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Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

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Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#201

Post by renegade-otter »

uxp100 wrote: post #141
renegade-otter wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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.

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.

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#202

Post by lolinder »

photomatt wrote: post #112
talideon wrote: post #78

TBH, I'm surprised they had almost 2000. I would've thought they'd be around the 500 mark.

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/

What percent of the WordPress team took the offer? ~126 departures were from WordPress, out of how many total?

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#203

Post by lazide »

arethuza wrote: post #161
preommr wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perspecti…

Maybe that's why they are hiring an "Associate General Counsel"?

That’s really not the right way to hire a lawyer you need right now.

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?

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#204

Post by lsaferite »

jart wrote: post #140
chx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 document…

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 pro…

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.

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#205

Post by ufmace »

senadir wrote: post #142
hshshshsvsv wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupid question but where exactly in the world is getting a remote job not tricky?

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?

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#206

Post by lolinder »

The article says that ~80% of the departures (126 people) were in the WordPress division, but doesn't indicate the size of that division. That's a much more interesting number than 8% of the company as a whole—depending on the size of the division and the sub teams affected that could be an enormous amount of WordPress brain drain.

For scale, Automattic has previously indicated that "over 100" people work on WordPress full time [0]. How many of those ~100 were part of the 126 WordPress employees who left?

[0] https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/09/26/our-wordpress-contribu...

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#207

Post by tzs »

yellow_lead wrote: post #135
hshshshsvsv wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupid question but where exactly in the world is getting a remote job not tricky?

I think in the US it's less tricky. There are much more openings without time zone issues.

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.

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#208

Post by finnthehuman »

yellow_lead wrote: post #133
benjaminwootton wrote: post #15

I suspect it was the 6 months salary rather than any major philosophical agreement.

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?

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.

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#209

Post by cpach »

surgical_fire wrote: post #185
cpach wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we can know for sure that those who stay think that the CEO made a good decision in this regard, simply because they declined this offer?

I don't know. 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41739789

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.

Re: Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

#210

Post by sleepybrett »

mtlynch wrote: post #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 mak…

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