FWIW Jeffrey Zeldman is a living legend. He was one of the first print designers to transition to the web, did it well, and wrote about it constantly. He designed the “Batman Forever” website in 1995; it was visited by something like one-third of all Internet users.
He created the Web Standards Project, hugely influential in getting browser manufacturers to support standards rather than pee in the pool. And if you think cross-browser support today is rough, at the time you could reliably crash production browsers with valid CSS.
Never mind A List Apart, one of the best early mailing lists on the web, a kind of transitionary form between Usenet and forums/Discord. And A Book Apart, which published lots of high-quality stuff.
If you develop for the web today, every time a browser behaves as the spec describes, thank Jeffrey Zeldman.
> I also know that the Maker-Taker problem is an issue in open source, just as I know that a friend you buy lunch for every day, and who earns as much money as you do, is supposed to return the favor now and then
Informal agreements like this work between people who know each other, not for agreements between strangers. The terms in an open source license are intended to be universally applicable, to make the obligations clear for anyone who reads them. This includes total strangers and companies that didn’t exist when you published the code.
Those strangers shouldn’t be expected to abide by anything not explicitly written down in the license. If the license doesn’t document the obligations you expect of anyone, you used the wrong license.
We should be suspicious of people who try to claim that there are additional unwritten obligations for reusing source code. Open source licenses have very generous terms, maybe too generous. They allow takers. That’s how it works, you can take it.
Nah. Or at least, not entirely. (I'm not really writing about Automattic here).
Contracts -- and law in general -- describe in detail what kinds of actions will allow another to bring legal force into play against you or vice-versa.
But there's all kinds of actions that I can legally take that don't conform to norms that will invite condemnation and reprisal through means other than the legal sphere.
Not every obligation should be given legal force; not every action that's strictly legal will turn out to be socially okay or consequence free.
In my opinion this is completely backwards. You should reserve all of the rights you intend to exercise. This is indeed what most companies have always done; you don't go randomly giving people copyright licenses to e.g. your characters and then get mad when they use them. Instead you just tacitly allow some unlicensed usage of your IP. That really is a social contract that exists in different places across the world.
I understand that some people didn't always understand the consequences of their choices, or maybe wrongly thought we all agreed on these unwritten social contracts, but we don't agree at all and I hope the lesson is learned well.
None of my prior work contracts stipulated not to microwave fish in the break room, or how often I ought to shower; yet "Don't stink up the office" is rule most folk innately know, recognize and respect as part of being a decent colleague. Some rules have to stay unwritten (or be in vague clauses), otherwise every contract will be tens of thousands of pages long.
Look, you can argue about the existence of social norms till the cows come home, it won't change the fact that there is a non-trivial subset of open source developers and users that believe the lack of discrimination of any kind is exactly the point of Open Source. The definition is not stipulating these rights indiscriminately by accident, and it did not have to be written that way. I will acknowledge that some people in the community clearly believe that enforcing unwritten social rules with regards to Open Source is the best practice, but I don't accept that this is the common or obvious viewpoint. I think that viewpoint is overrepresented in spaces like Hacker News with a lot of startup-adjacent folks but even here I wouldn't expect the majority of people to agree with this.
P.S.: This all having been said, while I think that there aren't commonly-shared unwritten rules w.r.t. who may do what with open source software pertaining to its copyright license(s), I don't think there's absolutely no "unwritten rules" in open source. For example, I think the CLA rug-pull pattern is a pretty dirty trick, but that has little to do with open source licenses and more to do with outright deceiving people. And even then, it does beg the question of why you would agree to sign something that explicitly grants that right when there is absolutely no reason to do so.
If you want things, you get them written into the contract. that's how business works. Eg the license for Facebook's llama model says if you have a ton of users you gotta pay up. if this were something small, like maybe give us a shout-out once in a while then hey, but we're talking substantial actual resources that shouldn't be left to implied assumptions. because if you don't actually talk about it, what I assume and what you assume is reasonable is going to be on different planets.
A license can allow something, but there can still be companies that are good citizens of the open source community of things licensed that way and other companies that are not so good.
In turn, that can affect how likely others are to view those companies favorably and/or cooperate with them.
e.g. I favor Prusa 3d printers over other vendors because Prusa provides substantial resources to development of the tooling that we all use. Other vendors are (usually) compliant with the contract, but may not be seen as good citizens by everyone in the community, and this can have consequences even if it doesn't have legal force.
It's I think sort of clear from everything that Automattic's leadership doesn't seem to understand that running a business means you're running a business. You're not making a side project, working on a hobby or running a non-profit. You're running a for-profit business which means others will treat you as such and you can't make excuses for it.
I don't buy it. This "only what's in the legal" is so silly, and ppl who keep writing it are self-identifying as not understanding whole branches and histories of community- and culture-building
> We should be suspicious of people who try to claim that there are additional unwritten obligations for reusing source code. Open source licenses have very generous terms, maybe too generous. They allow takers. That’s how it works, you can take it.
This only makes sense in the point of view that every obligation should be enforced by courts. However public opinion can sway people to fulfill non-legal obligations or else have their reputation tarnished. WP Engine reputation is pretty damaged due to their behavior of being a "taker" rather than a "maker".
>We should be suspicious of people who try to claim that there are additional unwritten obligations for reusing source code.
There are additional and unwritten obligations in everything, that's just what a culture is. And open source culture has always relied on a general goodwill extended to strangers, it is what keeps it alive. If we only abide by the letter of the law and take as much as we can and give as little as possible open source is just dead, I mean you already see this with large open source contributors moving towards more restrictive licenses.
Saying that the conclusion of this is that licenses were too generous and that we ought to be suspicious of people because they take the underling ethos seriously is... strange to say the least.
The social obligations that people have are not the same obligations that businesses have with each other, and that is true culturally and legally.
There are no consumer protection laws for businesses. There is no cooling off period for certain contracts. Businesses are supposed to have the legal wherewithal to protect their own interests.
I don’t know why you are downvoted. I find it pretty terrifying that people are thinking about companies as if they were conscious beings while they are only a complex mix of the people working for it who may or may not have random amounts of power.
Companies aren’t people, they are social constructions which can, or not, have positive or negative impact on the society but ultimately live for making money. And I don’t mean this as an insult, it’s just that if you want to work with other people with other goals than making money, a company is just the wrong structure. I think it’s crucial to stop that belief that companies have souls. Companies souls are what is wrote in their status, nothing more, nothing less.
I would argue that the taking is the point of open source. By providing software free to use and copy and modify to the world, you’re making it a better place. You won’t be financially rewarded for that. That isn’t the point. Mongo, Redis, Elastic, HashiCorp, Automattic, and many others have forgotten that.
Obviously I agree that current licenses do permit this. However: What are the long-term implications if everyone behaves this way?
They are that less open source software will be created and made available to everyone with permissive licensing. More software will be produced either commercially, or with more restrictive licensing. Less software will be produced overall, because of the overhead costs of enforcing these restrictions. The culture will shift from a norm of "Here, use this thing I made if you want!" towards "You'd better not be using this thing I made without paying me."
This formalisation of norms into explicit contracts backed by legal enforcement would not necessarily be a bad thing overall, and it may be a necessary thing in a "society" where there are too many people for everyone to know everyone else personally and establish trust that way. But it will be different. There will be winners and losers.
Everyone does behave this way. For any popular open-source project (e.g., Linux), the absolute vast majority does not contribute, just uses or makes money off of it. How can you shame someone into starting to contribute? There are people who like to contribute, there are other people who like to make a quick buck using someone else's work, and nothing else, and always will be. Unclear how to magically change the latter if the legal means fail.
This is silly. Open source doesn't require getting paid. In fact, that people have figured out how to make open source turn them into billionaires is a problem. And a good sign that the market is broken. Get those people out of open source. Linux, Kubernetes, Apache, Python, and more are doing just fine. Companies should find ways to build things together rather than trying to abuse open source to pay off VCs who are the real takers in the software industry.
Maybe I’m out of touch but I don’t get people complaining about the „takers“ in the maker-taker-problem. If you are offended when people take your stuff without contributing, don’t make it open source. Maybe it’s just me being too cynical but people taking my open source stuff and contributing nothing is basically the expectation, everything else is a welcome positive surprise. But I would never get angry and badmouth other people because they dared taking my stuff I consciously open sourced earlier.
Also, imagine other open source projects doing this. Should Linux maintainers complain about every company using Linux Servers without contributing to the kernel? Or would offering Linux hosting be the better analogy? What percentage of Linux hosting providers has written a single kernel patch and contributed it?
I have a tough time relating to "[believing] in the work we do" at a for-profit company, especially one that just makes blogs. I work at a somewhat similar commercial open source company, I really enjoy my job, and I adore my direct collegues, but I've thought a lot over the past few years that if in a similar position I would almost definitely take the offer.
A job you like where ~10% of your colleges leave is a job I would probably enjoy a whole lot less.
Thats an interesting sentiment to me. I dont have much trouble believing in the work, even in for-profit companies. For me, it is about the end product, and if it makes the world a better place or not. If it is net positive, than the work (as a whole), is meaningful. Everything beyond that is just degrees of efficiency.
I conceptually like non-profits, but that seems tangential. Why would I discount my work due to comparison with a hypothetical alternative that is more efficient at doing good.
Nothing wrong with blogs, but I think it’s useful just to be real what it is we’re doing. I don’t think there’s a moral obligation or a unique social benefit to creating WordPress.
You can enjoy your job, and I do too, but I don’t claim to be doing anything extraordinary.
Oh, I agree. I just don't think believing in the work requires it to be extraordinary or ground breaking. For example, you can believe that growing potatoes is beneficial work.
