I apologize for my erratic behavior which has tarnished our brand and created unnecessary turmoil within our organization. Regrettably, we will need to implement a 16% reduction in headcount to address the financial challenges we now face. I have decided to step aside and hand over control to my deputy, who I believe will provide the steady leadership needed to rebuild trust and restore our company's vision.
He'll never admit he was wrong or step down. He'll drive Automattic into the ground and Wordpress along with it (until someone forks it, like say...WP Engine, heh. Or Redhat, or IBM, or some huge web design firm, etc.)
He considers Wordpress "his" even though...he took it over from the original author who was abandoning the project.
It reminds me of the rage-bender Jamie and Jim Thompson went on, attacking OPNsense for "stealing" their work and doing a lot of immature things taking over opnsense's domain, their subreddit, etc. via legal actions. And at least one lawsuit. They lost on every front - reddit gave the subreddit back to the opnsense developers, ICANN gave them back their domain name, etc.
Attacking OPNsense for "stealing" pfSense was pretty rich given pfSense's origin; netgate slapped their logo on m0n0wall and started working on their fork. Which is exactly what opnsense did that enraged them...
Especially as pfsense software started getting more user-hostile and shifting functionality into the paid versions, pfsense has rapidly become less and less popular. I almost never see anyone recommend it anymore.
> He considers Wordpress "his" even though...he took it over from the original author who was abandoning the project.
Non Wordpress user here, not a blogger, don’t use CMSs. Curious about this line. Reading the history on Wikipedia, the original b2 was the precursor. It was pretty small and being abandoned. Matt proposed forking it in January 2003, and worked with Mike to bring the first version to fruition a few months later. 22 years later it’s a goliath.
Given that history it seems totally fair for Matt to consider WP his thing. You don’t seem to think so, can you explain?
That's all true and does not conflict. There is nothing to explain.
If only we had real leaders...
We do, but the sociopaths outcompete them.
You can trust me, facile3232, instead. I will improve upon all things the leader of automattic.com failed to improve upon.
This messaging is compelling. Are you also perchance against all bad things, and in favor of all good things?
You can't just say "perchance."
You got this random internet stranger
[dead]
Huh.
>> There are no layoffs plans at Automattic, in fact we're hiring fairly aggressively and have done a number of acquisitions since this whole thing started, and have several more in the pipeline.
That was important posturing to make sure that everyone knew that his nuclear war on WP Engine was absolutely not going to impact his ability to run the business and the WordPress project. Whether it was true or not it didn't matter at the time, the important thing was to keep up appearances and not let anyone on Reddit think they knew better than Matt.
It's not uncommon for companies to be in a hiring mode until they're very much not in a hiring mode any more.
Yeah. I was made a manager in Feb 2022 with 5 directs and 9 headcount to fill. Hired 5, and then by June 2022 all remaining headcount was cut. In January 2023 we had our first-ever layoffs in the company's 25-year history.
It is so hard to fathom that a leader trusted with millions of dollars of other people's money can be so disengaged from recruiting as to not see a hard wall of cash crunch, months if not years ahead.
You can't assume fundraising will always go swimmingly. You have to always be in survival mode, and if that means not hiring aggressively, then you put on the breaks until the money comes in .
Either as a leader you are clueless about your business cash needs, you are clueless about risk management, or you are clueless about the market, all of which make you not a suitable leader for a long-term company.
The issue was interest rates. Money was free in Feb 2022; the interest rate was literally 0%, and so any cash-generating investment at all is profitable. Fed started raising rates in Apr 2022, at which point leaders started freaking out because they know what higher rates mean, and by Jun 2022 the Fed was raising them in 0.75% increments, which was unheard of in modern economics. By Jan 2023 the rate was 4.5%, which meant that every investment that generates an internal rate of return between 0% and 4.5% is unprofitable. That is the vast majority of investment in today's economy. (We also haven't yet seen this hit fully - a large number of stocks have earnings yields that are lower than what you can get on a savings account, which implies that holding these stocks over cash is unprofitable unless you expect their earnings to grow faster than the interest rate drops, which doesn't seem all that likely in today's environment.)
Now, you'd have a point if you complained about how centralization of government and economic power with the President and Fed chair, respectively, is a problem. That is the root cause that allows the economy to change faster than any leader can adapt. There used to be a time when people would complain about centralization of executive power on HN, but for some reason that moment seems to have passed.
> The issue was interest rates. Money was free in Feb 2022; the interest rate was literally 0%, and so any cash-generating investment at all is profitable. Fed started raising rates in Apr 2022, at which point leaders started freaking out because they know what higher rates mean, and by Jun 2022 the Fed was raising them in 0.75% increments, which was unheard of in modern economics. By Jan 2023 the rate was 4.5%, which meant that every investment that generates an internal rate of return between 0% and 4.5% is unprofitable.
"Unheard of in modern economics" is carrying quite a lot of weight there. The last time the rates were increased by 0.75% was 1994, and while that's not recent, it's pretty silly to imply that CEOs should be making long-term investments assuming that it would be literally unprecedented for that to happen. Interest rates have changed only a few dozen times _at all_ since then, so yes, they haven't been increased by that much recently, but there's never going to be enough of a sample size over a period of a couple decades that it would be reasonable to assume a precedent that will never be broken.
The crux of your argument seems to be that because the interest rates happen to be set a certain way at a certain time, it would be irrational not to make decisions based on how profitable they'd be at that exact moment in time. The problem with this line of thinking is that plenty of investments are only realized over long enough period of time that by your own admission, people can't possibly react fast enough to avoid those turning into a loss. My question is, why put yourself in a position where you can't adapt fast enough in the first place? The way interest rates are set should not be news to the people making these decisions in companies, so it's not crazy to expect that maybe the people who are betting their company's success on something from less than three decades before being "unprecedented in modern economics" could think at least _a little_ longer term than "literally anything is profitable in this exact moment, so there's no need to think about what might come next".
Because they are publicly traded and subject to lots and lots of checks on corporate governance. The CEO actually didn't want to lay people off (and did a shit-poor job of it when he did). He was getting pressure from the board, who in turn was getting pressure from a lot of activist hedge funds.
Small-fry who operate secretly are able to take the long view and enrich themselves off the masses' stupidity. CEOs of a multi-trillion-$ company that is ~10% of the retirement portfolio of every American are not. At that level you have to go with the market consensus, because you will be ousted and deemed not a fit steward of the enterprise that you are entrusted with otherwise.
> Small-fry who operate secretly are able to take the long view and enrich themselves off the masses' stupidity. CEOs of a multi-trillion-$ company that is ~10% of the retirement portfolio of every American are not.
From my math, you're off by several orders of magnitude, unless somehow we're not talking about Automattic anymore.
> Fed started raising rates in Apr 2022, at which point leaders started freaking out because they know what higher rates mean, and by Jun 2022 the Fed was raising them in 0.75% increments, which was unheard of in modern economics.
You're basically making the case that it happened fast, and went up high, but everyone who paid attention to interest rates understood it was only a matter of time till it had to at least revert back to pre-covid rates (whether you think that's 1.5 or 2.3 or something, depending on how you measure), and that obviously there would need to be real layoffs after.
The excuse is really saying "it turned out more extreme than we thought", but was the behavior take responsible assuming non-extreme rate changes?
Why does the interest rate matter? Unless you have no cash on hand and are operating soley off debt??
If you're venture based and were expecting another round sometime soon. With higher interest rates there were more compelling alternatives for LPs than to invest in Venture, causing a trickle down chilling of the fund raising environment for venture backed companies and requiring them to come up with accelerated plans to reach profitability - including cutting staff and optimizing for survival over growth.
> Unless you have no cash on hand and are operating soley off debt??
Bingo
My employer actually has roughly $100B of cash on hand.
The issue is that they're a publicly-traded company, with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. If they're investing in an internal product that will make back 1% of the money invested in it over the next couple years, but they could have been investing in Treasury Bills that make back 4.5%, they are committing financial malpractice and will be sued accordingly.
I’ve seen many companies have this problem. They base hiring against planned revenue instead of current revenue. In a sense you have to - if you’re planning on growing 100% for several years on the back of new products and a big sales team you must hire in advance. It’s what the VC model is founded on. The downside is when you miss the revenue, you have to cut deep. And it’s usually worse because your hiring standards dropped in hyper growth.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
If you are the CEO saying 'we are planning for bad things in the future' while every other CEO is saying 'the arrow only goes up' guess which company the stock market punishes and who gets removed by the board versus who's options become worth more?
Not uncommon at all, but perhaps a symptom of poor leadership.
How infuriating for anyone recently hired caught in this trap.
It seems to me the obvious, from both a business & human perspective, is to stop hiring at first signs of trouble, before layoffs. To do so otherwise is cruel.
I doubt Matt had zero idea about this possibility two months ago.
This will continue until there are actual consequences for those responsible.
I'm of the mindset that any time a company does layoffs, they should start from the top And work down.
>I'm of the mindset that any time a company does layoffs, they should start from the top And work down.
