automatticians. Yes, they literally used this term in TFA.
I know this really bugs some people but every tech company these days has a demonym for its employees.
It doesn't mean that employees have some cultlike adoration for the company. It's just very convenient inside the company to have a single short word to refer to all employees of the business.
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Plus severance will be paid but didn't say how much.
I was thinking this is a boilerplate firing email though!
I wonder if it's better or worse than the voluntary termination deal they offered to employees last year (first 6 months, then 9 months pay).
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> how much
With so many countries and legal frameworks to comply with, there's never going to be a single answer for this.
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Given what I know of the situation (which admittedly isn't much), wouldn't the best course of action be to shitcan the CEO?
From Reddit discussions, if they can be trusted, there is nobody who can remove Matt from any position. It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.
> It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.
My understanding is that the investors signed proxy voting rights over to Matt. They are mostly ordinary shares, and may be revocable. [1]
[1] https://ma.tt/2021/08/funding-buyback-hiring/
I am confused -- so if investors don't like the CEO, there is nothing they can do? Other than maybe taking their part of the money out?
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he'd already be out if it was simple to force him out
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With apologies to Louis XIV, Matt is Automattic.
L'etatt, c'est M'att.
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wait, did he put his name in the company name?
if so, that's what we in the narcissist-identifying business call a "tell".
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Mentioning "our revenue continues to grow" seems quite out of place in an announcement like this.
I disagree - it's not properly addressed, but it's nice to see it at least brought up.
Layoffs are always awful, but seeing companies talk about "changing economic realities" amongst continuing revenue and profit growth - often all time highs - is a real morale killer for those who are left behind.
Microsoft/Amazon/Alphabet/Google are trillion dollar megacorps who are insanely profitable, but they're firing people because they no longer have to pretend we care about you at all and will instead try to cater to Wall Street (who will never be happy - if I had $10000 for every quarter where a big tech corp "beat expectations" and the stock dropped anyway I'd retire). It's a hard pill to swallow and will increase bitterness and cynicism in the remaining workforce and kill any chance of your employees caring about your vision or putting in any extra effort.
> they no longer have to pretend we care about you at all and will instead try to cater to Wall Street
The company isn't "catering" to wall street, wall street is their boss. The owners of the company vote on what they want the company to do, and hire the person in charge of the company. And besides, do you care about your company? If you got a job offer to make twice your salary doing something you'd enjoy more than what you do now, would you stay with your current company out of care for them? Maybe you would, but I know of almost no one who feels that way towards their employer, outside of those working for small tech startups with their friends.
For almost everyone I know, their mindset is that they're going to do the best job they can right up until something better comes along, at which point they'll switch to something better. And I fully expect that if my best work is no longer worth more to them than my salary, they'll lay me off. In the meantime, they're paying me a ridiculous amount of money to do a job I enjoy. It's a deal that 99% of the world is envious of, and I don't think it should inspire bitterness and cynicism
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In this case, the "our revenue continues to grow" is not transparency, it's deliberately obfuscating the increase in expenses that led to layoffs being necessary. Not mentioned is the insanely expensive legal battle that they launched with WP Engine, which is already a massive drain on resources and a huge financial risk given how strong WP Engine's case is.
"Our revenue continues to grow" doesn't matter if unnecessary expenses outstrip it.
I might agree with you, if the "why we're making changes" section had listed even one reason to lay people off.
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When was anyone naive enough to think their company cared about them?
On the other hand, why should a company keep people around that they don’t need?
And the last point, speaking more about Microsoft/Amazon/Google, if you have worked for either company for any length of time, there is no excuse for you not to have a nice nest egg to tide you over especially considering the severance amounts they give you.
You might be forced to sully yourself and become an “enterprise developer” and make around what most of the 2.8 million developers in the US.
And yes, I did a bid at Amazon and within three years, I paid off some debt, saved a chunk of change, got my 3.5 months severance package and found another job quickly that was my target compensation (not enterprise dev).
I think it's just saving face. That statement could be true if revenue was growing at 1% or 10% or whatever.
If opex is growing at a faster rate than revenue, and it’s not a VC situation, then layoffs are a popular way to curtail opex — typically business leadership cannot effect changes that would eventually impact themselves, so, the board and executive layer prefer to mass-layoff workers and middle management first and then let the remaining leadership fight for their life to present optimized plans. This is of course a terrible approach, because — as Taskmaster quite enjoyably demonstrates — even the smartest people tend to make a lot of asinine judgment calls under duress and deadlines; but when the alternative is to admit weaknesses of leadership, it’s certainly a logical enough course of action.
Executive behaves like a child, labor suffers the consequences.
> They also have our enduring gratitude for their time with the company.
I hope the RIF'd employees can pay rent with that gratitude.
If I were considering using Wordpress for anything, which I am not, this would end those plans. If they're laying off and keeping the CEO, they must be in dire financial straits. That message says "we're doing all the right things and have good leadership with a track record of making good decisions, but we have no alternative but to fire a sixth of our employees". That's not a good sign.
I used to be a big admirer of Matt and Automattic, but after this whole WP Engine episode I've lost respect. I shut down my old wordpress blog, still working on importing the posts as org-mode files onto my new site, I no longer recommend WP to non-techies that ask me how to build a website.