Of course, as stated, "believe in the work" is an imprecise sentiment. Believe what exactly? They probably don't believe it is bad tho, haha
>I dont have much trouble believing in the work, even in for-profit companies.
One of the things I liked about selling software is the knowledge that customers do value your software. If they didn't then they wouldn't put their hand in their pocket.
If you replace the word "software" with the word "Fentanyl" in your sentence, do you still like it?
The sentence is still true regardless of whatever noun you put in it. If the noun itself changes your mind then you should either clarify or reconsider your position
I feel the same way about drug making. Customers might wish new drugs were cheaper, but they are free to with cheaper options or generics. Meanwhile, today's blockbuster will be tomorrow's generic, and progressively more lives are saved.
That may be true when we’re talking about investing in new drugs, but a whole lot of the pharmaceutical industry engages in rent-seeking behavior, and people are often not deep thinkers so their natural inclination is to just throw the baby out with the bath water.
The rent seeking is pretty negligible when you zoom out in time. It is extremely hard to find a specific medication that is still on patent 20 years after approval.
I think people are generally confused by things like insulin, where there are newer and better versions coming out continually, despite it being invented in the 1920s.
So how does a diabetic get one of the older, worse insulins that they can afford? Certainly that's preferable to the better insulin that they can't afford.
At Walmart it is $25 for 1,000 Units of Novolin N [1], with no insurance or prescription. 1000 units is about a month for a lot of people. Novolin N is a third or 4th generation Insulin approved in 1950.
You can get 1000 units of Humalog (Approved in 1996) for $43 at walgreens or most pharmacies (or 19.99 with a Walgreens coupon) [2]
The more recently approved version of Insulin Afrezza, (approved in 2014) costs about $2,000 for a monthly supply.[3]
There has been a fairly consistent march of insulin improvements since the first versions were sold in 1926. [0]
This seems like a pretty big "if". Arguably, Automattic is better than most for-profit companies since they develop a FOSS product, and I think you can make an argument that any sort of FOSS makes the world better.
OTOH, it's not clear to me that making it easier and cheaper to blog or host websites makes the world better. I'm sure there's lots of people using WordPress and similar products for horrible things, like tobacco companies, arms manufacturers, animal ag companies, etc. And that's not to mention the no doubt plenty of personal users who are blogging about conspiracy theories, white supremacy, or Hindu nationalism.
I think the best case for most software is that it's net _neutral_. I work at a database company. Our products are used by many, many different companies, non-profits, and governments. I think some of our customers are horrible, some are great, and most are neither. But that would be the case for me at nearly every software company I might work at.
These casual calls for censorship are really dangerous. Every idea that we take for granted today started as something that was justifiably censorable for the social standards of the time (civil rights, women's voting rights, etc).
If Billy Bob wants to out himself as a white nationalist, I'd rather he do it out in the open. If it's really a terrible idea then it won't get any traction.
When you censor these people it gives them even more reason to get angry and people start supporting just to fight the perceived injustice. This was a key driver in Jan 6th.
I don't think the plan that software is not neutral is any more supportive than it is good or bad. If anything, neutrality seems extremely unlikely because if you were to total all of the impacts, it seems exceedingly unlikely that they would perfectly sum up to zero.
That said, you are right in that these judgments certainly depends on your mental model of the world. Ex. Are blogs and websites good or bad. A proponent of radical back to the trees movement would probably disagree. I tend to think logs are a good thing for the world
There’s a lot of anti-capitalist brainwashing these days that exists to make you just feel guilty about the social/environmental effects of everything that isn’t free.
Being relatively far-left, much of the tech industry is indoctrinated into it.
It seems to them like a not-unintelligent, non-controversial, or even obvious viewpoint because they’ve been swimming in that water their whole lives. It’s a first principle to them and they don’t even know it.
I believe in the work they do. The web would be much sadder without standalone blogs and websites, they mostly power the diverse smaller outfits. Hate to see the entire world gobbled up and milked dry by some single-digit combo of youtube, insta, x, whatever.
IMO the next generation of website tools are coming along in the form of drag-and-drop premade widgets and integrations to YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Almost all of WP value isn't composed of indie blogs and websites, almost all the value comes from business websites. If indie blogs and websites die it won't be because of WP because there will be other tools. Indie content of the WP variety is dying organically, or at the least the rising tide does not lift all boats.
And if indie content creation moves to TikTok that's because it's what the next generation wants.
Slight tangent; but arguments such as "if indie content creation moves to TikTok that's because it's what the next generation wants" are almost universally invalid. The reasons a trend emerges are complex and definitely not only down to an average preference nor simply a generational shift, though those factors might play a small role. There are at least 2 other major factors that outweigh those, and probably more.
People routinely make choices that have long term outcomes they don't agree with; and we all know they do and thus the information industry quite explicitly exploits this - the difference between what we "really" want and short term impulses has never been larger due to such intentional exploitation.
Secondly, network effects. The way intellectual property happens to work allows platforms to effectively own networks their user's create. A group of entirely rational users might well each individually choose to join a network since for them doing so is extremely valuable, even in the knowledge that it'd be better for everyone to choose a different alternative if they could manage to do so collectively, especially since IP laws mean it's quite unlikely for any such alternative not to eventually develop similar weaknesses. Business plans work when profiting off content involves controlling it simply because that's how the law pretty much defines it - IP doesn't support creativity directly, it supports monopolies and leaves the support to exploiting that monopoly.
The implied argument sort of infers a cause by default - people are choosing the proverbial tiktok (or whatever other new thing), people are rational, therefore there must be a reason, therefore tiktok is better for people (and we don't need to know why). But each of those steps is quite weak; the overall link is tenuous at best.
I don't see a reason to exclude those from my earlier comment at all. Yes, they are very much a part of the deal too, whether ecom or whatever business they are in. Having independent "wp shopping carts" replaced by generic Prime dropshipping with both sides at the mercy of a monopolist would also be very sad. If there are people dedicated to improving the standalone alternative software and sustaining those efforts by making money off of it, i view it as a 100% positive.
100% agreed - given that they published this under their own name though, I wonder how much of that was just echoing the corporate mission statement of Automattic for the sake of any colleagues who happen to stumble across the blog.
> I wonder how much of that was just echoing the corporate mission statement of Automattic for the sake of any colleagues who happen to stumble across the blog.
It's fairly obvious that's what it is.
Or they are being forced to post "I stayed", as nearly everyone that I've come across that works there is posting it. To the point where it doesn't even feel organic.
For anyone else that wants the latest drama: Matt seems to be weaponizing Automattic and CVE's against WP Engine now.
Yes. That's his job. His title is Employer Brand and when our glassdoor scores were too low he led the charge to write fake reviews to boost the score.
> Automattic's security team has responsibly disclosed a vulnerability in @wp_acf to @wpengine. As is standard, they have 30 days to issue a fix before public disclosure. We have reserved this CVE for the issue: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2024-9529
Basically announcing to the world that there is a CVE in a very widely used ("2MM+ sites") WP plugin, that also can't be patched as they banned the developers accounts from updating said plugin[1].
Perhaps Automattic's goal is to force WPEngine to host their plugin(s) elsewhere? And also force WPEngine to have their own plugin cache or plugin market? Or at least no longer rely on WordPress.org's plugin repo directly.
I was a bit dubious about this point of view before reading the full post, but wow, the last couple paragraphs lay it on thick. Suing someone for using your open source product in their own product takes "courage"? Comparing the work of developing Wordpress to Rodney King? I want to give the author the benefit of the doubt, and maybe I'm too cynical, but this sounds even more corporate-y than a lot of stuff I've read on company-hosted blogs.
I don't think there was a comparison between WordPress and Rodney King. If so, what is the comparison being claimed. Is WordPress the cops? The one saying can't we get along?
The way I read it at least, it was a simple reference and sentiment, not a comparison.
There is no comparison. there is a reference. A reference is not a comparison.
You also didnt answer my question. You are claiming there is an inferred comparison. If so, please explain what two things are being compared, and in what way.
Does the reference have no interaction with the rest of the blog post?
If I mention that I have a big idea and then mention how a great man also once stated “I have a dream”, do you think I’m referencing MLK with no inferred comparison to my idea?
Referencing something in light of your previous statement out of nowhere for a public blog post is a comparison. If you think this just happened randomly and was completely divorced from the previous context then I struggle to understand how to communicate with you
Fair enough. It still feels shoehorned in to me though, almost like an essay in school students are told to include a quote in their conclusion (something that happened in my English class at least once from what I can remember), which just adds to the vibe of this being "homework" to support their employer rather than coming across as authentic.
I am just reading about this whole Automattic vs WP Engine fight today, and I'm a little surprised that most people seem to think Automattic is the unambiguous bad guy. Automattic has still given away a huge amount of open-source software away over the years. WP Engine seems like it is entirely a mercenary operation. (Which there's nothing wrong with, per se. But it doesn't exactly warm the cockles of my heart.)
And paying people to leave if they don't agree with what the company is doing seems like a win-win.
I wouldn't say that's what people are saying. I've been a vocal critic of Matt's actions in these threads, and my perspective is basically this:
WP Engine may be exactly as bad as Matt says it is. They may be contributing too little and taking too much. I've seen enough of corporations to believe that that can happen.
None of that matters any more after Matt's actions in September. WP Engine has put forward convincing evidence that Matt attempted to extort them into paying tens of millions per year to Matt's for profit under threat of launching a smear campaign. Matt then demonstrated that the boundaries between Automattic (the for profit) and the open source project don't exist by locking millions of WordPress users out of the plugin ecosystem over this dispute with the for profit.
That plugin ecosystem is the WordPress project. By messing about with that ecosystem Matt showed that he is both able and willing to singlehandedly screw over anyone who uses WordPress because he has a dispute with their hosting provider.