Oh, to be young and idealistic again! So in your world, the people running the business should fire themselves first?
It's been done.
Bob Mercer and Peter Brown laid themselves off from IBM when they were told to execute 10% across the board layoffs. They had argued their team was one of the highest performing teams in the company but were told that they had their quota. 10% of their team was 2 so they took the hit.
From there, they went on to run Renaissance.
IBM should have kept them.
> So in your world, the people running the business should fire themselves first?
If they are needed to continue leading, they should consider cutting their own salary until the problems are fixed. Let them take their entire compensation in just their equity for a time.
However we all know this won’t be the norm, and that’s OK. Not great, just OK.
Been there and done that. One startup I was at instituted a 50% pay cut for senior execs, 25% for the level below that and no cut below that. The CEO took a 100% pay cut.
This let us get through a short rough patch without layoffs.
I worked at middle-sized company that instituted a pay cuts, cutting all bonuses and stopping raises.
After year, company lost almost every person in tech managenent and most of team leaders, their clients actively executing forking rights and no one believes in company future now.
I once heard wise words from some CEO. In harsh times, clients do not want cheaper and worse services from us. They want less services. So we are moving out headcount down, while keeping pay and even execute raises for those who stay.
Can you explain why this is wise? I'd say most execs leaving is usually a net positive. You are framing it as a tragedy and I am just not seeing it.
From where I am standing, leeches that are only there for fat bonuses left. Where's the loss?
And the measure you described also doesn't follow. Bad times always end and then you have a worse product. Will the execs pick up the new tech work?
I do know of one guy who took a pay cut because unless he hamstrung his own team badly he was looking at needing to lay off about 2.3 people and so he cut his own salary to make it 2 instead of 3.
That's one story surrounded by a hell of a lot of shitheel stories.
Jim Barksdale enters the room.
If they're running the business, and it's at a point where it needs layoffs; sounds like they're not doing their job properly, and should be replaced with people who can-- like every other position in the business.
Not that they will-- too much self-interest.
not the parent, but accountability is supposed to be assumed up the org chart while responsibility is delegated down.
so, yeah. the people ultimately accountable for fucking shit up should probably be held accountable first and foremost.
(this is why CEOs often resign in the wake of a scandal)
Imagine the organization you are imagining in your head.
Now imagine there is a Super-boss, who is exactly like the "people running the business" (attribution needed), but one level above them.
If the Super Boss were to look at the situation, I think it'd be pretty obvious that the issue would be "The people organizing the company at the highest level" who are responsible for the failures of the company. That may involve over-hiring, which is itself a bad practice that causes unnecessary pain and (personal, financial) suffering, and would be a good cause to fire them for almost crashing my beautiful super-company that I, the Super-boss, super-founded.
You're saying that if we return the Super-boss to the realm of the fictional, then suddenly it isn't the C-suite's fault anymore?
If we're discussing should, then yeah, their heads should be the first to roll. I agree its idealistic to imagine them having the sort of decency this requires, but I agree it should be the case!
If they have to fire people, they're running it poorly, so yes?
If you've spent any time in business at all, you know it's always the tea lady who gets fired first and the managers last. Many commenters here seem to live in some kind of fantasy world.
>the people running the business should fire themselves first?
You were questioning whether they should, not whether they will. That's what people are responding to. They understand perfectly well who will get fired first.
I was questioning the idealism actually. There’s not much to be achieved by wishing the world was a certain way, it’s generally more useful to deal with the world as it is.
What idealism? The person you responded to said they didn't expect things to change unless there were real consequences. Not expecting things to change is the opposite of idealism.
But even if they were idealistic, arguing with people for wishing the world was better is a genuinely odd thing. If you followed your beliefs, wouldn't you understand that telling people not to wish for things is pointless? If you actually dealt with the world as it is, you would not argue with people on the Internet because changing somebody's mind, particularly in the way you are attempting to do it, is just as much wishful thinking as hoping that CEOs will fire themselves.
If we don't talk about what we feel is ideal, we can never strive to achieve it.
Its really important to discuss idealism for that reason alone
Good luck with changing human nature, i.e. persuading managers to voluntarily act against their own self-interest. That’s just not how people work.
What you say is true in some cases, but not in all cases.
Can't even try if we don't talk about it. The issue with line of 'clear thinking' is it leaves no room for change.
If enough people take talk into action, we could reasonably see a change in behavior. It may come from sources than we don't expect, but it can happen all the same and we only have a chance at getting there if we are wiling to talk about what is ideal and raising that awareness. Its an important piece of that puzzle
An honest question: why is this being downvoted? I thought that downvoting is meant to be used when someone is trolling or bringing the level of discussion down, not when you simply disagree with someone's point. I mean sure, it's stated a bit sarcastically, but my gosh if we're going to downvote every sarcastic comment, that would include a good portion of HN comments.
My read is that the parent is immature and needs to be reminded that "starting at the top" means the people in charge. What does it add to the discussion?
I probably failed to account for the differing backgrounds of HN commenters & the resulting overly-literal interpretation of sarcasm, to be fair to the downvoters. Of course the owners & managers should take responsibility for poor corporate performance.
> I'm of the mindset that any time a company does layoffs, they should start from the top And work down.
I'm off the mindset that employment should be voluntary: both by the employer and the employee. It makes employers reluctant to hire if they know they can't get rid of people again.
(I'm a socialist at heart and think it'd be pretty nice for the government to take care of people who lost their jobs. Just tax the companies a little more!)
Those lacking empathy don’t know how to not be cruel. They keep filtering to the top unfortunately. Something that remains to be solved for.
There is nothing to solve - you are in the game of capitalism (the American Edition) and the job is to maximise shareholder value. They are paid big bucks because they only work for that without empathy/cruelty or such emotions. The only way to solve is to change the game but that's next to impossible because most powerful players like it that way and will turn on anyone trying to change their fattening ways.
The best part is that the pawns keep getting sacrificed and do nothing to change it; not only that, they refuse to support anyone trying to change the game to make their lives better. It's amazing.
The business world changes direction faster than companies can adapt. That was my biggest lesson as an entrepreneur: entrepreneurs don't really pivot into product-market fit, the market pivots into them. The reason capitalism works is because there's this huge sea of dream-chasers out there, most of whom will go bankrupt, so that when the market's needs change there is somebody out there to service them, and everybody who's not effectively servicing them goes to hell and gets another job.
Corporations and management basically exist to buffer this uncertainty. Employment is actually a really bad deal in good economic times; owners reap almost all the windfall of having a successful product. But in bad times, the company keeps paying you even if they're losing money, at least up until they don't. You get a raw deal, but not as raw a deal as the people paying you.
Likewise with strategic direction. The market's needs change faster than senior executives can adapt: if they always produced what the market was actually clamoring for, the company would run around like a chicken with its head cut off (this actually happens when the CEO panics, and a key CEO skill, and part of the reason they're paid so much, is the ability to ignore every piece of market data saying "You're not hot anymore. Nobody wants you, and the market has moved on" and keep doing what you're doing even though your intuition is telling you that you're doomed and going to lose your cushy $20M/year job). Much of the job of middle management is to buffer senior management's freakouts and tell the ICs "Keep calm and carry on; let's see if he still cares about this new hotness next week."
I've worked at a couple consultancies who played themselves by investing too heavily in one or two customers.
Once a single customer is 1/3 of your revenue they can start extracting considerations from you that may not be what your employees thought they signed up for. It's a good way to end up being a body shop. I don't have a philosophical problem with body shops per se, it's just that I don't want to work for one, so I pick places that should know better, but sometimes don't.
It can also be problematic if 2 customers account for 45% of your revenue and they both get the same idea, which can happen particularly when the market shifts. You have no way to call their bluff and move enough people to other projects to make it stick.
>The market's needs change faster than senior executives can adapt: if they always produced what the market was actually clamoring for, the company would run around like a chicken with its head cut off (this actually happens when the CEO panics, and a key CEO skill, and part of the reason they're paid so much, is the ability to ignore every piece of market data saying "You're not hot anymore. Nobody wants you, and the market has moved on" and keep doing what you're doing even though your intuition is telling you that you're doomed and going to lose your cushy $20M/year job)
You know what I absolutely hate about this take? It ignores my shared experience I've had with others (IE, its not just me). I've worked in this industry a long time. So I've inevitably worked for places that ran into financial trouble. In multiple of those cases, it could have been prevented if upper management actually listened to what those of us developing the product had to say about shifting customer behaviors and expectations, that what we were seeing was different from what they were trying to sell and have us develop. It always ended in disaster.
They refused to listen, but never paid the price for that failure, my colleagues did and in one instance, I was on the receiving end of a layoff along with others as well.
It's kinda their job to not listen. CEOs get bombarded with thousands of pieces of information each week. If they shifted the company direction each time, the company would get nothing wrong. In the immortal words of Ribbonfarm, "CEOs don't steer":
A good CEO will let in just the little bit of information that saves the company - this was Andy Grove's pivot to focus on microprocessors over memory chips, or Steve Jobs's turnaround of Apple. You didn't have a good CEO, and got your average mediocre CEO that sets a strategic direction and sticks with it regardless of what the market says.
