8.4% or 159 employees is a lot of people, this will be long-remember at this company. On the other hand, most companies easily have at least 20% headcount overhead, so it'll be okay.
twitter fired a lot more % and it's still working
Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer
31–40 of 416 posts
Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer
#32I hope the legal team isn't included as part of that 159 employees, because god forbid they'll be needed.
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.
Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer
#33[flagged]
Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer
#34Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer
#35>So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher. But you’d lose access to Automattic that evening, and you wouldn’t be eligible to boomerang (what we call re-hires). HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.
Mullenweg doesn't explain when the offer was announced, but the earliest I can imagine is the Monday after he blocked WPE customers from accessing wordpress.org, which would mean employees had a max of four days to consider this deal. If it was after the WPE lawsuit, then employees had less than a day to consider it.
For comparison, when Basecamp did this in 2021, they originally had a deadline for the offer but extended it indefinitely.[0]
It's interesting to compare the way DHH presents the buyouts to the way Mullenweg does. Here's DHH[1]:
>Yesterday, we offered everyone at Basecamp an option of a severance package worth up to six months salary for those who've been with the company over three years, and three months salary for those at the company less than that. No hard feelings, no questions asked. For those who cannot see a future at Basecamp under this new direction, we'll help them in every which way we can to land somewhere else.
DHH's explanation of the buyout feels gracious and that he genuinely wished well to the employees who accepted the buyout.
Mullenweg explaining his buyout just feels like a petty tyrant purging anyone who won't pledge loyalty to him. He highlights the tight deadline and the immediate shunning of employees who take the deal. He uses the word "enticing" as if the employees who accept the deal are the weak-willed ones who succumbed to temptation.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hand...
Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer
#36I am a bit out of the loop does any one have a summary of what is happening with automattic and wpengine ?
We have no idea, really.
Based on public posts only, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, founder of Wodpress completely lost his mind and went into war against WPEngine for unclear reasons (many suspect it's money pressure perhaps from investors). He claims they don't contribute to Wordpress and WPEngine says while they don't contribute to the core product they contribute aplenty to plugins, sponsor camps and documentation. He claims WPEngine "butchers" WordPress, WPEngine claims they host an unchanged version. (Note: WordPress is a codebase under GPL, you can change it). He claims WPEngine disables revisions and indeed they do and you need to contact support to get it switched on -- but the ability to disable revisions is included with WordPress although normally it's a simple setting. WPEngine claims they do this for performance reasons while Matt claims this is done only because of greed. He claims they violate trademarks, WPEngine says they didn't change how they use trademarks over more than a decade and their usage is referential (nominative) which is legal.
Further, WPEngine points out as recently as 2023 Matt had a positive opinion of them at a fireside chat at DE{CODE} 2023 "when you support companies like a WP Engine, who don’t just provide a commercial service, but are also part of a wider open source community, you’re saying, hey, I want more of this in the world". https://wpengine.com/resources/decode-2023-fireside-chat-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://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem but inconveniencing countless sites because you have a beef with their hosting company is not going to help that's for sure.
Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer
#37TIL Pocket Casts is an Automattic product. Anyone have recommendations to switch (and not to the disaster that is Overcast)?
Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer
#38I can think of very few jobs where I wouldn’t take this offer immediately and have a few month sabbatical.
Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer
#39I am a bit out of the loop does any one have a summary of what is happening with automattic and wpengine ?
This is the best explanation I know of:
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt
Since then, WPE filed a lawsuit against Automattic.
Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer
#40[flagged]