That's the issue now. I don't see WP Engine as white knights fighting a villain, but Matt turned what could have been a united effort to improve the WordPress ecosystem into a battle between greedy corporations and it's Matt who showed that he doesn't care who gets caught in the crossfire. The issue isn't that Automattic is the unambiguous bad guy in this suit, it's that Matt has demonstrated he has more power than he can be trusted with.
One man's extortion is another's negotiation. I think this framing, however natural given Matt's phrasing, isn't really helpful. We all routinely extort better deals - we just call it negotiation, and we usually try to be less plainspoken about it.
Even the kind of leverage/threats he was making aren't abnormal. What's threating to defame or emphasize looked at from one side is offering to sign a non-disclosure or non-disparagement from the other.
The content of these threats may be less tolerable than other negotiating tactics, but they are entirely normal in negotiations we don't label extortion. He's not donating horse heads.
As to pulling access to plugins - if at its heart this is about freeloading, then that action seems proportionate in principle as it's one of the few possible leverage points - it did not block existing installations, merely new ones - but the effect was likely poorly thought out as it relates to updates. Then again, WP engine had a workaround in pretty much no time, so even the update issue is not a big one; i.e. that power you state that Matt has does not appear to actually exist.
The whole saga seems very much in the eye of the beholder. Whether the end result will end up achieving Matt's apparent aims is of course another.
I doubt current wordpress sites will suffer much long-term harm in the crossfire, but they will perhaps have a short-term mess. But the power balance shift may well harm the overall ecosystem severely. The loss of trust alone is problematic; and if this takes down the de-factor maintainers of the wordpress core, which seems possible right now, that would be bad. Or worse, if it convinces them to go semi-closed source, and they then drag out their decline in a way that makes a finding momentum for a replacement hard.
> WP Engine may be exactly as bad as Matt says it is.
> None of that matters any more after Matt's actions in September.
I'm ambivalent towards WP Engine. IF Matt's claims are true, there are better ways to do it than extortion, breaking the core freedoms of the GPL, ignoring open source principles, and generally being a destructive, toxic force.
> WP Engine has put forward convincing evidence that Matt attempted to extort them into paying tens of millions per year
I think it was Automattic that put forth that evidence? The literally posted the extortion letter on their blog, aiming to prove it wasn’t extortion at all.
I'm referring to the cease and desist [0] and the subsequent complaint. They have texts from Matt all the way up until he's about to step on stage that appear to show him threatening to launch an enormous smear campaign against them starting with his speech if they don't agree. Just two examples:
> I have 14 slides so far, working title for the talk: "How Private Equity can Hollow out and Destroy Open Source Communities, a Story in 4 Parts."
> I've got quotes from current and former employees, some may even stand up and speak as well.
And then, with a photo of the audience taken from on stage:
> I'm literally waiting for them to finish the raffle so my talk can start, I can make it just a Q&A about WordPress very easily
Matt's gone very public (some have suggested too public) with this lawsuit, but he hasn't provided any context that would make these texts look any better.
Did WPEngine maintain their own cache to lessen the load on WordPress.org's plugin repo? If not then that could be a significant cost, which a large hosting provider should cache to minimize their upstream footprint and improve the UX of their own customers.
That said, it seems a modest trademark dispute has gotten way out of hand.
Yeah, I'm really no longer interested in what WP Engine could or should have been doing. Matt's been trying really hard to distract everyone from the simple fact that he personally has a kill switch that can stop the flow of security updates to millions of WordPress sites and that he will use it.
We host mirrors of NPM for many reasons, but fear that Microsoft will one day bar AWS customers from using the main registry isn't one of them.
Matt doesn't get to use that button and stay a trusted component of anyone's supply chain.
Automattic previously prevented 1.5 million sites from receiving security updates.
Their latest move (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41751776) is announcing a security hole in ACF, a WP Engine plugin, and preventing them from deploying a fix for it. This places 2+ million users at risk.
Good guys wouldn't do either of these things. The sooner Matt is replaced or Automattic goes under the better.
It is a complex story and "unambiguous bad guy," probably not. But if you had to draw sides... well, in most fairy tales the Good Guys don't try to extort and blackmail the Bad Guys with personal threats aimed directly at their livelihood:
> The filing also includes a purported job offer from Mullenweg to WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner saying that if she declines to join Automattic, he’d tell the CEO of Silver Lake — the private equity firm that owns WP Engine. WP Engine referred us to the lawsuit when asked for comment.
For those of us of a certain age, the phrase "can't we all just get along" connects quite naturally to Rodney King. So if you heard it, or for some other reason wanted to use it in a written piece ...
I don't know what you're trying to imply. Rodney King was beaten and shocked by four police officers, 63 people died and approximately $1 billion of damages resulted from the Riots. Zeldman's grief is understandable to the extent that one can emphasize with the internal conflict of choosing to remain employed by a company that is under scrutiny by people in your professional/personal community and ran by a man who is proving to be rather unpredictable.
There's likely more to Zeldman's personal struggles with respect to his health and other financial concerns than what he discloses (rightfully so). But at the same time, evoking the rhetoric of King during the Riots is indeed perplexing when measured against what Zeldman does speak about more openly: his commitment to the open web in light of the aforementioned drama. In this regard, as the kids say, "It's not that deep".
I think it's to say that, in the face of his beating and the aftermath, King said, "can't we all just get along?" instead of calling for the heads of the cops, the mayor, or whoever else he might have considered blameworthy.
It's a nice sentiment, but are you helping people by granting the wishes of an unshackled combative owner? Could you take the money and help people more by working for a company with more careful leadership? Wordpress isn't the only CMS out there...
Come on, pretty much all work is hurting the world now by furthering unsustainable capitalism. I have yet to find a job that truly helps people in the tech line of work.
I hope the decision works out for him. Six months salary is really only a big bag of cash if 1) you have a decent salary, and 2) you can be confident of landing a job of equal or better salary within the six-month window. Otherwise you're just going to burn through it. Given the way hiring has been in the tech world of late, it's easy to imagine it taking six months or more to get a decent job -- you can easily spend several months interviewing to have a role disappear.
FWIW I'd have to be pretty pissed and/or have no confidence in the direction of the company & its leadership and/or have another job/work lined up already to jump ship on a few days' notice like that.
I'm guessing one other reason he's staying is that he's probably still on Automattic's advisory board [1], and has significantly more influence on the company's direction than most other people who have taken the offer.
I don't have faith in wordpress nor really care about them, but I find this particular aspect of Zeldman's story pretty believable. It's not hard to see Matt's actions both as bad and yet well intentioned, especially if the underlying problem of freeloading is perhaps existential to the current maintainers of wordpress (no idea if it is).
It's pretty easy to forgive mistakes if you believe people made them for the right reasons, and especially if those reasons are important and the consequences of the mistake fairly diffuse, as might be the case here. Also, given Zeldman's prior work he clearly believes in the power of big ideas; he's surely more likely than most to see the need for pain now to prevent much more later on.
Doesn't mean we have to agree with him; just that it's not hard to empathize with it.
A Book Apart (the publishing company) closed?! When did this happen? The article linked doesn’t mention a date. So sad I had wanted to use them to publish a book eventually.
> Our software and services aim to provide a seamless experience, but when things don’t go as planned, our customers rely on us for help. Happiness Engineers are the frontline heroes ensuring we deliver the best experience for our users. Their role is crucial because they interact with our customers the most and make the biggest impression in their time of need.
On the req they want candidates with senior/"tier 3" support experience or TAM experience, but the salary band is $40,000-$75,000. That's garbage pay, "and we pay in local currency", so they're offshoring without saying it out loud. It's a job for someone's happiness, but probably not the support eng's.
No, they’re an entirely remote company hiring across the globe for any position, and they’re pretty clear about that beginning in the h1 title of their hiring page. This is just your “on-shore” bias talking.
Yeah, it's a cutesy title for customer support because you can't take yourself too seriously in jobs like this. Put very simply, people are fucking ass holes (and yes - you have to acknowledge this to excel at being a "Happiness Engineer" - it's not cynical to recognize that people have angry outbursts, because you have to know how to calm them down; pretending that people aren't mean is a one-way ticket to burnout). Even "nice" people can be ass holes; humans are complex and represent a whole spectrum of emotions [0]. Sometimes they don't know they're doing it, sometimes they do. There are social differences (what someone on the West Coast thinks is rude is not the same as what someone on the East Coast thinks is rude, and there are even difference between "microcultures" on the rules of social engagement; these rules might be intersubjective, but differ) that have to be negotiated often in one-time ephemeral interactions. Negativity is contagious and I cringe at the times that I unnecessarily injected negativity into an interaction where the other person/people didn't do anything to deserve it.
I think there is maybe one other "weird" job title in that list, but otherwise they're all pretty normal, so this is probably one of the last things I'd criticize Automattic for. The fact that they describe customer support as "Happiness Engineering" suggests the nature of the title - we have to be a little goofy to help people.
As a final note, for anyone thinking "I work in customer support and I don't like this yada yada", it's just not for you, and that's OK. No need to think up a huge rebuttal, it's just a different philosophy for those of us who like to help people and have a little bit of fun at the same time.
I don't work at Automattic, but I like WordPress and don't really care too much about this drama.
Absolutely. The problem here is that people that generally parrot the “1984” meme haven’t read the book, let alone read any Orwell, or Huxley for that matter.
It will be hard to do that work from within an embattled organization that's only in that situation because of the CEO's behavior. Things don't get better from here. Any good-faith assumptions people made before are just gone. Every action has new layers of scrutiny, every move becomes suspect.