I'm curious though, if you knew your employer was going under, why not jump ship to the competitor that actually did understand what customers wanted? Employees are economic agents too, and oftentimes competitors are more than happy to hire out of their competition.
>A good CEO will let in just the little bit of information that saves the company - this was Andy Grove's pivot to focus on microprocessors over memory chips, or Steve Jobs's turnaround of Apple. You didn't have a good CEO, and got your average mediocre CEO that sets a strategic direction and sticks with it regardless of what the market says.
Still too simplistic. Yeah, they need to filter information and say no to things constantly, I get that is a core skill. If something is repeatedly being brought up by members of your core teams, you should at least look at what they're saying and ask where they are coming from. That is simply good sense. There is a persistence factor in involved in each of these cases that are the source of the frustration.
If what constitutes a good CEO is allowing in the 'little bit of information that can save the company' (really thats a call about identifying useful information before anyone else), objectively most companies have terrible CEOs, and I question the value of the position entirely on that basis, especially at larger public companies.
FWIW, at each of these companies I worked at, the headcount was at most in the hundreds. I was only 2 clicks below the executives in the company tree, there wasn't a lot of barrier to interaction there, which is what I find even more baffling about the whole thing.
>I'm curious though, if you knew your employer was going under, why not jump ship to the competitor that actually did understand what customers wanted?
I did this twice. In the one instance I wasn't able to get moving faster than things were going down hill. Partially, this is a symptom of just how long interview cycles have become over the years. Took me longer than expected, but moreover, the company conducted the layoff faster than I really thought they would. I got the timing wrong by a little bit, it happens.
Its not like you identify an issue one time either, its the repeated ignoring of what happens despite repeated sustained efforts to raise the awareness where it needs to be.
That's a lot of words from someone who doesn't know what's been going on for ~6 months or so that is relevant.
Mullenweg lost his mind and attacked a competitor to Wordpress hosting (WP Engine) and kept doubling down and only served to demonstrate how much of an unhinged asshole he was.
Along the way he pissed off the Wordpress community - the worry was that if anyone else pissed him off (which could include he'd accuse them of using the Wordpress name or even "WP", even if it was descriptive (which is entirely permitted use of a trademarked name) and run up a bunch of legal expenses for them.
Angry-at-the-world blog post after blog post doubling down over and over. Taunting people as he banned them from the Wordpress slack, that sort of stuff. Then he blocked WP Engine from accessing the Wordpress.org plugin and theme registries which meant a huge number of sites couldn't update plugins or themes.
Then he announced Automattic was going to cut back engineering hours to (if I remember right) one full time staffer. One person to keep up with security updates and bugfixes of a very complicated piece of software used by a lot of organization.
Incredibly childish and thoroughly demonstrated to the world that he was unsuited for leading a company and being the sole person almost completely in charge of a piece of software used by a 20-30% of the websites in the world.
This was absolutely foreseeable, especially when he cut back Automattic's engineering to 40hr/week.
I advised a client a few weeks into the drama to at least keep in the back of their minds that they might have to migrate at some point as "the CEO of the company is off his rocker, they probably will start to struggle with security updates, and the company may go out of business."
The median position is to be hiring, just to backfill attrition. "Trouble" might be temporary; it might be noise. Hiring is always slow, with cycles longer than "trouble" might last.
We might argue about the parameters in this situation, but structurally there's a bias towards the low-pass average.
The exuberance and self-assuredness that your plans are going to work out leads to overreach and I think the lag in accounting practices helps make that more acute.
I have had too many experiences where I thought my current employer was about to start circling the drain, and I've ended up some place that was circling faster. At a guess I'm about 50:50, which I suppose I should count as 'lucky' but has never felt that way.
Fish-tailing is a common flame-out mode for startups. VCs are partly to blame. They don't like to discourage you in case you come up with a miracle, but neither do they want to put good money and time after bad if it turns out you're going to be a break-even play or a loss.
Its not even cruel. Its just dumb. Really dumb.
You are going to invest significant resources into hiring, onboarding, and injecting new staff into workflows for people that will not be there as soon as they are actually productive.
So its not just the cash burn - its the tieup of 3x team members to getting new people trained to become effective and successful contributor. Time is finite.
It makes no sense to throw away all that time spent by your team, who could have use that same time to get a few more features out, proposals sent , or projects spec'd instead.
If you believe you need more people to get out of trouble isn’t it cruel to not follow through?
So if you took the deal last year you would have gotten 9 months, now the severance is 9 weeks. Way to reward "loyalty". Good thing we're so smart and better than everyone else and we don't need unions.
Financially your best bet is to be in the 1st round of layoffs. Ego-wise, it's best to be in the second round. First round there's still some money and a lot of guilt, so the severance tends to be good.
By the time they lay off truly essential people, you're burnt out, and you're lucky if you don't have to sue to get what you're owed by law, let alone whatever policy they had for paying out vacation time or what have you. You also get to enjoy a fun period of survivor guilt when they laid off people who you think have contributed as much or more than you have, and then know that you'll be next if they laid of <person> already.
IMO, if there is any talk of "loyalty" in that first round of voluntary layoffs, you should always leave. Even if you were previously loyal, the company is changing and you won't like the results.
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Your also competing with fewer people when looking for a new job.
Not especially surprising, but there’s an awfully large elephant in the room that likely directly contributed to this necessity that goes completely unmentioned.
Matt's only real problem is not owning his ambition openly.
Trying to publicly argue the moral high ground was a stupid, unforced error.
It didn't need to be moralized at all. Just make the changes you want to make, piss off a vocal minority, then get back to winning and making boatloads of money by executing exceptionally.
The problem, I suspect, is that Matt values how certain people perceive him more than he values winning. It's unfortunate, because he's clearly a very good executer and strategist. He's getting in his own way.
> he's clearly a very good executer and strategist. He's getting in his own way.
Apparently not. I'd argue he was perceived as such but has thoroughly proven the opposite by now. There were so many stations to get off the train.
Ignore the financial valuations, man is a worm. I'd call him a 'hack' but that might imply talents given where we are.
Through his shitshow, he tried - and failed - to curry favor with an OSS puppet. Not any particular software... like one might think, but the whole "thing".
There was never any moment where WPEngine was beholden for offering WordPress services. Everything was strained to the point he was trying to redefine OSS.
He got in his way, ours as members of the public, and that of WPEngine. Repeatedly... and I don't see enough reflection/reason from Matt to believe this will change. Personally, I'd hesitate to promote his strategies or skills.
Hamfisted is a better message. Or none, take the wind away. We don't want his ambition or to hear about it. It's demonstrably shit.
Edit: just in case this needs saying, I've never been affiliated with either company. Don't waste your limited time looking for me, Matt.
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IMHO moralizing wasn't really the problem.
The extremely erratic behavior, the ego, the fixation with vengeance, harassing organizations legally using the Wordpress name, abusing his power at the wordpress foundation, using it to punish Automattic competitors...
He pissed off a lot of people, but worse: he made a lot of people nervous.
If more people valued how others perceive them more than they valued winning, the world would be a better place.
Drupal's sudden popularity?
Is the elephant in the room with us now? (Mind filling in?)
The legal threats against WPEngine and their customers, the lawsuits between WP/Automatic/WPF and WPEngine, the banning of several contributors, the takeover of WP Plugins on WP.org, the shenanigans with several check boxes on the login pages of WP.org.
While it wasn't as damaging from a legal or (business) reputational perspective, he also peeked into the Tumblr database in order to doxx people who were making fun of him, which doesn't say great things about his stability or fitness to run a company.
Since Matt regularly comments here, and given the expression chosen; I'm pretty certain that they know who the elephant is.
His account has been inactive for almost all of 2025, I think his legal team must have taken away the password.
He has alts he uses that are probably still active.
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Matt commenting here was part of the reason he is in the mess he is in.
the author of that email has been having a very public breakdown for months now, mostly consisting of being a prick and trying to harm the community and a competitor.
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> This restructuring will result in an approximately 16% workforce reduction
Probably the most salient detail for non-Automattic employees. Everything else was generic fluff.
> non-Automattic employees
non-Automatticians. Yes, they literally used this term in TFA.
I know this really bugs some people but every tech company these days has a demonym for its employees.
It doesn't mean that employees have some cultlike adoration for the company. It's just very convenient inside the company to have a single short word to refer to all employees of the business.
> a single short word
> “Automattician”
The word you’re looking for is employee.
I checked my list, and the fact that employees of Automattic are called "Automatticians" did not make my list of things to be outraged about. Maybe next week.
Pointing out the error in your claim implied nothing about outrage.
"Employee" is ambiguous because it doesn't convey which business someone is an employee of. A company-specific demonym is short and precise.
