Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic

> In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.

> “We were unaware that Matt redirected sign-up emails until current Automattic employees contacted our support team,” a spokesperson for Blind told me, adding that they’d “never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees from signing up for Blind by redirecting emails.”

> “New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That's water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt.

It's kind a funny, the whole point of the last offer was that you rip off the band-aid once and for all. But giving people a 4-hour window before you spend a week doing increasingly crazy things didn't really give people enough of a taste of things to come.

I'm also not sure why the CEO is being so pernicious with these tiny windows. Why only give your people 4 hours with no advance notice?

People want to draw obvious comparisons to the offers at Twitter and 37 Signals, but at least with those employees were a) given enough notice to discuss things with friends/family and b) knew what they were signing up for. I'm not sure if the Automattic employees who missed the window last week knew they were going to be engaging in supply chain attacks against their own ecosystem a few days later.

> Mullenweg offered Automattic employees six months of pay or $30,000, whichever was higher, with the stipulation that they would lose access to their work logins that same evening and would not be eligible for rehire. One hundred and fifty-nine people took the offer and left.

I can't imagine what that does to a company's output. What happens to everything those 159 people were working on? Surely not everyone else had intimate knowledge of their work, unless they were just customer support staff or something.

Also, often the people who leave at the drop of a hat are the more talented ones because they're not (or less) worried about the financial repercussions of doing so knowing they can get work elsewhere.

Life is too short to work in such a toxic place. I've been in two of them; not having a job can be bad, but life goes on much more pleasantly when you get out.

Should I even bother asking why there isn't some kind of Board of Directors at WP?

They could act as a check against one person going absolutely insane and destroying a company and hundreds of jobs in the process. (except in obvious cases like Musk or Zuckerberg of course, where they basically run everything and the board never pushes back)

I don't know about anyone else in this thread, but if I was offered a 9 months severance, I'd have to really, really LOVE my job to not take it.

More likely than not I'd find a job before 9 months.

I'd probably make screenshots and videos of the offer and me resigning just to make sure I get my $$.

Quoting:

> In the “Alignment Offer,” Mullenweg offered Automattic employees six months of pay or $30,000, whichever was higher, with the stipulation that they would lose access to their work logins that same evening and would not be eligible for rehire.

> One hundred and fifty-nine people took the offer and left. “However now, I feel much lighter,” Mullenweg wrote in his blog.

Awesome. I'd love to see more offers like this.

I don't know why i keep popping into these WP related threads, gotta take a break... Apparently also just read that he used the .org to push a post promoting alternative WPEngine hosting to his affiliates. I have no clue what is going on anymore.

>> “Overall, the environment is now full of people who unequivocally support Matt's actions, and people who couldn't leave because of financial reasons (and those are mostly silent),” one Automattic employee told me.

So if he keeps making the financial benefit of leaving more attractive, we should see significant uptick in people who accept? If you support Matt, Automattic is probably becoming an increasingly awesome place to work!

Maybe everyone will just leave and fork the project and run a company without this toxic brogrammer at the helm.

Hope these people are aware that your work computer, work phone, work vehicle, email account, slack, etc, and anything sent through an employers network (including personal devices/accounts connected to employer's wifi/vpn) can (and in many cases will) be snooped on, if you live in the US.

If you're in a toxic work environment, don't say shit on or near employer devices or over their networks. It will be used against you. I've heard too many stories of people getting screwed as a result of this at companies small and large, and I've experienced it firsthand. If you need to check something or log into a personal account, do it on your personally owned device and over a non-employer network. If you're at work, use your cell connection directly or through tethering. Employers can legally do this, so cya.

thats is why board is very important. this looks like one man show.

That is seriously sad

For anyone working at Blind - PGP encryption on emails as an option please.

Like Amazon, continuing to work for Automattic is a choice.