Why does someone who works at Automattic have meaningful medical debt? That's awful. I would expect Automattic to have both good insurance and sufficient pay such that no employee suffers from medical debt.
As critical as I am of Mullenweg, I am sure Automattic is obeying the Affordable Care Act and giving employees health insurance. It would be a dumb thing to save money on when you're paying competitive wages!
This seemed like an adequate explanation without needing any details:
> incurred by the closing of my conference and publishing businesses.
Because there are hundreds of conditions that need to was Trent that insurance, even great insurance, barely covers and leaves you with thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars in medical debt.
What's the background on doing a soft layoff (or w/e) and hiring at the same time? Many of us have seen one of these close-up, just wondering what the case is here.
Musk is an ideological asshole, this is Matt recognizing further growth probably requires pushing WP Engine out of their market. If you disagree with him on this, you probably disagree where Automattic as a whole is going.
"It's not the rats who first abandon a sinking ship. It's the crew members who know how to swim." - Antonio Garcia Martinez, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
My insight into corporate legal disputes is as meaningful as my opinion on Quantum Mechanics.
What an immensely cowardly statement. Zeldman is not some naive worker elf and pretending to be such as an excuse to avoid saying anything is contemptible. If you don't want people to know what you think, just say that, or say nothing. Pretending you don't have an opinion because you don't understand is just...ick.
> And you are, at best, incredibly insensitive, and at worst, an actual bigot.
And you are a control freak, who's hobby is to make up random rules, and insult everyone else not following them. Does this make you feel good about yourself? Can't you find anything else? Anyway, would you kindly fuck off, all with your friends.
> That word is generally universally recognized as bigoted and discriminatory, so please don’t use it.
Eheheh, you wish (and by wish, I mean lie). Even the fucking wikipedia doesn't agree with you:
> The adjective retarded is used in the same way, for something very foolish or stupid.
Have they picked on me when I wore sandals with socks? Yes, they have, and it felt bad. Did I know that they were just sad, pitiful bullies? No, I didn't know it back then, but I do know it now. Shouldn't I just pity them, and go on with my days? No, I'd rather they stop doing this. Publicly calling them and their behaviour out, seems to be the right choice.
edit: also notice that GP doesn't even try to hide the fact that they are only here to bully. If they were less direct about it, "hey pal, we are trying to eradicate the word retard here, could you please use one of the following options", that would be more or less the same, but GP just jumped in to brag about some facts in their head, and insult GGP, not even leaving a hair's breadth place for a charitable interpretation.
>I stayed because I believe in the work we do. I believe in the open web and owning your own content. I’ve devoted nearly three decades of work to this cause, and when I chose to move in-house, I knew there was only one house that would suit me. In nearly six years at Automattic, I’ve been able to do work that mattered to me and helped others, and I know that the best is yet to come.
As the layoffs and hiriing hesitation has increased over the past 1-2 years I have seen an increased amount of copium coming from engineers work at prestigious jobs.
If you work at a for profit company, I believe that you believe in their mission.
That mission is to make money.
If you work at a company where your job role pays out enough that you could retire of a few years of salary from the position, and you stay after the company pivots to something you didn't think was a good idea, you are there for money.
If you work at a company where your job role pays out enough that you could retire of a few years of salary from the position, and you stay after the company lays off a large number of your coworkers that you think could have been a net benefit to the company, you are there for money.
If you work at a company where your job role pays out enough that you could retire of a few years of salary from the position, and you stay after the company lays off many coworkers that you had a positive, personal relationship with, you are there for money.
I see people in this thread lauding this person for making what I believe is an ultimately selfish decision, and trying to pretend he is not.
I am tired of seeing all these software luminaries discussing how brave they are for {getting a fuck ton of money but pretending it is difficult to accept because they dont get to control everything}.
The feeling I am getting from this blog post and the reaction to it, is the same reaction I got to hearing about how Linus Torvalds was all for the concept of Free Software and then checking his wikipedia page to find out that the chain of links to his famous ancestors goes back to at least his grandparents.
Like no shit you "stayed", you got bank for it. Don't try and spin it as a moral good under
People might have more than one reason that they are at a company. Many people have a job because they do indeed want and need money, but they have their particular job because they like the work there more than the work at other jobs they may have taken.
If it was just about the money they would have probably left. They are well known enough to almost certainly be able to quickly get another job making at least as much money. Add in the 6 months severance they would have gotten and leave is the money maximizing option.
His last two paragraphs are so egregious I segfaulted when reading them.
Did he really quote Rodney King on why we cant all get along as a response to layoffs that he survived, and then tells everyone that his group is hiring?
Fuck this guy. I don't care if it hurts my career. I wouldn't work with someone who is this big an asshole cause I wouldn't trust them to not throw me under the bus the second its expedient for them.
> I already miss them, and most only quit yesterday. I feel their departure as a personal loss, and my grief is real. The sadness is like a cold fog on a dark, wet night.
I can't understand this. I do not view my coworkers as part of my personal life, so while I enjoy working with some, I wouldn't say I'm sad if they leave. This sounds unhealthy
When you spend 8 hours a day around folks and become friends with them, it's natural to miss them when they leave. It's OK if you don't have any meaningful relationships with your co-workers, but, to me, that sounds unhealthy.
I worked at Automattic and the connections you could develop with your coworkers were fantastic. Almost everyone was kind, helpful, and encouraging, and I did my best to bring a positive attitude every day. Nearly everything being written communication makes that easier! (Eg you won’t seem standoffish one day if external circumstances have you in a poor mood.)
While you aren’t seeing people every day (the company is distributed), the relatively frequent meetups in cool places are a massive highlight, and just make your relationships that much stronger.
There are a lot of folks who have been around for ages — even if you aren’t working with someone directly anymore, you’ll frequently see a familiar face (and helping hand!) on the other side of the company.
So the grief of leaving these relationships is acute, especially if you’ve been around for a while. Processing that grief is healthy — and I might suggest that not having any kind of relationship with your coworkers is unhealthy. Or at least speaks to a cold culture somewhere.
Why are you spending your finite life working with people who you wouldn't fight for?
This might not be a "them" problem.
I'm not advocating that your coworkers have to be at the same rung as your family or [in-group X] but it's weird/sad to many reading this that you're okay not caring about the people you spend your days working towards a common goal with.
FWIW Jeffrey Zeldman is a living legend. He was one of the first print designers to transition to the web, did it well, and wrote about it constantly. He designed the “Batman Forever” website in 1995; it was visited by something like one-third of all Internet users.
He created the Web Standards Project, hugely influential in getting browser manufacturers to support standards rather than pee in the pool. And if you think cross-browser support today is rough, at the time you could reliably crash production browsers with valid CSS.
Never mind A List Apart, one of the best early mailing lists on the web, a kind of transitionary form between Usenet and forums/Discord. And A Book Apart, which published lots of high-quality stuff.
If you develop for the web today, every time a browser behaves as the spec describes, thank Jeffrey Zeldman.
Zeldman, Bowman, Molly, ppk are the ones I remember reading and learning from back in the IE6, pre-firefox days.
Legends indeed.
RIP Molly.
Thank you for this — I was uninformed.
As was I. Now off to read about these interesting people.
> I also know that the Maker-Taker problem is an issue in open source, just as I know that a friend you buy lunch for every day, and who earns as much money as you do, is supposed to return the favor now and then
Informal agreements like this work between people who know each other, not for agreements between strangers. The terms in an open source license are intended to be universally applicable, to make the obligations clear for anyone who reads them. This includes total strangers and companies that didn’t exist when you published the code.
Those strangers shouldn’t be expected to abide by anything not explicitly written down in the license. If the license doesn’t document the obligations you expect of anyone, you used the wrong license.
We should be suspicious of people who try to claim that there are additional unwritten obligations for reusing source code. Open source licenses have very generous terms, maybe too generous. They allow takers. That’s how it works, you can take it.
Nah. Or at least, not entirely. (I'm not really writing about Automattic here).
Contracts -- and law in general -- describe in detail what kinds of actions will allow another to bring legal force into play against you or vice-versa.
But there's all kinds of actions that I can legally take that don't conform to norms that will invite condemnation and reprisal through means other than the legal sphere.
Not every obligation should be given legal force; not every action that's strictly legal will turn out to be socially okay or consequence free.
In my opinion this is completely backwards. You should reserve all of the rights you intend to exercise. This is indeed what most companies have always done; you don't go randomly giving people copyright licenses to e.g. your characters and then get mad when they use them. Instead you just tacitly allow some unlicensed usage of your IP. That really is a social contract that exists in different places across the world.
I understand that some people didn't always understand the consequences of their choices, or maybe wrongly thought we all agreed on these unwritten social contracts, but we don't agree at all and I hope the lesson is learned well.
None of my prior work contracts stipulated not to microwave fish in the break room, or how often I ought to shower; yet "Don't stink up the office" is rule most folk innately know, recognize and respect as part of being a decent colleague. Some rules have to stay unwritten (or be in vague clauses), otherwise every contract will be tens of thousands of pages long.
Look, you can argue about the existence of social norms till the cows come home, it won't change the fact that there is a non-trivial subset of open source developers and users that believe the lack of discrimination of any kind is exactly the point of Open Source. The definition is not stipulating these rights indiscriminately by accident, and it did not have to be written that way. I will acknowledge that some people in the community clearly believe that enforcing unwritten social rules with regards to Open Source is the best practice, but I don't accept that this is the common or obvious viewpoint. I think that viewpoint is overrepresented in spaces like Hacker News with a lot of startup-adjacent folks but even here I wouldn't expect the majority of people to agree with this.