> It doesn't mean that employees have some cultlike adoration for the company
No, but it does mean that the company wishes that employees had some cult like adoration. The line between proud of the company one works for and being cult like is not rigid, and moves depending on the company
I get it, it's just kind of a meme at this point after a couple years of these boilerplate RIF announcements. Cmd-F for "difficult decision" + whatever the demonym is and you're basically guaranteed hits.
Just say "all employees" then. Lots of companies use contractors who don't have employee benefits, do they count as "Googlers" or whatever the stupid stand-in moniker is?
Some companies even have a name for people after they left the company, like "xooglers" for Google and "outfluxers" for InfluxData
get hired back to become a refluxer, train as a hardware engineer to become a flux capacitor...
Plus severance will be paid but didn't say how much.
I was thinking this is a boilerplate firing email though!
I wonder if it's better or worse than the voluntary termination deal they offered to employees last year (first 6 months, then 9 months pay).
It’s worse. Max I’m seeing is 9 weeks.
Yikes. Meanwhile, the people who took the buyout last year got 6 months (or 9 if they waited for the second round).
Much worse.
> how much
With so many countries and legal frameworks to comply with, there's never going to be a single answer for this.
It’s looking like countries with better worker protections saw zero layoffs.
Given what I know of the situation (which admittedly isn't much), wouldn't the best course of action be to shitcan the CEO?
From Reddit discussions, if they can be trusted, there is nobody who can remove Matt from any position. It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.
> It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.
My understanding is that the investors signed proxy voting rights over to Matt. They are mostly ordinary shares, and may be revocable. [1]
I am confused -- so if investors don't like the CEO, there is nothing they can do? Other than maybe taking their part of the money out?
Even "taking their part of the money out" is not guaranteed. Again, it's a privately traded company, so there's no open market. You have to find someone willing to buy your shares from you and make a deal with them.
he'd already be out if it was simple to force him out
Let this be a lesson to anyone investing in a startup: don't give any cash unless there's real corporate governance.
but the opposite is true too: don't take money from investors unless they let you keep control of your company. for every case like this there are probably a dozen cases where investors took control of a company and ruined it for the sake of making money.
How did they "ruin" a company if that company made money?
Not all humans are driven by the same motivations.
Presumably if you as a founder are not driven by a desire to make money and your investors are, you 100% should be ousted. This is the principal-agent problem at work.
> Presumably if you as a founder are not driven by a desire to make money and your investors are, you 100% should be ousted
Presumably, the real world is a bit more nuanced than that.
There is no reason why you cannot run a company for different motivations than "get as rich as possible" while still accepting investments from people whose sole motivation is "get as rich as possible". While difficult, it is possible to align people even when they have different motivations.
Same with trading your time for stock options (that you hope are eventually negotiable shares); trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.
Dilution is a real problem. If they want you to act like a Founder, you should have protected equity like one.
if so, that's what we in the narcissist-identifying business call a "tell".
Or it just sounded like a fun joke for a good company name... I mean you are not wrong, but pretty much any successful young entrepreneur must have some degree of excessive appreciation for themselves, and this one was already achieving that status at 19.
Knowing a number of successful entrepreneurs, many having hit success early as well - most don't need to enshrine themselves in the company name. It is indeed a tell.
If that wasn't enough of a tell, his behavior in the last few months spelled it out clearly, circled the relevant parts with a big fat red marker, and installed a blinking neon sign saying "narcissist".
i don't think that is how a tell works. of course now we know. hindsight and all that.
to decide whether it is actually a tell, we need to look at statistics of company names containing references to the owners/founders and their behavior. and i don't think that statistic bears out. naming your company after yourself is the traditional thing to do. "automattic" is just on the more clever side.
the tradition is changing only because it is becoming more and more popular to name your company after the product you are selling. now, putting your name into the product name, that maybe could be a tell. but even here there are exceptions: debian for example.
Yes but this isn't really much of a crime or tell to me. The name is great as far as I'm concerned.
And he's full of himself and completely wrong in this crusade he launched for some reason, completely indefensible acts left & right for over a year.
Both true.
It's easy to call that a "tell" in light of Matt Mullenweg's recent activities. No one was saying shit when Wordpress was the darling of Web 2.0.
Justifiable evidence of Matt Mullenweg's unhealthy/excessive narcissism only surfaced within the past year or so (I'm fuzzy on the timeline, cut me some slack ya?). Automattic the company has been so named for, goodness, close to twenty years now.
It could be Matt's been a narcissist from the start. But people also change and not always for the better so maybe he became a "narcissist" much later in life and his chosen company name just so conveniently fell into the narrative.
There are CEOs in bigger spotlights with a bigger case for narcissism who don't put their names on any of their companies (emphasis on the plurality). One of them has a name with a similar inflection pattern to other well-known albeit fictional narcissist, Tony Stark.
I don't know what "Automattic" as a company name says about Matt as a person. I'll tell you what it is though: a damn good pun, one I would gladly score myself given the chance.
Yeap, Automatic is not a good trade name but Automattic is great!
> wait, did he put his name in the company name?
Yes.
Yes. He also calls the employees Automatticians. So they're all just Matt.
guess their jobs were just automatted away!
Mentioning "our revenue continues to grow" seems quite out of place in an announcement like this.
I disagree - it's not properly addressed, but it's nice to see it at least brought up.
Layoffs are always awful, but seeing companies talk about "changing economic realities" amongst continuing revenue and profit growth - often all time highs - is a real morale killer for those who are left behind.
Microsoft/Amazon/Alphabet/Google are trillion dollar megacorps who are insanely profitable, but they're firing people because they no longer have to pretend we care about you at all and will instead try to cater to Wall Street (who will never be happy - if I had $10000 for every quarter where a big tech corp "beat expectations" and the stock dropped anyway I'd retire). It's a hard pill to swallow and will increase bitterness and cynicism in the remaining workforce and kill any chance of your employees caring about your vision or putting in any extra effort.
> they no longer have to pretend we care about you at all and will instead try to cater to Wall Street
The company isn't "catering" to wall street, wall street is their boss. The owners of the company vote on what they want the company to do, and hire the person in charge of the company. And besides, do you care about your company? If you got a job offer to make twice your salary doing something you'd enjoy more than what you do now, would you stay with your current company out of care for them? Maybe you would, but I know of almost no one who feels that way towards their employer, outside of those working for small tech startups with their friends.
For almost everyone I know, their mindset is that they're going to do the best job they can right up until something better comes along, at which point they'll switch to something better. And I fully expect that if my best work is no longer worth more to them than my salary, they'll lay me off. In the meantime, they're paying me a ridiculous amount of money to do a job I enjoy. It's a deal that 99% of the world is envious of, and I don't think it should inspire bitterness and cynicism
> they're paying me a ridiculous amount of money to do a job I enjoy
> It's a deal that 99% of the world is envious of, and I don't think it should inspire bitterness and cynicism
First of all, I think it takes a lot of guts to continue to have this attitude in the current economic climate. Or, in your case, immense skill, but not everybody - not even everybody in the big tech companies - has that.
I think the bitterness and cynicism stems from not enjoying the work. As crazy as this sounds - it's the intangibles as much as the cash: for example, knowing the company will fight your efforts to improve things.
In this case, the "our revenue continues to grow" is not transparency, it's deliberately obfuscating the increase in expenses that led to layoffs being necessary. Not mentioned is the insanely expensive legal battle that they launched with WP Engine, which is already a massive drain on resources and a huge financial risk given how strong WP Engine's case is.
"Our revenue continues to grow" doesn't matter if unnecessary expenses outstrip it.
I might agree with you, if the "why we're making changes" section had listed even one reason to lay people off.
Our revenue continues to grow, and will be even more profitable as we lay off 16% of the employees.
The tone being set is not a good one to be sure.
Are they being profitable? Didn't automattic take venture capital somewhat recently, suggesting that's not the case?
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When was anyone naive enough to think their company cared about them?
On the other hand, why should a company keep people around that they don’t need?
And the last point, speaking more about Microsoft/Amazon/Google, if you have worked for either company for any length of time, there is no excuse for you not to have a nice nest egg to tide you over especially considering the severance amounts they give you.
You might be forced to sully yourself and become an “enterprise developer” and make around what most of the 2.8 million developers in the US.
And yes, I did a bid at Amazon and within three years, I paid off some debt, saved a chunk of change, got my 3.5 months severance package and found another job quickly that was my target compensation (not enterprise dev).
I think it's just saving face. That statement could be true if revenue was growing at 1% or 10% or whatever.
If opex is growing at a faster rate than revenue, and it’s not a VC situation, then layoffs are a popular way to curtail opex — typically business leadership cannot effect changes that would eventually impact themselves, so, the board and executive layer prefer to mass-layoff workers and middle management first and then let the remaining leadership fight for their life to present optimized plans. This is of course a terrible approach, because — as Taskmaster quite enjoyably demonstrates — even the smartest people tend to make a lot of asinine judgment calls under duress and deadlines; but when the alternative is to admit weaknesses of leadership, it’s certainly a logical enough course of action.
> They also have our enduring gratitude for their time with the company.
I hope the RIF'd employees can pay rent with that gratitude.
