211–220 of 249 posts
I hope WordPress (and Automattic) turn the ship around but its not looking good at this point.
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If we don't talk about what we feel is ideal, we can never strive to achieve it. Its really important to discuss idealism for that reason alone
Good luck with changing human nature, i.e. persuading managers to voluntarily act against their own self-interest. That’s just not how people work. What you say is true in some cases, but not in all cases.
If enough people take talk into action, we could reasonably see a change in behavior. It may come from sources than we don't expect, but it can happen all the same and we only have a chance at getting there if we are wiling to talk about what is ideal and raising that awareness. Its an important piece of that puzzle
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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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>the people running the business should fire themselves first? You were questioning whether they should , not whether they will. That's what people are responding to. They understand perfectly well who will get fired first.
I was questioning the idealism actually. There’s not much to be achieved by wishing the world was a certain way, it’s generally more useful to deal with the world as it is.
But even if they were idealistic, arguing with people for wishing the world was better is a genuinely odd thing. If you followed your beliefs, wouldn't you understand that telling people not to wish for things is pointless? If you actually dealt with the world as it is, you would not argue with people on the Internet because changing somebody's mind, particularly in the way you are attempting to do it, is just as much wishful thinking as hoping that CEOs will fire themselves.
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Why does the interest rate matter? Unless you have no cash on hand and are operating soley off debt??
> Unless you have no cash on hand and are operating soley off debt?? Bingo
The issue is that they're a publicly-traded company, with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. If they're investing in an internal product that will make back 1% of the money invested in it over the next couple years, but they could have been investing in Treasury Bills that make back 4.5%, they are committing financial malpractice and will be sued accordingly.
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The issue was interest rates. Money was free in Feb 2022; the interest rate was literally 0%, and so any cash-generating investment at all is profitable. Fed started raising rates in Apr 2022, at which point leaders started freaking out because they know what higher rates mean, and by Jun 2022 the Fed was raising them in 0.75% increments, which was unheard of in modern economics. By Jan 2023 the rate was 4.5%, which…
> The issue was interest rates. Money was free in Feb 2022; the interest rate was literally 0%, and so any cash-generating investment at all is profitable. Fed started raising rates in Apr 2022, at which point leaders started freaking out because they know what higher rates mean, and by Jun 2022 the Fed was raising them in 0.75% increments, which was unheard of in modern economics. By Jan 2023 the rate was 4.5%, whic…
Small-fry who operate secretly are able to take the long view and enrich themselves off the masses' stupidity. CEOs of a multi-trillion-$ company that is ~10% of the retirement portfolio of every American are not. At that level you have to go with the market consensus, because you will be ousted and deemed not a fit steward of the enterprise that you are entrusted with otherwise.
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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 everybo…
>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 th…
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/09/ceos-dont-steer/
A good CEO will let in just the little bit of information that saves the company - this was Andy Grove's pivot to focus on microprocessors over memory chips, or Steve Jobs's turnaround of Apple. You didn't have a good CEO, and got your average mediocre CEO that sets a strategic direction and sticks with it regardless of what the market says.
I'm curious though, if you knew your employer was going under, why not jump ship to the competitor that actually did understand what customers wanted? Employees are economic agents too, and oftentimes competitors are more than happy to hire out of their competition.