P.S.: This all having been said, while I think that there aren't commonly-shared unwritten rules w.r.t. who may do what with open source software pertaining to its copyright license(s), I don't think there's absolutely no "unwritten rules" in open source. For example, I think the CLA rug-pull pattern is a pretty dirty trick, but that has little to do with open source licenses and more to do with outright deceiving people. And even then, it does beg the question of why you would agree to sign something that explicitly grants that right when there is absolutely no reason to do so.
In the context of free software the entire ethos is complete, unabated freedom to do anything except restrict freedoms.
Even that wasn’t free enough for some. Permissive licensing allows you redistribute software without even disclosing your patches.
These are radically different to regular contracts.
If you want things, you get them written into the contract. that's how business works. Eg the license for Facebook's llama model says if you have a ton of users you gotta pay up. if this were something small, like maybe give us a shout-out once in a while then hey, but we're talking substantial actual resources that shouldn't be left to implied assumptions. because if you don't actually talk about it, what I assume and what you assume is reasonable is going to be on different planets.
A license can allow something, but there can still be companies that are good citizens of the open source community of things licensed that way and other companies that are not so good.
In turn, that can affect how likely others are to view those companies favorably and/or cooperate with them.
e.g. I favor Prusa 3d printers over other vendors because Prusa provides substantial resources to development of the tooling that we all use. Other vendors are (usually) compliant with the contract, but may not be seen as good citizens by everyone in the community, and this can have consequences even if it doesn't have legal force.
It's I think sort of clear from everything that Automattic's leadership doesn't seem to understand that running a business means you're running a business. You're not making a side project, working on a hobby or running a non-profit. You're running a for-profit business which means others will treat you as such and you can't make excuses for it.
I don't like what Automattic's doing, but I don't think that means we have to throw out the whole idea of obligations that aren't legal obligations.
I don't buy it. This "only what's in the legal" is so silly, and ppl who keep writing it are self-identifying as not understanding whole branches and histories of community- and culture-building
> We should be suspicious of people who try to claim that there are additional unwritten obligations for reusing source code. Open source licenses have very generous terms, maybe too generous. They allow takers. That’s how it works, you can take it.
This only makes sense in the point of view that every obligation should be enforced by courts. However public opinion can sway people to fulfill non-legal obligations or else have their reputation tarnished. WP Engine reputation is pretty damaged due to their behavior of being a "taker" rather than a "maker".
>We should be suspicious of people who try to claim that there are additional unwritten obligations for reusing source code.
There are additional and unwritten obligations in everything, that's just what a culture is. And open source culture has always relied on a general goodwill extended to strangers, it is what keeps it alive. If we only abide by the letter of the law and take as much as we can and give as little as possible open source is just dead, I mean you already see this with large open source contributors moving towards more restrictive licenses.
Saying that the conclusion of this is that licenses were too generous and that we ought to be suspicious of people because they take the underling ethos seriously is... strange to say the least.
The social obligations that people have are not the same obligations that businesses have with each other, and that is true culturally and legally.
There are no consumer protection laws for businesses. There is no cooling off period for certain contracts. Businesses are supposed to have the legal wherewithal to protect their own interests.
You can't project our social norms to businesses.
I don’t know why you are downvoted. I find it pretty terrifying that people are thinking about companies as if they were conscious beings while they are only a complex mix of the people working for it who may or may not have random amounts of power.
Companies aren’t people, they are social constructions which can, or not, have positive or negative impact on the society but ultimately live for making money. And I don’t mean this as an insult, it’s just that if you want to work with other people with other goals than making money, a company is just the wrong structure. I think it’s crucial to stop that belief that companies have souls. Companies souls are what is wrote in their status, nothing more, nothing less.
I would argue that the taking is the point of open source. By providing software free to use and copy and modify to the world, you’re making it a better place. You won’t be financially rewarded for that. That isn’t the point. Mongo, Redis, Elastic, HashiCorp, Automattic, and many others have forgotten that.
The continuation of this work demands defending it (and therefore the good it spread) from parasitic actors.
Obviously I agree that current licenses do permit this. However: What are the long-term implications if everyone behaves this way?
They are that less open source software will be created and made available to everyone with permissive licensing. More software will be produced either commercially, or with more restrictive licensing. Less software will be produced overall, because of the overhead costs of enforcing these restrictions. The culture will shift from a norm of "Here, use this thing I made if you want!" towards "You'd better not be using this thing I made without paying me."
This formalisation of norms into explicit contracts backed by legal enforcement would not necessarily be a bad thing overall, and it may be a necessary thing in a "society" where there are too many people for everyone to know everyone else personally and establish trust that way. But it will be different. There will be winners and losers.
Everyone does behave this way. For any popular open-source project (e.g., Linux), the absolute vast majority does not contribute, just uses or makes money off of it. How can you shame someone into starting to contribute? There are people who like to contribute, there are other people who like to make a quick buck using someone else's work, and nothing else, and always will be. Unclear how to magically change the latter if the legal means fail.
This is silly. Open source doesn't require getting paid. In fact, that people have figured out how to make open source turn them into billionaires is a problem. And a good sign that the market is broken. Get those people out of open source. Linux, Kubernetes, Apache, Python, and more are doing just fine. Companies should find ways to build things together rather than trying to abuse open source to pay off VCs who are the real takers in the software industry.
Maybe I’m out of touch but I don’t get people complaining about the „takers“ in the maker-taker-problem. If you are offended when people take your stuff without contributing, don’t make it open source. Maybe it’s just me being too cynical but people taking my open source stuff and contributing nothing is basically the expectation, everything else is a welcome positive surprise. But I would never get angry and badmouth other people because they dared taking my stuff I consciously open sourced earlier.
Also, imagine other open source projects doing this. Should Linux maintainers complain about every company using Linux Servers without contributing to the kernel? Or would offering Linux hosting be the better analogy? What percentage of Linux hosting providers has written a single kernel patch and contributed it?
I have a tough time relating to "[believing] in the work we do" at a for-profit company, especially one that just makes blogs. I work at a somewhat similar commercial open source company, I really enjoy my job, and I adore my direct collegues, but I've thought a lot over the past few years that if in a similar position I would almost definitely take the offer.
A job you like where ~10% of your colleges leave is a job I would probably enjoy a whole lot less.
Thats an interesting sentiment to me. I dont have much trouble believing in the work, even in for-profit companies. For me, it is about the end product, and if it makes the world a better place or not. If it is net positive, than the work (as a whole), is meaningful. Everything beyond that is just degrees of efficiency.
I conceptually like non-profits, but that seems tangential. Why would I discount my work due to comparison with a hypothetical alternative that is more efficient at doing good.
>especially one that just makes blogs
What's wrong with blogs? I like blogs.
Nothing wrong with blogs, but I think it’s useful just to be real what it is we’re doing. I don’t think there’s a moral obligation or a unique social benefit to creating WordPress.
You can enjoy your job, and I do too, but I don’t claim to be doing anything extraordinary.
Oh, I agree. I just don't think believing in the work requires it to be extraordinary or ground breaking. For example, you can believe that growing potatoes is beneficial work.
Of course, as stated, "believe in the work" is an imprecise sentiment. Believe what exactly? They probably don't believe it is bad tho, haha
>I dont have much trouble believing in the work, even in for-profit companies.
One of the things I liked about selling software is the knowledge that customers do value your software. If they didn't then they wouldn't put their hand in their pocket.
If you replace the word "software" with the word "Fentanyl" in your sentence, do you still like it?
The sentence is still true regardless of whatever noun you put in it. If the noun itself changes your mind then you should either clarify or reconsider your position
I feel the same way about drug making. Customers might wish new drugs were cheaper, but they are free to with cheaper options or generics. Meanwhile, today's blockbuster will be tomorrow's generic, and progressively more lives are saved.
That may be true when we’re talking about investing in new drugs, but a whole lot of the pharmaceutical industry engages in rent-seeking behavior, and people are often not deep thinkers so their natural inclination is to just throw the baby out with the bath water.
The rent seeking is pretty negligible when you zoom out in time. It is extremely hard to find a specific medication that is still on patent 20 years after approval.
I think people are generally confused by things like insulin, where there are newer and better versions coming out continually, despite it being invented in the 1920s.
So how does a diabetic get one of the older, worse insulins that they can afford? Certainly that's preferable to the better insulin that they can't afford.
You buy it at Walmart.
At Walmart it is $25 for 1,000 Units of Novolin N [1], with no insurance or prescription. 1000 units is about a month for a lot of people. Novolin N is a third or 4th generation Insulin approved in 1950.
You can get 1000 units of Humalog (Approved in 1996) for $43 at walgreens or most pharmacies (or 19.99 with a Walgreens coupon) [2]
The more recently approved version of Insulin Afrezza, (approved in 2014) costs about $2,000 for a monthly supply.[3]
There has been a fairly consistent march of insulin improvements since the first versions were sold in 1926. [0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_(medication)#History
https://www.walmart.com/cp/relion-insulin/8418641?action=Sig...
https://www.goodrx.com/insulin-lispro
https://pharmacy.amazon.com/afrezza-180-Cartridge-Pack-Insul...
> if it makes the world a better place or not.
This seems like a pretty big "if". Arguably, Automattic is better than most for-profit companies since they develop a FOSS product, and I think you can make an argument that any sort of FOSS makes the world better.
OTOH, it's not clear to me that making it easier and cheaper to blog or host websites makes the world better. I'm sure there's lots of people using WordPress and similar products for horrible things, like tobacco companies, arms manufacturers, animal ag companies, etc. And that's not to mention the no doubt plenty of personal users who are blogging about conspiracy theories, white supremacy, or Hindu nationalism.