If I were considering using Wordpress for anything, which I am not, this would end those plans. If they're laying off and keeping the CEO, they must be in dire financial straits. That message says "we're doing all the right things and have good leadership with a track record of making good decisions, but we have no alternative but to fire a sixth of our employees". That's not a good sign.
Executive behaves like a child, labor suffers the consequences.
I used to be a big admirer of Matt and Automattic, but after this whole WP Engine episode I've lost respect. I shut down my old wordpress blog, still working on importing the posts as org-mode files onto my new site, I no longer recommend WP to non-techies that ask me how to build a website.
I hope WordPress (and Automattic) turn the ship around but its not looking good at this point.
I wonder if the CEO throwing a tantrum that another company was using "their" open-source (thus, not theirs) code wasn't the real problem, but it made investors take a closer look, and they noticed that Automattic has less of a moat then they thought.
Haven't seen any public reporting on this yet, but from internal conversations this seems to include a 60% workforce reduction at Tumblr, which now only has a few remaining engineers.
I actually started paying the subscription for my Tumblr account a couple years ago. I don't get much direct benefit from it, I do it because it's the only social media site I use and enjoy, and I was hoping it would help keep it from shutting down. 60% workforce reduction is not great.
i dont mean to kick a dead horse, but a "few remaining engineers" for what is effectively an outdated clone of a microblogging site, a few engineers, seems like a lot still
what microblogging site do you think Tumblr is a clone of? and outdated compared to what, exactly?
Yeah, that’s my understanding as well
I wonder what this means for the future of Beeper.
I'm wondering the same thing. Considering they were just acquired, I'm concerned. Especially since as far as I know, they still are operating under a free model.
HR wranglers? Damn, that’s simultaneously hilarious and terrifying
"Either I'm an idiot, or something is going on that you don't understand. Let's check back in a month. :)"
This might not have happened if Mullenweg hadn’t sued his competitor, then went off the deep end and hurt everyone.
Another interpretation would be a common cause for both this and the litigation, i.e. pressure to improve financials.
That's an unbelievably terrible course of action. If you have financial issues, don't try to get out of it by litigation. Only litigate if you absolutely have to, and you have been wronged. Don't do it because you are trying to improve your bottom line.
Yes, i think that's the consensus. But it didn't start with litigation, it started with a 'creative' approach to generating new licensing revenue.
I think this is a bit unfair.
Who among us can really say they haven't gone off the deep end, burned every drop of good will that ever existed towards them and their projects, sued a competitor and got hilariously burned by the judge, all while burning hundreds of millions of your companies value (blackrock marked them down 10%, which is 750 million)
This is just a normal thing that happens. It could have happened to anyone.
It may also have been part of his reason for doing so. Panic/desperation.
on the positive side, it's a small thing monetarily, but retention of company laptops is a nice goodwill gesture
Many of them are fully depreciated and worth nothing, or nearly so, on paper anyway. Any new employees won't want an old laptop. And it will cost time and money to deal with shipping, storage, cleaning, re-imaging, etc. On average, the bean counters must figure it's cheaper to let people keep them.
Worth maybe $1000, not even half a month's rent in almost any major US city
They’re mostly high specced, newer M model MacBook pros
They do say they have employees in 90 countries…
Eh, from the company's perspective this is logistically easiest--the laptop's value is hardly worth the effort.
a lot of companies ask for equipment to be returned due to security concerns, or just on principle
A company which is even moderately "OK" at IT will already have the means to instantly lock and securely wipe devices of any employee at a moments notice. Doing this during a RIF is a hell of a lot better than making the mail room deal with a bunch of filthy laptops.
A large bunch of big companies, including some of the biggest on the planet don't even sell past-end-of-life laptops to their current employees.
Let that sink in. They're not even willing to <<sell>> old laptops, they would rather scrap them and contribute to pollution and overall waste.
If they sell to (ex-)employees they sell to consumers. This then includes consumer warranties etc.
However what large companies do is to get an agreement with a refurbishing company, which will collect and refurbish them and and pay the corporation some share.
This works in some mix calculation - the well treated machines can be sold well, some machines can be used to reuse some parts and some machines are nothing but cost for disposal.
If you scrap a laptop you get a nice, auditable, chain of custody from the end user to the company that will certify it's been destroyed. If you sell someone their old laptop you need to ensure that it's actually been wiped, not just "I copied my files over and started using the new one". I've seen a few IT departments be not great at "Sam got their new laptop two weeks ago, someone should follow up now to see if the wipe on the old one happened".
One choice won't get you fired, the other might save you a bit of cash.
I'm talking about some companies that should have the best IT departments on the planet.
Writing off equipment through depreciation is a time honored thing for corps. If they sell them, they are no longer a write off. That's now more work for the bean counters.
Then donate them.
Isn't that essentially what they are doing when the let the employees keep them?
My original comment in the thread:
> A large bunch of big companies, including some of the biggest on the planet don't even sell past-end-of-life laptops to their current employees.
It's good that Automattic is doing it, I was wishing it was an industry standard procedure, for all past-end-of-life hardware, not just layoffs and not just laptops.
Right now FAANG, for example, which you'd expect to have the very best of everything, as far as I know don't give old laptops (and other old hardware) to employees, they don't even sell them. They send them to be recycled or whatever, but the best action is to reduce and reuse, recycle should be the last option.
Plus an employee is likely to be willing to accept their old device since they know it's performance and general behavior.
klarna allowed us to buy our work phone and macbook paying only the tax value. We had to give them the devices so they would be wiped out by a third party, then they mailed them to my home.
MacBooks and iPhones are amongst the easiest to wipe remotely.
You can wipe them fully (which would be the recommendation for MacBooks) and remove just work-installed apps on an iPhone.
Absolutely. I was in charge of that at a previous job, and telling Jamf to nuke the device did the job the next time it was turned on.
This is a G move, without a doubt the best way I've heard of this being done.
One former employer had this policy, and also refused to provide a way to ship said equipment back. No one was happy with my alternative solution: leaving it at the police station instead.
Is that what you proposed or what you actually did? I want a story!
I actually did it. This was back in the times when you could get a job the next day, and my new employer didn't want me keeping anything from the old employer by the time I started. Old employer was dragging their feet on the shipping label and made it clear that failure to return the equipment would be considered theft. I gave them a week of daily reminder emails with an approaching deadline (no response), then handed it to the cops as abandoned property. Got a few HR calls immediately afterwards asking how to pick it up, and an annoyed police call asking me not to do it again.
> made it clear that failure to return the equipment would be considered theft
Is "please arrange for a courier to retrieve it" not the end of your obligations?
In a situation where everyone (including me) was acting reasonably, sure. But I was slightly gruntled from being pushed out for filing a safety report, and keeping it in my possession would have technically violated my new contract. Giving it to the police was clearly not stealing it and didn't require going out of my way to help them solve a problem of their own creation.
On the other side of this, I doubt the police would have done anything if they reported it stolen.
There are questions online about "what if a former employee doesn't return their laptop." They almost always end with "send a threatening letter in legalese." They stop after that because the the next step is get a $300 per hour lawyer involved for a $600 laptop.
I love this. Bravo.
When I left microsoft, I kept everything EXCEPT data bearing devices. I got the sense they REALLY didn't want to have to collect the laptops either, but the VPs were forced to by compliance.
We always let our ex-employees keep their laptops because a. why not? and b. I don't need laptops for positions that no longer exist.
I was at a company that let people keep laptops (after they were wiped) largely because the severance was so meager it seemed they expected people to sell the laptops for some extra cash. :p
doubtful it was considered extra cash, but just now not needing to spend cash on replacing the laptop with personal money
“Welcome to your new job at HighSpeed TopFlight. Here’s an old, used laptop.”
I’ve had that happen to me at a new job. It disnt make my new employer shine.
One of my key metrics for evaluating employers is Time To Second Monitor.
And yet only one company I've ever worked for went this way.
I wish more did; it really is such a small goodwill gesture to departing employees.
companies that collect their laptops from laid off => where do these laptops go? how they recycle them?
It's a huge "depends". Different areas have different recycling opportunities. Some hardware providers have their own buyback/replacement programs. Also some companies may want to reimage and reuse the returned hardware. Finally you want some stock of temporary laptops available for people who are waiting for repairs so some functioning used ones are great for that.
Yeah at the BigCorps I was at, old laptops (as long as they weren’t more than 3-4 years old) were usually reimaged and kept on hand as spares or for interns, etc. But I imagine after a large layoff they ended up with way more than they’d ever actually need.
Redistributing them to new employees/interns is very common, especially if the laptop is only 1-2 years old.
There's a parallel timeline where he admitted he messed up, stepped down, hired a real CEO, put someone else in charge of the nonprofit, and the downward slide he caused started to reverse.
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This comment thread is just hilarious. When a CEO of a VC-backed startup that you admire does things you disagree with, you find ways to justify their actions. When a CEO that is running an actually successful business and wishes to defend that business legally, you trash him. Be better.
