159 employees are leaving Automattic as CEO’s fight with WP Engine escalates

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...

I've brought this up in another thread, but what's stopping Automattic from going after anyone making a profit in the WP community? Website developers, plugin makers, theme designers, etc.

Everyone is using the Wordpress trademark to promote their service and the plugins library to keep their services updated. If that's the legal precedent being used now, Automattic winning the lawsuit implies that nearly the entire community loses it's legal right to exist.

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

As entertaining as it can be to follow a public meltdown for 5 minutes, this hurts because Automattic was a company I used to look up to. I had the idea that some day I might work for them. Not sure this will still be possible. Maybe on a business unrelated to Wordpress.

> 159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay!

That is an interesting (meritful, imo) way of putting it.

Either the industry has changed dramatically, people have changed or there’s something truly odd going on at Automattic.

There is a Reddit user right now:

https://www.reddit.com/user/r_mutt1917/

They’re making some very rude statements about the people who accepted the severance package.

Not too long ago, there was this unspoken rule amongst humans where we don’t trash a large group of former coworkers in public like that. We wouldn’t speak in absolutes about large groups of people. We had class.

And now I see this person who has trashed everyone who left. They apparently aren’t allowed to state what division they’re in. But trashing over 100 people seems to be okay. I cannot imagine a single functional organization approving of such a thing.

I haven’t used Wordpress in a very long time. But I had a lot of respect for Automattic. My hope is that I don’t have to keep the verb in the past tense.

Somewhere along the lines, we lost a lot of our humanity. It is very embarrassing to think that we traded humanity for social media likes.

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.

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

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.

Plenty of people who took the offer were on the fence already or looking to switch companies anyway, it was a good motivator for them.

> Mullenweg said the package offered $30,000 or six months of salary

I've really enjoyed some of the jobs I've had, but find it hard to imagine a world where I wouldn't accept a six-month payoff.

It will be interesting how many customers start flying the coop. Wordpress can be entrenching software but I have also found that a lot of the plugin heavy sites are just using plugins/customizations for trivial things you could easily eclipse. Migrating off of it is easier done than said in that case. We will be leaving WP Engine and Wordpress behind after we spend 2 months rebuilding on sensible software on a sensible host (WP engine is also terrible) this Q4.

We actually had a contingency plan to just leave WP Engine and fix our wordpress up, but in light of Matt’s nonsensical actions we have scrapped that option.

Congrats to these employees on fleeing what appears to be tyranny for the Automattic employees and the customers.

Good riddance Wordpress.

So now we know the lawyers on both sides.

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.

I can think of very few jobs where I wouldn’t take this offer immediately and have a few month sabbatical.

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.

Job market is very bad for programmers. Strange time to quit.

photomatt made a smart move to incentivize the exit of employees who disagreed with him on this important issue (as it would have festered in the company), but I think he offered them too much money.

WP engine should raise and hire these people.

>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...

[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e

6 months salary offer means people will take this whether they agree or not

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.

> 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.

Looks like the 2021 situation at 37signals.

I am a bit out of the loop does any one have a summary of what is happening with automattic and wpengine ?

I hope the legal team isn't included as part of that 159 employees, because god forbid they'll be needed.

>we called it an Alignment Offer.”

That sounds bad

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.

TIL Pocket Casts is an Automattic product. Anyone have recommendations to switch (and not to the disaster that is Overcast)?