I think the best case for most software is that it's net _neutral_. I work at a database company. Our products are used by many, many different companies, non-profits, and governments. I think some of our customers are horrible, some are great, and most are neither. But that would be the case for me at nearly every software company I might work at.
These casual calls for censorship are really dangerous. Every idea that we take for granted today started as something that was justifiably censorable for the social standards of the time (civil rights, women's voting rights, etc).
If Billy Bob wants to out himself as a white nationalist, I'd rather he do it out in the open. If it's really a terrible idea then it won't get any traction.
When you censor these people it gives them even more reason to get angry and people start supporting just to fight the perceived injustice. This was a key driver in Jan 6th.
> These casual calls for censorship are really dangerous
Where in my comment did I call for censorship?
All I said was that it's not clear whether FOSS blog software makes the world a better place. I don't understand how you get from there to censorship.
I don't think the plan that software is not neutral is any more supportive than it is good or bad. If anything, neutrality seems extremely unlikely because if you were to total all of the impacts, it seems exceedingly unlikely that they would perfectly sum up to zero.
That said, you are right in that these judgments certainly depends on your mental model of the world. Ex. Are blogs and websites good or bad. A proponent of radical back to the trees movement would probably disagree. I tend to think logs are a good thing for the world
There’s a lot of anti-capitalist brainwashing these days that exists to make you just feel guilty about the social/environmental effects of everything that isn’t free.
Being relatively far-left, much of the tech industry is indoctrinated into it.
It seems to them like a not-unintelligent, non-controversial, or even obvious viewpoint because they’ve been swimming in that water their whole lives. It’s a first principle to them and they don’t even know it.
It’s funny that you think the tech industry is relatively far-left.
I think it is. In my experience it is basically mirrors a cross section of California politics, ages 25-40.
That is fairly left when compared US averages.
[flagged]
Leftists can be proud of making, building, and growing things too.
I believe in the work they do. The web would be much sadder without standalone blogs and websites, they mostly power the diverse smaller outfits. Hate to see the entire world gobbled up and milked dry by some single-digit combo of youtube, insta, x, whatever.
IMO the next generation of website tools are coming along in the form of drag-and-drop premade widgets and integrations to YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Almost all of WP value isn't composed of indie blogs and websites, almost all the value comes from business websites. If indie blogs and websites die it won't be because of WP because there will be other tools. Indie content of the WP variety is dying organically, or at the least the rising tide does not lift all boats.
And if indie content creation moves to TikTok that's because it's what the next generation wants.
Slight tangent; but arguments such as "if indie content creation moves to TikTok that's because it's what the next generation wants" are almost universally invalid. The reasons a trend emerges are complex and definitely not only down to an average preference nor simply a generational shift, though those factors might play a small role. There are at least 2 other major factors that outweigh those, and probably more.
People routinely make choices that have long term outcomes they don't agree with; and we all know they do and thus the information industry quite explicitly exploits this - the difference between what we "really" want and short term impulses has never been larger due to such intentional exploitation.
Secondly, network effects. The way intellectual property happens to work allows platforms to effectively own networks their user's create. A group of entirely rational users might well each individually choose to join a network since for them doing so is extremely valuable, even in the knowledge that it'd be better for everyone to choose a different alternative if they could manage to do so collectively, especially since IP laws mean it's quite unlikely for any such alternative not to eventually develop similar weaknesses. Business plans work when profiting off content involves controlling it simply because that's how the law pretty much defines it - IP doesn't support creativity directly, it supports monopolies and leaves the support to exploiting that monopoly.
The implied argument sort of infers a cause by default - people are choosing the proverbial tiktok (or whatever other new thing), people are rational, therefore there must be a reason, therefore tiktok is better for people (and we don't need to know why). But each of those steps is quite weak; the overall link is tenuous at best.
> value comes from business websites
I don't see a reason to exclude those from my earlier comment at all. Yes, they are very much a part of the deal too, whether ecom or whatever business they are in. Having independent "wp shopping carts" replaced by generic Prime dropshipping with both sides at the mercy of a monopolist would also be very sad. If there are people dedicated to improving the standalone alternative software and sustaining those efforts by making money off of it, i view it as a 100% positive.
100% agreed - given that they published this under their own name though, I wonder how much of that was just echoing the corporate mission statement of Automattic for the sake of any colleagues who happen to stumble across the blog.
> I wonder how much of that was just echoing the corporate mission statement of Automattic for the sake of any colleagues who happen to stumble across the blog.
It's fairly obvious that's what it is.
Or they are being forced to post "I stayed", as nearly everyone that I've come across that works there is posting it. To the point where it doesn't even feel organic.
For anyone else that wants the latest drama: Matt seems to be weaponizing Automattic and CVE's against WP Engine now.
https://x.com/automattic/status/1842612123488473341
You think Jeffrey Zeldman is parroting a corporate mission statement or is being cowed into posting this? Damn, the youths today.
Yes. That's his job. His title is Employer Brand and when our glassdoor scores were too low he led the charge to write fake reviews to boost the score.
Post deleted. What did it say?
The Tweets original content was[0]:
> Automattic's security team has responsibly disclosed a vulnerability in @wp_acf to @wpengine. As is standard, they have 30 days to issue a fix before public disclosure. We have reserved this CVE for the issue: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2024-9529
Basically announcing to the world that there is a CVE in a very widely used ("2MM+ sites") WP plugin, that also can't be patched as they banned the developers accounts from updating said plugin[1].
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/wf73amz
[1]: https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/
Perhaps Automattic's goal is to force WPEngine to host their plugin(s) elsewhere? And also force WPEngine to have their own plugin cache or plugin market? Or at least no longer rely on WordPress.org's plugin repo directly.
WPEngine has already done both of those.
Literally at this point the only customers this is hurting are standard WordPress users not on WPEngine.
The tweet has been deleted, but this other submission was in reply to it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41752289
I was a bit dubious about this point of view before reading the full post, but wow, the last couple paragraphs lay it on thick. Suing someone for using your open source product in their own product takes "courage"? Comparing the work of developing Wordpress to Rodney King? I want to give the author the benefit of the doubt, and maybe I'm too cynical, but this sounds even more corporate-y than a lot of stuff I've read on company-hosted blogs.
I don't think there was a comparison between WordPress and Rodney King. If so, what is the comparison being claimed. Is WordPress the cops? The one saying can't we get along?
The way I read it at least, it was a simple reference and sentiment, not a comparison.
Literally the one saying can't we all get along is referencing Rodney King and inferring a comparison between them.
For future readers the article at one point said
>On May 1, 1992, a man who’d been horribly beaten by the L.A. police called for calm in five heartfelt, memorable words: “Can’t we all get along?”
This is a reference to a statement by Rodney King near the end of the riot period.
https://archive.nytimes.com/learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/...
Yes, I said it seemed like a reference. A reference is different than a comparison. What is the comparison to the company? Can you explain it to me?
The literal first sentence of your comment is
> I don't think there was a comparison between WordPress and Rodney King
You did not say it “seemed” like a reference, you explicitly said there was no comparison
I dont know what part of this is confusing you.
There is no comparison. there is a reference. A reference is not a comparison.
You also didnt answer my question. You are claiming there is an inferred comparison. If so, please explain what two things are being compared, and in what way.
Does the reference have no interaction with the rest of the blog post?
If I mention that I have a big idea and then mention how a great man also once stated “I have a dream”, do you think I’m referencing MLK with no inferred comparison to my idea?
Referencing something in light of your previous statement out of nowhere for a public blog post is a comparison. If you think this just happened randomly and was completely divorced from the previous context then I struggle to understand how to communicate with you
Fair enough. It still feels shoehorned in to me though, almost like an essay in school students are told to include a quote in their conclusion (something that happened in my English class at least once from what I can remember), which just adds to the vibe of this being "homework" to support their employer rather than coming across as authentic.
> especially one that just makes blogs
Uhm, that's pretty reductive. Perhaps that's the difference?
I am just reading about this whole Automattic vs WP Engine fight today, and I'm a little surprised that most people seem to think Automattic is the unambiguous bad guy. Automattic has still given away a huge amount of open-source software away over the years. WP Engine seems like it is entirely a mercenary operation. (Which there's nothing wrong with, per se. But it doesn't exactly warm the cockles of my heart.)
And paying people to leave if they don't agree with what the company is doing seems like a win-win.
> Automattic is the unambiguous bad guy.
I wouldn't say that's what people are saying. I've been a vocal critic of Matt's actions in these threads, and my perspective is basically this:
WP Engine may be exactly as bad as Matt says it is. They may be contributing too little and taking too much. I've seen enough of corporations to believe that that can happen.
None of that matters any more after Matt's actions in September. WP Engine has put forward convincing evidence that Matt attempted to extort them into paying tens of millions per year to Matt's for profit under threat of launching a smear campaign. Matt then demonstrated that the boundaries between Automattic (the for profit) and the open source project don't exist by locking millions of WordPress users out of the plugin ecosystem over this dispute with the for profit.
That plugin ecosystem is the WordPress project. By messing about with that ecosystem Matt showed that he is both able and willing to singlehandedly screw over anyone who uses WordPress because he has a dispute with their hosting provider.
That's the issue now. I don't see WP Engine as white knights fighting a villain, but Matt turned what could have been a united effort to improve the WordPress ecosystem into a battle between greedy corporations and it's Matt who showed that he doesn't care who gets caught in the crossfire. The issue isn't that Automattic is the unambiguous bad guy in this suit, it's that Matt has demonstrated he has more power than he can be trusted with.
One man's extortion is another's negotiation. I think this framing, however natural given Matt's phrasing, isn't really helpful. We all routinely extort better deals - we just call it negotiation, and we usually try to be less plainspoken about it.