Matt needs to be better, you're hilarious - he is the common denominator
>A comprehensive package covering severance pay and benefits.
What does this mean in term of monthly wages?
I was a technical lead for the Romanian branch of an US company. They fired me along with my team and other teams. The reason was they were profitable but they missed the ARR by a million or something. Last year they did the first firing round, this the second.
When they announced they will fire us, they also announced they will hire more sales people. The ratio of business people/tech people was already 7:1 before that. They also said a programmer should produce 5 times the money the company spent with him, and we were at 4 point something.
Now I have found a position at a local company which takes care of its people even in harder times.
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Judgement aside, I've gotta respect the humane way this org does layoffs. There's some slags in here about founder being "sociopath", but I'm just seeing a really humane founder with maybe some control issues.
Trump, who betrays everyone for personal benefit, there's a sociopath. Mullenwag's just got some personality vices that served him as underdog, and didn't adapt to when he gained power
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Tough break for Matt Mullenweg, who unfortunately was caught up in this reduction in force. I am sure this unexpected change will afford him new opportunities. Wishing him the best!
for others who took this at its word, this sarcasm. matt is unaffected.
As a great man once said: "some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make"
From an alternate universe:
I apologize for my erratic behavior which has tarnished our brand and created unnecessary turmoil within our organization. Regrettably, we will need to implement a 16% reduction in headcount to address the financial challenges we now face. I have decided to step aside and hand over control to my deputy, who I believe will provide the steady leadership needed to rebuild trust and restore our company's vision.
He'll never admit he was wrong or step down. He'll drive Automattic into the ground and Wordpress along with it (until someone forks it, like say...WP Engine, heh. Or Redhat, or IBM, or some huge web design firm, etc.)
He considers Wordpress "his" even though...he took it over from the original author who was abandoning the project.
It reminds me of the rage-bender Jamie and Jim Thompson went on, attacking OPNsense for "stealing" their work and doing a lot of immature things taking over opnsense's domain, their subreddit, etc. via legal actions. And at least one lawsuit. They lost on every front - reddit gave the subreddit back to the opnsense developers, ICANN gave them back their domain name, etc.
Attacking OPNsense for "stealing" pfSense was pretty rich given pfSense's origin; netgate slapped their logo on m0n0wall and started working on their fork. Which is exactly what opnsense did that enraged them...
Especially as pfsense software started getting more user-hostile and shifting functionality into the paid versions, pfsense has rapidly become less and less popular. I almost never see anyone recommend it anymore.
> He considers Wordpress "his" even though...he took it over from the original author who was abandoning the project.
Non Wordpress user here, not a blogger, don’t use CMSs. Curious about this line. Reading the history on Wikipedia, the original b2 was the precursor. It was pretty small and being abandoned. Matt proposed forking it in January 2003, and worked with Mike to bring the first version to fruition a few months later. 22 years later it’s a goliath.
Given that history it seems totally fair for Matt to consider WP his thing. You don’t seem to think so, can you explain?
That's all true and does not conflict. There is nothing to explain.
If only we had real leaders...
We do, but the sociopaths outcompete them.
You can trust me, facile3232, instead. I will improve upon all things the leader of automattic.com failed to improve upon.
This messaging is compelling. Are you also perchance against all bad things, and in favor of all good things?
You can't just say "perchance."
You got this random internet stranger
[dead]
Huh.
>> There are no layoffs plans at Automattic, in fact we're hiring fairly aggressively and have done a number of acquisitions since this whole thing started, and have several more in the pipeline.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1hxnh73/automatt...
That was important posturing to make sure that everyone knew that his nuclear war on WP Engine was absolutely not going to impact his ability to run the business and the WordPress project. Whether it was true or not it didn't matter at the time, the important thing was to keep up appearances and not let anyone on Reddit think they knew better than Matt.
It's not uncommon for companies to be in a hiring mode until they're very much not in a hiring mode any more.
Yeah. I was made a manager in Feb 2022 with 5 directs and 9 headcount to fill. Hired 5, and then by June 2022 all remaining headcount was cut. In January 2023 we had our first-ever layoffs in the company's 25-year history.
It is so hard to fathom that a leader trusted with millions of dollars of other people's money can be so disengaged from recruiting as to not see a hard wall of cash crunch, months if not years ahead.
You can't assume fundraising will always go swimmingly. You have to always be in survival mode, and if that means not hiring aggressively, then you put on the breaks until the money comes in .
Either as a leader you are clueless about your business cash needs, you are clueless about risk management, or you are clueless about the market, all of which make you not a suitable leader for a long-term company.
The issue was interest rates. Money was free in Feb 2022; the interest rate was literally 0%, and so any cash-generating investment at all is profitable. Fed started raising rates in Apr 2022, at which point leaders started freaking out because they know what higher rates mean, and by Jun 2022 the Fed was raising them in 0.75% increments, which was unheard of in modern economics. By Jan 2023 the rate was 4.5%, which meant that every investment that generates an internal rate of return between 0% and 4.5% is unprofitable. That is the vast majority of investment in today's economy. (We also haven't yet seen this hit fully - a large number of stocks have earnings yields that are lower than what you can get on a savings account, which implies that holding these stocks over cash is unprofitable unless you expect their earnings to grow faster than the interest rate drops, which doesn't seem all that likely in today's environment.)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
Now, you'd have a point if you complained about how centralization of government and economic power with the President and Fed chair, respectively, is a problem. That is the root cause that allows the economy to change faster than any leader can adapt. There used to be a time when people would complain about centralization of executive power on HN, but for some reason that moment seems to have passed.
> The issue was interest rates. Money was free in Feb 2022; the interest rate was literally 0%, and so any cash-generating investment at all is profitable. Fed started raising rates in Apr 2022, at which point leaders started freaking out because they know what higher rates mean, and by Jun 2022 the Fed was raising them in 0.75% increments, which was unheard of in modern economics. By Jan 2023 the rate was 4.5%, which meant that every investment that generates an internal rate of return between 0% and 4.5% is unprofitable.
"Unheard of in modern economics" is carrying quite a lot of weight there. The last time the rates were increased by 0.75% was 1994, and while that's not recent, it's pretty silly to imply that CEOs should be making long-term investments assuming that it would be literally unprecedented for that to happen. Interest rates have changed only a few dozen times _at all_ since then, so yes, they haven't been increased by that much recently, but there's never going to be enough of a sample size over a period of a couple decades that it would be reasonable to assume a precedent that will never be broken.
The crux of your argument seems to be that because the interest rates happen to be set a certain way at a certain time, it would be irrational not to make decisions based on how profitable they'd be at that exact moment in time. The problem with this line of thinking is that plenty of investments are only realized over long enough period of time that by your own admission, people can't possibly react fast enough to avoid those turning into a loss. My question is, why put yourself in a position where you can't adapt fast enough in the first place? The way interest rates are set should not be news to the people making these decisions in companies, so it's not crazy to expect that maybe the people who are betting their company's success on something from less than three decades before being "unprecedented in modern economics" could think at least _a little_ longer term than "literally anything is profitable in this exact moment, so there's no need to think about what might come next".
Because they are publicly traded and subject to lots and lots of checks on corporate governance. The CEO actually didn't want to lay people off (and did a shit-poor job of it when he did). He was getting pressure from the board, who in turn was getting pressure from a lot of activist hedge funds.
Small-fry who operate secretly are able to take the long view and enrich themselves off the masses' stupidity. CEOs of a multi-trillion-$ company that is ~10% of the retirement portfolio of every American are not. At that level you have to go with the market consensus, because you will be ousted and deemed not a fit steward of the enterprise that you are entrusted with otherwise.
> Small-fry who operate secretly are able to take the long view and enrich themselves off the masses' stupidity. CEOs of a multi-trillion-$ company that is ~10% of the retirement portfolio of every American are not.
From my math, you're off by several orders of magnitude, unless somehow we're not talking about Automattic anymore.
> Fed started raising rates in Apr 2022, at which point leaders started freaking out because they know what higher rates mean, and by Jun 2022 the Fed was raising them in 0.75% increments, which was unheard of in modern economics.
You're basically making the case that it happened fast, and went up high, but everyone who paid attention to interest rates understood it was only a matter of time till it had to at least revert back to pre-covid rates (whether you think that's 1.5 or 2.3 or something, depending on how you measure), and that obviously there would need to be real layoffs after.
The excuse is really saying "it turned out more extreme than we thought", but was the behavior take responsible assuming non-extreme rate changes?
Why does the interest rate matter? Unless you have no cash on hand and are operating soley off debt??
If you're venture based and were expecting another round sometime soon. With higher interest rates there were more compelling alternatives for LPs than to invest in Venture, causing a trickle down chilling of the fund raising environment for venture backed companies and requiring them to come up with accelerated plans to reach profitability - including cutting staff and optimizing for survival over growth.
> Unless you have no cash on hand and are operating soley off debt??
Bingo
My employer actually has roughly $100B of cash on hand.
