Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Since I last blogged here, WP Engine filed a meritless lawsuit and Automattic responded, and there’s been a hurricane of public activity and press. Inside of Automattic, there’s been a parallel debate and process.
Silver Lake and WP Engine’s attacks on me and Automattic, while spurious, have been effective. It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.
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.
I’ve been asking people to vote with their wallet a lot recently, and this is another example!
159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay! 63.5% were male. 53% were in the US. By division it impacted our Ecosystem / WordPress areas the most: 79.2% of the people who took it were in our Ecosystem businesses, compared to 18.2% from Cosmos (our apps like Pocket Casts, Day One, Tumblr, Cloudup). 18 people made over 200k/yr! 1 person started two days before the deadline. 4 people took it then changed their minds.
It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired, you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit.
However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay. As the kids say, LFG!
Way to lead
I should also say, we’re hiring! https://automattic.com/work-with-us/
Lots of new roles have opened up. We’re going to need some more hands on deck to keep up with demand.
Looks like a win-win to me. Six months pay to find a new job. I’m sure having Automattic on the resume will speed things up.
I see that twitter is treating this story as some sort of apocalypse for A8C and and don’t get it why. You shouldn’t collaborate with those who aren’t interested in working with you. Instead, you definitely want to team up with those who chose not to hit the piñata and decided to focus on the band at the candy factory.
If twitter survived after losing 80%, you will definitely do better things in the future.
Good luck!
Using Twitter as an example is not a good look.
Keep it up, Matt. Let’s get people that are aligned to your long term vision in. We’re here for you and Automattic.
The problem is that only part of the story has been made available to the outside world. Most blogs and tweets focus on WP Engine cutting down revisions and core features of WordPress, which essentially makes them “non-WP.” If the core is altered, WP is not WP anymore. This could have been resolved with some understanding, but it seems things have gone beyond that point.
This is a story we’ve seen repeated often, where big corporations continue to exploit the open-source industry.
From what I understand, plugins/themes, and other hosting services for enterprises or hosting providers shouldn’t be free. I’m not sure why they were to begin with. They should contribute some sort of fee towards the resources they use. Only the core WP project should remain open-source and free—not the infrastructure around it.
Additionally, this situation could have been addressed simply by implementing a “pricing” model for WordPress infrastructure costs (plugins, updates, etc.). It would have been more politically feasible to explain this to the community, and the reaction might have been very different.
You are a great leader, Matt.
Whatever happened, I stand with you.
I shared my thoughts on X: https://x.com/WPFahim/status/1839260017532526936.
I appreciate all your efforts in trying to stay as transparent as you can. But the people that rely on WP Engine’s hosting or their crap plugins (ACF Pro = crippleware that sabotages your site if you’re not on a subscription, use JetEngine instead) are self-serving and not interested in who’s actually right or wrong, or what’s beneficial for the community in the long run. They’re going to demonize you at every imagined opportunity. Let the lawyers handle this mess and do what you do best: Move WordPress forward!
Of course WP Engine is self serving. *Everyone* is self serving to some degree. There aren’t any heroes or villains in this when you get right down to it. It’s just two groups of people or business entities acting as they think appropriate to support their ideas and users/customers.
One clarification on how HR sweetened the deal: The package included pre-scheduled sabbaticals this year and parental leave. So some people got 9 months instead of 6.
As one of the 91.6% staying put, thank you for making a stand, Matt. It feels more critical now than ever to champion and defend open source. You can’t keep cutting down the forest without planting new trees.
This was never going to be easy. But in the time I’ve known you, you’ve never gone with what’s easy at the expense of what’s right. That’s what brought a lot of us to Automattic in the first place, what brought some of us back after time away, and what made the overwhelming majority of us choose to stay.
Drafting my CV now.
This is going to end up being one of the best decisions you ever made. You’re going to be able to move much faster now and with much more alignment.
What exactly is wrong here? Is it corporate conduct avoiding trademark fee, or is it the use of a drastic “scorched earth” approach to deal with misalignment?
Wise governance is not about eliminating dissent but resolving it. As the saying goes, “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” Growth comes through engaging with differences, not eradicating them.
That was the most skillful layoff I’ve ever seen. Kudos! And I applied to A8C. Or submitted my interest (FWIW- I apply to pretty much every company that I’m remotely aligned with in the hopes that I can find a company to work for that allows me to be more impactful. So far I’ve rejected every offer.)
With due respect, please don’t call it a layoff! It is anything but that. Thank you.
“Layoff” probably is the wrong word. But it did trim away a portion of the company who weren’t aligned with the mission of leadership, like a layoff does.
Matt,
I just wondering where you think the dividing line is between reasonable use of the “Wordpress” name and unreasonable?
I ask as I’ve a nascent WordPress hosting business and im sure I’m not alone in being concerned that conditions might be put on me promoting that I use WordPress and those conditions are somewhat arbitrary…
Pete
I’m not sure, and I can’t say who’s right and who’s wrong, but I just hope WordPress gets better and better, and long live open source!
8.4% is a misleadingly high number as it includes all employees who were already planning to leave. What is actually relevant is the ‘excessive departures,’ which Automattic will be able to compute by the end of the year. Assuming that Automattic’s employee turnover typically ranges between 4-6%, the figure becomes even more modest.
I love WordPress and i love OSS and I stand with Matt in this quest, but…
I just wish Matt could find ASAP a solution to the crappy “Slack” app he demands us all to use in order to participate in the WordPress community collaboration efforts.
Slack is not OSS. and in most of local communities, we can’t afford the use of paid versions of that solution, so every six months or so, we loose loads of information that should stay free and open for everyone who might need to read and learn from it.
Beginners (like me) are the ones who loose the most.
It is just so ironic that Matt defends OSS principles with such braveness but then, in regards of the core task of “making WordPress”, I consider this to be a major flaw.
I just can’t participate in full WordPress collaboration until an open solution is given to the community instead of “Slack”.