Even the kind of leverage/threats he was making aren't abnormal. What's threating to defame or emphasize looked at from one side is offering to sign a non-disclosure or non-disparagement from the other.
The content of these threats may be less tolerable than other negotiating tactics, but they are entirely normal in negotiations we don't label extortion. He's not donating horse heads.
As to pulling access to plugins - if at its heart this is about freeloading, then that action seems proportionate in principle as it's one of the few possible leverage points - it did not block existing installations, merely new ones - but the effect was likely poorly thought out as it relates to updates. Then again, WP engine had a workaround in pretty much no time, so even the update issue is not a big one; i.e. that power you state that Matt has does not appear to actually exist.
The whole saga seems very much in the eye of the beholder. Whether the end result will end up achieving Matt's apparent aims is of course another.
I doubt current wordpress sites will suffer much long-term harm in the crossfire, but they will perhaps have a short-term mess. But the power balance shift may well harm the overall ecosystem severely. The loss of trust alone is problematic; and if this takes down the de-factor maintainers of the wordpress core, which seems possible right now, that would be bad. Or worse, if it convinces them to go semi-closed source, and they then drag out their decline in a way that makes a finding momentum for a replacement hard.
^ Well said.
> WP Engine may be exactly as bad as Matt says it is.
> None of that matters any more after Matt's actions in September.
I'm ambivalent towards WP Engine. IF Matt's claims are true, there are better ways to do it than extortion, breaking the core freedoms of the GPL, ignoring open source principles, and generally being a destructive, toxic force.
> WP Engine has put forward convincing evidence that Matt attempted to extort them into paying tens of millions per year
I think it was Automattic that put forth that evidence? The literally posted the extortion letter on their blog, aiming to prove it wasn’t extortion at all.
Yeah, that also happened...
I'm referring to the cease and desist [0] and the subsequent complaint. They have texts from Matt all the way up until he's about to step on stage that appear to show him threatening to launch an enormous smear campaign against them starting with his speech if they don't agree. Just two examples:
> I have 14 slides so far, working title for the talk: "How Private Equity can Hollow out and Destroy Open Source Communities, a Story in 4 Parts."
> I've got quotes from current and former employees, some may even stand up and speak as well.
And then, with a photo of the audience taken from on stage:
> I'm literally waiting for them to finish the raffle so my talk can start, I can make it just a Q&A about WordPress very easily
Matt's gone very public (some have suggested too public) with this lawsuit, but he hasn't provided any context that would make these texts look any better.
[0] https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-De...
Did WPEngine maintain their own cache to lessen the load on WordPress.org's plugin repo? If not then that could be a significant cost, which a large hosting provider should cache to minimize their upstream footprint and improve the UX of their own customers.
That said, it seems a modest trademark dispute has gotten way out of hand.
Yeah, I'm really no longer interested in what WP Engine could or should have been doing. Matt's been trying really hard to distract everyone from the simple fact that he personally has a kill switch that can stop the flow of security updates to millions of WordPress sites and that he will use it.
We host mirrors of NPM for many reasons, but fear that Microsoft will one day bar AWS customers from using the main registry isn't one of them.
Matt doesn't get to use that button and stay a trusted component of anyone's supply chain.
thank you for phrasing it better than I can. the violation of the spirit of open source is at stake here.
Automattic previously prevented 1.5 million sites from receiving security updates.
Their latest move (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41751776) is announcing a security hole in ACF, a WP Engine plugin, and preventing them from deploying a fix for it. This places 2+ million users at risk.
Good guys wouldn't do either of these things. The sooner Matt is replaced or Automattic goes under the better.
> WP Engine seems like it is entirely a mercenary operation.
WP Engine also acquired and maintains Advanced Custom Fields [1] and Local [2] from their subsidiary Flywheel [3].
[1] https://deliciousbrains.com/wp-engine-acquisition/
[2] https://wpengine.com/blog/better-together-wp-engine-and-flyw...
[3] https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-to-acquire-flywheel/
It is a complex story and "unambiguous bad guy," probably not. But if you had to draw sides... well, in most fairy tales the Good Guys don't try to extort and blackmail the Bad Guys with personal threats aimed directly at their livelihood:
> The filing also includes a purported job offer from Mullenweg to WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner saying that if she declines to join Automattic, he’d tell the CEO of Silver Lake — the private equity firm that owns WP Engine. WP Engine referred us to the lawsuit when asked for comment.
(via https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24262232/matt-mullenweg-w...)
His evocation of the assault on Rodney King and the L.A. Riots is perplexing.
For those of us of a certain age, the phrase "can't we all just get along" connects quite naturally to Rodney King. So if you heard it, or for some other reason wanted to use it in a written piece ...
I don't know what you're trying to imply. Rodney King was beaten and shocked by four police officers, 63 people died and approximately $1 billion of damages resulted from the Riots. Zeldman's grief is understandable to the extent that one can emphasize with the internal conflict of choosing to remain employed by a company that is under scrutiny by people in your professional/personal community and ran by a man who is proving to be rather unpredictable.
There's likely more to Zeldman's personal struggles with respect to his health and other financial concerns than what he discloses (rightfully so). But at the same time, evoking the rhetoric of King during the Riots is indeed perplexing when measured against what Zeldman does speak about more openly: his commitment to the open web in light of the aforementioned drama. In this regard, as the kids say, "It's not that deep".
Edit: +++ "in light of the aforementioned drama"
I think it's to say that, in the face of his beating and the aftermath, King said, "can't we all just get along?" instead of calling for the heads of the cops, the mayor, or whoever else he might have considered blameworthy.
But that's the whole point! The expression is jarringly mild and reasonable given the circumstances.
I was going to say this too. I’m guessing PR didn’t get to vet this post.
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It's a nice sentiment, but are you helping people by granting the wishes of an unshackled combative owner? Could you take the money and help people more by working for a company with more careful leadership? Wordpress isn't the only CMS out there...
Is it really that easy to just leave and find a company/work you vibe with? It seems just as hard as trying to find a quality partner
Come on, pretty much all work is hurting the world now by furthering unsustainable capitalism. I have yet to find a job that truly helps people in the tech line of work.
I hope the decision works out for him. Six months salary is really only a big bag of cash if 1) you have a decent salary, and 2) you can be confident of landing a job of equal or better salary within the six-month window. Otherwise you're just going to burn through it. Given the way hiring has been in the tech world of late, it's easy to imagine it taking six months or more to get a decent job -- you can easily spend several months interviewing to have a role disappear.
FWIW I'd have to be pretty pissed and/or have no confidence in the direction of the company & its leadership and/or have another job/work lined up already to jump ship on a few days' notice like that.
Zeldman would have zero trouble getting hired anywhere tomorrow if he indicated that he was available.
This isn't the case for most people, but he is anything but most people.
I'm guessing one other reason he's staying is that he's probably still on Automattic's advisory board [1], and has significantly more influence on the company's direction than most other people who have taken the offer.
[1] https://twitter.com/zeldman/status/403874979512877056
Believing in the work the author was/is doing is one thing, but I can't help but wonder if/how they still believe in their boss.
I don't have faith in wordpress nor really care about them, but I find this particular aspect of Zeldman's story pretty believable. It's not hard to see Matt's actions both as bad and yet well intentioned, especially if the underlying problem of freeloading is perhaps existential to the current maintainers of wordpress (no idea if it is).
It's pretty easy to forgive mistakes if you believe people made them for the right reasons, and especially if those reasons are important and the consequences of the mistake fairly diffuse, as might be the case here. Also, given Zeldman's prior work he clearly believes in the power of big ideas; he's surely more likely than most to see the need for pain now to prevent much more later on.
Doesn't mean we have to agree with him; just that it's not hard to empathize with it.
A Book Apart (the publishing company) closed?! When did this happen? The article linked doesn’t mention a date. So sad I had wanted to use them to publish a book eventually.
I wonder what happened
I suspect that the current fashion for JavaScript-driven mega-sites, as well as most CMSes, is what happened.
His whole Web design system was based on a hand-coded methodology that made standard HTML/CSS sites work optimally.
That doesn't really scale too well, into the current world.
I was unaware that the company (and conferences) closed. I am sad to hear about his medical issues. They can really clobber you.
Wow, I didn't know this either. I loved their titles. That's a hard business to be in, in 2024.
The "We're hiring" link shows the first position offered is a "Happiness Engineer", https://i.imgur.com/zSVeuYq.png.
> Our software and services aim to provide a seamless experience, but when things don’t go as planned, our customers rely on us for help. Happiness Engineers are the frontline heroes ensuring we deliver the best experience for our users. Their role is crucial because they interact with our customers the most and make the biggest impression in their time of need.
On the req they want candidates with senior/"tier 3" support experience or TAM experience, but the salary band is $40,000-$75,000. That's garbage pay, "and we pay in local currency", so they're offshoring without saying it out loud. It's a job for someone's happiness, but probably not the support eng's.
> they're offshoring without saying it out loud
No, they’re an entirely remote company hiring across the globe for any position, and they’re pretty clear about that beginning in the h1 title of their hiring page. This is just your “on-shore” bias talking.
They are definitely not the first place I've heard that term. I know System76 has been using it as a title for some time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoL4gqjaWnY
I doubt it originated there, either.
ChatGPT implies Automattic may have been first, or least certainly led it to wide adoption: https://chatgpt.com/share/6701e039-0e74-8012-b821-dea9789564...
As if the title of engineer couldn't get any more diluted. Reminds me of how everyone now is a "specialist".