The issue is that they're a publicly-traded company, with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. If they're investing in an internal product that will make back 1% of the money invested in it over the next couple years, but they could have been investing in Treasury Bills that make back 4.5%, they are committing financial malpractice and will be sued accordingly.
I’ve seen many companies have this problem. They base hiring against planned revenue instead of current revenue. In a sense you have to - if you’re planning on growing 100% for several years on the back of new products and a big sales team you must hire in advance. It’s what the VC model is founded on. The downside is when you miss the revenue, you have to cut deep. And it’s usually worse because your hiring standards dropped in hyper growth.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
If you are the CEO saying 'we are planning for bad things in the future' while every other CEO is saying 'the arrow only goes up' guess which company the stock market punishes and who gets removed by the board versus who's options become worth more?
Not uncommon at all, but perhaps a symptom of poor leadership.
How infuriating for anyone recently hired caught in this trap.
It seems to me the obvious, from both a business & human perspective, is to stop hiring at first signs of trouble, before layoffs. To do so otherwise is cruel.
I doubt Matt had zero idea about this possibility two months ago.
This will continue until there are actual consequences for those responsible.
I'm of the mindset that any time a company does layoffs, they should start from the top And work down.
>I'm of the mindset that any time a company does layoffs, they should start from the top And work down.
Oh, to be young and idealistic again! So in your world, the people running the business should fire themselves first?
It's been done.
Bob Mercer and Peter Brown laid themselves off from IBM when they were told to execute 10% across the board layoffs. They had argued their team was one of the highest performing teams in the company but were told that they had their quota. 10% of their team was 2 so they took the hit.
From there, they went on to run Renaissance.
IBM should have kept them.
> So in your world, the people running the business should fire themselves first?
If they are needed to continue leading, they should consider cutting their own salary until the problems are fixed. Let them take their entire compensation in just their equity for a time.
However we all know this won’t be the norm, and that’s OK. Not great, just OK.
Been there and done that. One startup I was at instituted a 50% pay cut for senior execs, 25% for the level below that and no cut below that. The CEO took a 100% pay cut.
This let us get through a short rough patch without layoffs.
I worked at middle-sized company that instituted a pay cuts, cutting all bonuses and stopping raises. After year, company lost almost every person in tech managenent and most of team leaders, their clients actively executing forking rights and no one believes in company future now.
I once heard wise words from some CEO. In harsh times, clients do not want cheaper and worse services from us. They want less services. So we are moving out headcount down, while keeping pay and even execute raises for those who stay.
Can you explain why this is wise? I'd say most execs leaving is usually a net positive. You are framing it as a tragedy and I am just not seeing it.
From where I am standing, leeches that are only there for fat bonuses left. Where's the loss?
And the measure you described also doesn't follow. Bad times always end and then you have a worse product. Will the execs pick up the new tech work?
I do know of one guy who took a pay cut because unless he hamstrung his own team badly he was looking at needing to lay off about 2.3 people and so he cut his own salary to make it 2 instead of 3.
That's one story surrounded by a hell of a lot of shitheel stories.
Jim Barksdale enters the room.
If they're running the business, and it's at a point where it needs layoffs; sounds like they're not doing their job properly, and should be replaced with people who can-- like every other position in the business.
Not that they will-- too much self-interest.
not the parent, but accountability is supposed to be assumed up the org chart while responsibility is delegated down.
so, yeah. the people ultimately accountable for fucking shit up should probably be held accountable first and foremost.
(this is why CEOs often resign in the wake of a scandal)
Imagine the organization you are imagining in your head.
Now imagine there is a Super-boss, who is exactly like the "people running the business" (attribution needed), but one level above them.
If the Super Boss were to look at the situation, I think it'd be pretty obvious that the issue would be "The people organizing the company at the highest level" who are responsible for the failures of the company. That may involve over-hiring, which is itself a bad practice that causes unnecessary pain and (personal, financial) suffering, and would be a good cause to fire them for almost crashing my beautiful super-company that I, the Super-boss, super-founded.
You're saying that if we return the Super-boss to the realm of the fictional, then suddenly it isn't the C-suite's fault anymore?
If we're discussing should, then yeah, their heads should be the first to roll. I agree its idealistic to imagine them having the sort of decency this requires, but I agree it should be the case!
If they have to fire people, they're running it poorly, so yes?
If you've spent any time in business at all, you know it's always the tea lady who gets fired first and the managers last. Many commenters here seem to live in some kind of fantasy world.
>the people running the business should fire themselves first?
You were questioning whether they should, not whether they will. That's what people are responding to. They understand perfectly well who will get fired first.
I was questioning the idealism actually. There’s not much to be achieved by wishing the world was a certain way, it’s generally more useful to deal with the world as it is.
What idealism? The person you responded to said they didn't expect things to change unless there were real consequences. Not expecting things to change is the opposite of idealism.
But even if they were idealistic, arguing with people for wishing the world was better is a genuinely odd thing. If you followed your beliefs, wouldn't you understand that telling people not to wish for things is pointless? If you actually dealt with the world as it is, you would not argue with people on the Internet because changing somebody's mind, particularly in the way you are attempting to do it, is just as much wishful thinking as hoping that CEOs will fire themselves.
If we don't talk about what we feel is ideal, we can never strive to achieve it.
Its really important to discuss idealism for that reason alone
Good luck with changing human nature, i.e. persuading managers to voluntarily act against their own self-interest. That’s just not how people work.
What you say is true in some cases, but not in all cases.
Can't even try if we don't talk about it. The issue with line of 'clear thinking' is it leaves no room for change.
If enough people take talk into action, we could reasonably see a change in behavior. It may come from sources than we don't expect, but it can happen all the same and we only have a chance at getting there if we are wiling to talk about what is ideal and raising that awareness. Its an important piece of that puzzle
An honest question: why is this being downvoted? I thought that downvoting is meant to be used when someone is trolling or bringing the level of discussion down, not when you simply disagree with someone's point. I mean sure, it's stated a bit sarcastically, but my gosh if we're going to downvote every sarcastic comment, that would include a good portion of HN comments.
My read is that the parent is immature and needs to be reminded that "starting at the top" means the people in charge. What does it add to the discussion?
I probably failed to account for the differing backgrounds of HN commenters & the resulting overly-literal interpretation of sarcasm, to be fair to the downvoters. Of course the owners & managers should take responsibility for poor corporate performance.
> I'm of the mindset that any time a company does layoffs, they should start from the top And work down.
I'm off the mindset that employment should be voluntary: both by the employer and the employee. It makes employers reluctant to hire if they know they can't get rid of people again.
(I'm a socialist at heart and think it'd be pretty nice for the government to take care of people who lost their jobs. Just tax the companies a little more!)
Those lacking empathy don’t know how to not be cruel. They keep filtering to the top unfortunately. Something that remains to be solved for.
There is nothing to solve - you are in the game of capitalism (the American Edition) and the job is to maximise shareholder value. They are paid big bucks because they only work for that without empathy/cruelty or such emotions. The only way to solve is to change the game but that's next to impossible because most powerful players like it that way and will turn on anyone trying to change their fattening ways.
The best part is that the pawns keep getting sacrificed and do nothing to change it; not only that, they refuse to support anyone trying to change the game to make their lives better. It's amazing.
The business world changes direction faster than companies can adapt. That was my biggest lesson as an entrepreneur: entrepreneurs don't really pivot into product-market fit, the market pivots into them. The reason capitalism works is because there's this huge sea of dream-chasers out there, most of whom will go bankrupt, so that when the market's needs change there is somebody out there to service them, and everybody who's not effectively servicing them goes to hell and gets another job.
Corporations and management basically exist to buffer this uncertainty. Employment is actually a really bad deal in good economic times; owners reap almost all the windfall of having a successful product. But in bad times, the company keeps paying you even if they're losing money, at least up until they don't. You get a raw deal, but not as raw a deal as the people paying you.
Likewise with strategic direction. The market's needs change faster than senior executives can adapt: if they always produced what the market was actually clamoring for, the company would run around like a chicken with its head cut off (this actually happens when the CEO panics, and a key CEO skill, and part of the reason they're paid so much, is the ability to ignore every piece of market data saying "You're not hot anymore. Nobody wants you, and the market has moved on" and keep doing what you're doing even though your intuition is telling you that you're doomed and going to lose your cushy $20M/year job). Much of the job of middle management is to buffer senior management's freakouts and tell the ICs "Keep calm and carry on; let's see if he still cares about this new hotness next week."
I've worked at a couple consultancies who played themselves by investing too heavily in one or two customers.
Once a single customer is 1/3 of your revenue they can start extracting considerations from you that may not be what your employees thought they signed up for. It's a good way to end up being a body shop. I don't have a philosophical problem with body shops per se, it's just that I don't want to work for one, so I pick places that should know better, but sometimes don't.
It can also be problematic if 2 customers account for 45% of your revenue and they both get the same idea, which can happen particularly when the market shifts. You have no way to call their bluff and move enough people to other projects to make it stick.