I hope WordPress (and Automattic) turn the ship around but its not looking good at this point.
I wonder if the CEO throwing a tantrum that another company was using "their" open-source (thus, not theirs) code wasn't the real problem, but it made investors take a closer look, and they noticed that Automattic has less of a moat then they thought.
I wonder what this means for the future of Beeper.
I'm wondering the same thing. Considering they were just acquired, I'm concerned. Especially since as far as I know, they still are operating under a free model.
Haven't seen any public reporting on this yet, but from internal conversations this seems to include a 60% workforce reduction at Tumblr, which now only has a few remaining engineers.
I actually started paying the subscription for my Tumblr account a couple years ago. I don't get much direct benefit from it, I do it because it's the only social media site I use and enjoy, and I was hoping it would help keep it from shutting down. 60% workforce reduction is not great.
i dont mean to kick a dead horse, but a "few remaining engineers" for what is effectively an outdated clone of a microblogging site, a few engineers, seems like a lot still
what microblogging site do you think Tumblr is a clone of? and outdated compared to what, exactly?
Yeah, that’s my understanding as well
HR wranglers? Damn, that’s simultaneously hilarious and terrifying
"Either I'm an idiot, or something is going on that you don't understand. Let's check back in a month. :)"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1glejno/comment/...
...1 month later...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/64/wpengine-in...
“While our revenue continues to grow,”
Hard to read further than that…
This might not have happened if Mullenweg hadn’t sued his competitor, then went off the deep end and hurt everyone.
Another interpretation would be a common cause for both this and the litigation, i.e. pressure to improve financials.
That's an unbelievably terrible course of action. If you have financial issues, don't try to get out of it by litigation. Only litigate if you absolutely have to, and you have been wronged. Don't do it because you are trying to improve your bottom line.
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I think this is a bit unfair.
Who among us can really say they haven't gone off the deep end, burned every drop of good will that ever existed towards them and their projects, sued a competitor and got hilariously burned by the judge, all while burning hundreds of millions of your companies value (blackrock marked them down 10%, which is 750 million)
This is just a normal thing that happens. It could have happened to anyone.
It may also have been part of his reason for doing so. Panic/desperation.
on the positive side, it's a small thing monetarily, but retention of company laptops is a nice goodwill gesture
Many of them are fully depreciated and worth nothing, or nearly so, on paper anyway. Any new employees won't want an old laptop. And it will cost time and money to deal with shipping, storage, cleaning, re-imaging, etc. On average, the bean counters must figure it's cheaper to let people keep them.
Worth maybe $1000, not even half a month's rent in almost any major US city
They’re mostly high specced, newer M model MacBook pros
They do say they have employees in 90 countries…
Eh, from the company's perspective this is logistically easiest--the laptop's value is hardly worth the effort.
a lot of companies ask for equipment to be returned due to security concerns, or just on principle
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We always let our ex-employees keep their laptops because a. why not? and b. I don't need laptops for positions that no longer exist.
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And yet only one company I've ever worked for went this way.
I wish more did; it really is such a small goodwill gesture to departing employees.
companies that collect their laptops from laid off => where do these laptops go? how they recycle them?
It's a huge "depends". Different areas have different recycling opportunities. Some hardware providers have their own buyback/replacement programs. Also some companies may want to reimage and reuse the returned hardware. Finally you want some stock of temporary laptops available for people who are waiting for repairs so some functioning used ones are great for that.
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Redistributing them to new employees/interns is very common, especially if the laptop is only 1-2 years old.
There's a parallel timeline where he admitted he messed up, stepped down, hired a real CEO, put someone else in charge of the nonprofit, and the downward slide he caused started to reverse.
This comment thread is just hilarious. When a CEO of a VC-backed startup that you admire does things you disagree with, you find ways to justify their actions. When a CEO that is running an actually successful business and wishes to defend that business legally, you trash him. Be better.
Matt needs to be better, you're hilarious - he is the common denominator
>A comprehensive package covering severance pay and benefits.
What does this mean in term of monthly wages?
I was a technical lead for the Romanian branch of an US company. They fired me along with my team and other teams. The reason was they were profitable but they missed the ARR by a million or something. Last year they did the first firing round, this the second.
When they announced they will fire us, they also announced they will hire more sales people. The ratio of business people/tech people was already 7:1 before that. They also said a programmer should produce 5 times the money the company spent with him, and we were at 4 point something.
Now I have found a position at a local company which takes care of its people even in harder times.
Judgement aside, I've gotta respect the humane way this org does layoffs. There's some slags in here about founder being "sociopath", but I'm just seeing a really humane founder with maybe some control issues.
Trump, who betrays everyone for personal benefit, there's a sociopath. Mullenwag's just got some personality vices that served him as underdog, and didn't adapt to when he gained power
Tough break for Matt Mullenweg, who unfortunately was caught up in this reduction in force. I am sure this unexpected change will afford him new opportunities. Wishing him the best!
for others who took this at its word, this sarcasm. matt is unaffected.
As a great man once said: "some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make"
[dead]
AI is eating the world.
This is well handled.