Call Flow Optimization Specialist - Works at the front desk answering the telephone
Yeah, it's a cutesy title for customer support because you can't take yourself too seriously in jobs like this. Put very simply, people are fucking ass holes (and yes - you have to acknowledge this to excel at being a "Happiness Engineer" - it's not cynical to recognize that people have angry outbursts, because you have to know how to calm them down; pretending that people aren't mean is a one-way ticket to burnout). Even "nice" people can be ass holes; humans are complex and represent a whole spectrum of emotions [0]. Sometimes they don't know they're doing it, sometimes they do. There are social differences (what someone on the West Coast thinks is rude is not the same as what someone on the East Coast thinks is rude, and there are even difference between "microcultures" on the rules of social engagement; these rules might be intersubjective, but differ) that have to be negotiated often in one-time ephemeral interactions. Negativity is contagious and I cringe at the times that I unnecessarily injected negativity into an interaction where the other person/people didn't do anything to deserve it.
I think there is maybe one other "weird" job title in that list, but otherwise they're all pretty normal, so this is probably one of the last things I'd criticize Automattic for. The fact that they describe customer support as "Happiness Engineering" suggests the nature of the title - we have to be a little goofy to help people.
As a final note, for anyone thinking "I work in customer support and I don't like this yada yada", it's just not for you, and that's OK. No need to think up a huge rebuttal, it's just a different philosophy for those of us who like to help people and have a little bit of fun at the same time.
I don't work at Automattic, but I like WordPress and don't really care too much about this drama.
[0]: https://feelingswheel.com/
George Orwell is kicking himself for not thinking up that name first.
Someone should rewrite "1984" as it would work with todays technologies..
It is, in fact, being written. It’s called the modern West.
We’re more Brave New World than 1984.
Absolutely. The problem here is that people that generally parrot the “1984” meme haven’t read the book, let alone read any Orwell, or Huxley for that matter.
It will be hard to do that work from within an embattled organization that's only in that situation because of the CEO's behavior. Things don't get better from here. Any good-faith assumptions people made before are just gone. Every action has new layers of scrutiny, every move becomes suspect.
Why does someone who works at Automattic have meaningful medical debt? That's awful. I would expect Automattic to have both good insurance and sufficient pay such that no employee suffers from medical debt.
As critical as I am of Mullenweg, I am sure Automattic is obeying the Affordable Care Act and giving employees health insurance. It would be a dumb thing to save money on when you're paying competitive wages!
This seemed like an adequate explanation without needing any details:
> incurred by the closing of my conference and publishing businesses.
It's not clear to me why "closing of my conference and publishing businesses" results in medical expenses.
I'm not questioning it! I just don't understand the mechanics.
I think people are misreading the statement. The full statement is:
> Listen, I’m struggling with medical debts and financial obligations incurred by the closing of my conference and publishing businesses
People are reading it as
> Listen, I’m struggling with (medical debts and financial obligations) (incurred by the closing of my conference and publishing businesses)
but I suspect it was meant to be read as
> Listen, I’m struggling with (medical debts) and (financial obligations incurred by the closing of my conference and publishing businesses)
I think those are two separate issues. He's had medical issues and he needs to deal with the closing of his business.
Because they live in a country with a completely broken capitalist healthcare system?
Because there are hundreds of conditions that need to was Trent that insurance, even great insurance, barely covers and leaves you with thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars in medical debt.
What's the background on doing a soft layoff (or w/e) and hiring at the same time? Many of us have seen one of these close-up, just wondering what the case is here.
It’s an alignment layoff “I’m an asshole and if you aren't on board GTFO”. It’s right out of Musk’s playbook. Although I think Musk does it better.
Musk is an ideological asshole, this is Matt recognizing further growth probably requires pushing WP Engine out of their market. If you disagree with him on this, you probably disagree where Automattic as a whole is going.
Why? This is someone else’s fight. Do you have a high amount of equity in Automattic?
You have to look out for number one.
"It's not the rats who first abandon a sinking ship. It's the crew members who know how to swim." - Antonio Garcia Martinez, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
My insight into corporate legal disputes is as meaningful as my opinion on Quantum Mechanics.
What an immensely cowardly statement. Zeldman is not some naive worker elf and pretending to be such as an excuse to avoid saying anything is contemptible. If you don't want people to know what you think, just say that, or say nothing. Pretending you don't have an opinion because you don't understand is just...ick.
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> This is retarded.
That word is generally universally recognized as bigoted and discriminatory, so please don’t use it.
> Copyright is slavery.
No, slavery is slavery.
And you are, at best, incredibly insensitive, and at worst, an actual bigot.
> And you are, at best, incredibly insensitive, and at worst, an actual bigot.
And you are a control freak, who's hobby is to make up random rules, and insult everyone else not following them. Does this make you feel good about yourself? Can't you find anything else? Anyway, would you kindly fuck off, all with your friends.
> That word is generally universally recognized as bigoted and discriminatory, so please don’t use it.
Eheheh, you wish (and by wish, I mean lie). Even the fucking wikipedia doesn't agree with you:
> The adjective retarded is used in the same way, for something very foolish or stupid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retard_(pejorative)
Period.
Have they picked on me when I wore sandals with socks? Yes, they have, and it felt bad. Did I know that they were just sad, pitiful bullies? No, I didn't know it back then, but I do know it now. Shouldn't I just pity them, and go on with my days? No, I'd rather they stop doing this. Publicly calling them and their behaviour out, seems to be the right choice.
edit: also notice that GP doesn't even try to hide the fact that they are only here to bully. If they were less direct about it, "hey pal, we are trying to eradicate the word retard here, could you please use one of the following options", that would be more or less the same, but GP just jumped in to brag about some facts in their head, and insult GGP, not even leaving a hair's breadth place for a charitable interpretation.
> That word is generally universally recognized
Not a single word in history has ever been universally recognized.
Your brain is retarded.
But I'm rooting for you!
Try to remain open minded. A walk in the woods may help you.
Please, and I say this for (almost) all of us, grow up.
>I stayed because I believe in the work we do. I believe in the open web and owning your own content. I’ve devoted nearly three decades of work to this cause, and when I chose to move in-house, I knew there was only one house that would suit me. In nearly six years at Automattic, I’ve been able to do work that mattered to me and helped others, and I know that the best is yet to come.
As the layoffs and hiriing hesitation has increased over the past 1-2 years I have seen an increased amount of copium coming from engineers work at prestigious jobs.
If you work at a for profit company, I believe that you believe in their mission.
That mission is to make money.
If you work at a company where your job role pays out enough that you could retire of a few years of salary from the position, and you stay after the company pivots to something you didn't think was a good idea, you are there for money.
If you work at a company where your job role pays out enough that you could retire of a few years of salary from the position, and you stay after the company lays off a large number of your coworkers that you think could have been a net benefit to the company, you are there for money.
If you work at a company where your job role pays out enough that you could retire of a few years of salary from the position, and you stay after the company lays off many coworkers that you had a positive, personal relationship with, you are there for money.
I see people in this thread lauding this person for making what I believe is an ultimately selfish decision, and trying to pretend he is not.
I am tired of seeing all these software luminaries discussing how brave they are for {getting a fuck ton of money but pretending it is difficult to accept because they dont get to control everything}.
The feeling I am getting from this blog post and the reaction to it, is the same reaction I got to hearing about how Linus Torvalds was all for the concept of Free Software and then checking his wikipedia page to find out that the chain of links to his famous ancestors goes back to at least his grandparents.
Like no shit you "stayed", you got bank for it. Don't try and spin it as a moral good under
> I stayed because I believe in the work we do.
People might have more than one reason that they are at a company. Many people have a job because they do indeed want and need money, but they have their particular job because they like the work there more than the work at other jobs they may have taken.
If it was just about the money they would have probably left. They are well known enough to almost certainly be able to quickly get another job making at least as much money. Add in the 6 months severance they would have gotten and leave is the money maximizing option.
What do you believe the mission of Automaticc is?
JFC
His last two paragraphs are so egregious I segfaulted when reading them.
Did he really quote Rodney King on why we cant all get along as a response to layoffs that he survived, and then tells everyone that his group is hiring?
Fuck this guy. I don't care if it hurts my career. I wouldn't work with someone who is this big an asshole cause I wouldn't trust them to not throw me under the bus the second its expedient for them.
> I already miss them, and most only quit yesterday. I feel their departure as a personal loss, and my grief is real. The sadness is like a cold fog on a dark, wet night.
I can't understand this. I do not view my coworkers as part of my personal life, so while I enjoy working with some, I wouldn't say I'm sad if they leave. This sounds unhealthy
LOL
When you spend 8 hours a day around folks and become friends with them, it's natural to miss them when they leave. It's OK if you don't have any meaningful relationships with your co-workers, but, to me, that sounds unhealthy.
I worked at Automattic and the connections you could develop with your coworkers were fantastic. Almost everyone was kind, helpful, and encouraging, and I did my best to bring a positive attitude every day. Nearly everything being written communication makes that easier! (Eg you won’t seem standoffish one day if external circumstances have you in a poor mood.)
While you aren’t seeing people every day (the company is distributed), the relatively frequent meetups in cool places are a massive highlight, and just make your relationships that much stronger.
There are a lot of folks who have been around for ages — even if you aren’t working with someone directly anymore, you’ll frequently see a familiar face (and helping hand!) on the other side of the company.
So the grief of leaving these relationships is acute, especially if you’ve been around for a while. Processing that grief is healthy — and I might suggest that not having any kind of relationship with your coworkers is unhealthy. Or at least speaks to a cold culture somewhere.
Why are you spending your finite life working with people who you wouldn't fight for?
This might not be a "them" problem.
I'm not advocating that your coworkers have to be at the same rung as your family or [in-group X] but it's weird/sad to many reading this that you're okay not caring about the people you spend your days working towards a common goal with.
Is it possible for you to understand why others might feel this way about their colleagues and work?