>The market's needs change faster than senior executives can adapt: if they always produced what the market was actually clamoring for, the company would run around like a chicken with its head cut off (this actually happens when the CEO panics, and a key CEO skill, and part of the reason they're paid so much, is the ability to ignore every piece of market data saying "You're not hot anymore. Nobody wants you, and the market has moved on" and keep doing what you're doing even though your intuition is telling you that you're doomed and going to lose your cushy $20M/year job)
You know what I absolutely hate about this take? It ignores my shared experience I've had with others (IE, its not just me). I've worked in this industry a long time. So I've inevitably worked for places that ran into financial trouble. In multiple of those cases, it could have been prevented if upper management actually listened to what those of us developing the product had to say about shifting customer behaviors and expectations, that what we were seeing was different from what they were trying to sell and have us develop. It always ended in disaster.
They refused to listen, but never paid the price for that failure, my colleagues did and in one instance, I was on the receiving end of a layoff along with others as well.
It's kinda their job to not listen. CEOs get bombarded with thousands of pieces of information each week. If they shifted the company direction each time, the company would get nothing wrong. In the immortal words of Ribbonfarm, "CEOs don't steer":
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/09/ceos-dont-steer/
A good CEO will let in just the little bit of information that saves the company - this was Andy Grove's pivot to focus on microprocessors over memory chips, or Steve Jobs's turnaround of Apple. You didn't have a good CEO, and got your average mediocre CEO that sets a strategic direction and sticks with it regardless of what the market says.
I'm curious though, if you knew your employer was going under, why not jump ship to the competitor that actually did understand what customers wanted? Employees are economic agents too, and oftentimes competitors are more than happy to hire out of their competition.
>A good CEO will let in just the little bit of information that saves the company - this was Andy Grove's pivot to focus on microprocessors over memory chips, or Steve Jobs's turnaround of Apple. You didn't have a good CEO, and got your average mediocre CEO that sets a strategic direction and sticks with it regardless of what the market says.
Still too simplistic. Yeah, they need to filter information and say no to things constantly, I get that is a core skill. If something is repeatedly being brought up by members of your core teams, you should at least look at what they're saying and ask where they are coming from. That is simply good sense. There is a persistence factor in involved in each of these cases that are the source of the frustration.
If what constitutes a good CEO is allowing in the 'little bit of information that can save the company' (really thats a call about identifying useful information before anyone else), objectively most companies have terrible CEOs, and I question the value of the position entirely on that basis, especially at larger public companies.
FWIW, at each of these companies I worked at, the headcount was at most in the hundreds. I was only 2 clicks below the executives in the company tree, there wasn't a lot of barrier to interaction there, which is what I find even more baffling about the whole thing.
>I'm curious though, if you knew your employer was going under, why not jump ship to the competitor that actually did understand what customers wanted?
I did this twice. In the one instance I wasn't able to get moving faster than things were going down hill. Partially, this is a symptom of just how long interview cycles have become over the years. Took me longer than expected, but moreover, the company conducted the layoff faster than I really thought they would. I got the timing wrong by a little bit, it happens.
Its not like you identify an issue one time either, its the repeated ignoring of what happens despite repeated sustained efforts to raise the awareness where it needs to be.
That's a lot of words from someone who doesn't know what's been going on for ~6 months or so that is relevant.
Mullenweg lost his mind and attacked a competitor to Wordpress hosting (WP Engine) and kept doubling down and only served to demonstrate how much of an unhinged asshole he was.
Along the way he pissed off the Wordpress community - the worry was that if anyone else pissed him off (which could include he'd accuse them of using the Wordpress name or even "WP", even if it was descriptive (which is entirely permitted use of a trademarked name) and run up a bunch of legal expenses for them.
Angry-at-the-world blog post after blog post doubling down over and over. Taunting people as he banned them from the Wordpress slack, that sort of stuff. Then he blocked WP Engine from accessing the Wordpress.org plugin and theme registries which meant a huge number of sites couldn't update plugins or themes.
Then he announced Automattic was going to cut back engineering hours to (if I remember right) one full time staffer. One person to keep up with security updates and bugfixes of a very complicated piece of software used by a lot of organization.
Incredibly childish and thoroughly demonstrated to the world that he was unsuited for leading a company and being the sole person almost completely in charge of a piece of software used by a 20-30% of the websites in the world.
This was absolutely foreseeable, especially when he cut back Automattic's engineering to 40hr/week.
I advised a client a few weeks into the drama to at least keep in the back of their minds that they might have to migrate at some point as "the CEO of the company is off his rocker, they probably will start to struggle with security updates, and the company may go out of business."
The median position is to be hiring, just to backfill attrition. "Trouble" might be temporary; it might be noise. Hiring is always slow, with cycles longer than "trouble" might last.
We might argue about the parameters in this situation, but structurally there's a bias towards the low-pass average.
The exuberance and self-assuredness that your plans are going to work out leads to overreach and I think the lag in accounting practices helps make that more acute.
I have had too many experiences where I thought my current employer was about to start circling the drain, and I've ended up some place that was circling faster. At a guess I'm about 50:50, which I suppose I should count as 'lucky' but has never felt that way.
Fish-tailing is a common flame-out mode for startups. VCs are partly to blame. They don't like to discourage you in case you come up with a miracle, but neither do they want to put good money and time after bad if it turns out you're going to be a break-even play or a loss.
Its not even cruel. Its just dumb. Really dumb.
You are going to invest significant resources into hiring, onboarding, and injecting new staff into workflows for people that will not be there as soon as they are actually productive.
So its not just the cash burn - its the tieup of 3x team members to getting new people trained to become effective and successful contributor. Time is finite.
It makes no sense to throw away all that time spent by your team, who could have use that same time to get a few more features out, proposals sent , or projects spec'd instead.
If you believe you need more people to get out of trouble isn’t it cruel to not follow through?
So if you took the deal last year you would have gotten 9 months, now the severance is 9 weeks. Way to reward "loyalty". Good thing we're so smart and better than everyone else and we don't need unions.
Financially your best bet is to be in the 1st round of layoffs. Ego-wise, it's best to be in the second round. First round there's still some money and a lot of guilt, so the severance tends to be good.
By the time they lay off truly essential people, you're burnt out, and you're lucky if you don't have to sue to get what you're owed by law, let alone whatever policy they had for paying out vacation time or what have you. You also get to enjoy a fun period of survivor guilt when they laid off people who you think have contributed as much or more than you have, and then know that you'll be next if they laid of <person> already.
IMO, if there is any talk of "loyalty" in that first round of voluntary layoffs, you should always leave. Even if you were previously loyal, the company is changing and you won't like the results.
Your also competing with fewer people when looking for a new job.
Relevant comment from 24 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43309837
Not especially surprising, but there’s an awfully large elephant in the room that likely directly contributed to this necessity that goes completely unmentioned.
Matt's only real problem is not owning his ambition openly.
Trying to publicly argue the moral high ground was a stupid, unforced error.
It didn't need to be moralized at all. Just make the changes you want to make, piss off a vocal minority, then get back to winning and making boatloads of money by executing exceptionally.
The problem, I suspect, is that Matt values how certain people perceive him more than he values winning. It's unfortunate, because he's clearly a very good executer and strategist. He's getting in his own way.
> he's clearly a very good executer and strategist. He's getting in his own way.
Apparently not. I'd argue he was perceived as such but has thoroughly proven the opposite by now. There were so many stations to get off the train.
Ignore the financial valuations, man is a worm. I'd call him a 'hack' but that might imply talents given where we are.
Through his shitshow, he tried - and failed - to curry favor with an OSS puppet. Not any particular software... like one might think, but the whole "thing".
There was never any moment where WPEngine was beholden for offering WordPress services. Everything was strained to the point he was trying to redefine OSS.
He got in his way, ours as members of the public, and that of WPEngine. Repeatedly... and I don't see enough reflection/reason from Matt to believe this will change. Personally, I'd hesitate to promote his strategies or skills.
Hamfisted is a better message. Or none, take the wind away. We don't want his ambition or to hear about it. It's demonstrably shit.
Edit: just in case this needs saying, I've never been affiliated with either company. Don't waste your limited time looking for me, Matt.
IMHO moralizing wasn't really the problem.
The extremely erratic behavior, the ego, the fixation with vengeance, harassing organizations legally using the Wordpress name, abusing his power at the wordpress foundation, using it to punish Automattic competitors...
He pissed off a lot of people, but worse: he made a lot of people nervous.
If more people valued how others perceive them more than they valued winning, the world would be a better place.
Drupal's sudden popularity?
Is the elephant in the room with us now? (Mind filling in?)
The legal threats against WPEngine and their customers, the lawsuits between WP/Automatic/WPF and WPEngine, the banning of several contributors, the takeover of WP Plugins on WP.org, the shenanigans with several check boxes on the login pages of WP.org.
While it wasn't as damaging from a legal or (business) reputational perspective, he also peeked into the Tumblr database in order to doxx people who were making fun of him, which doesn't say great things about his stability or fitness to run a company.
https://mullenweg.wtf/
https://web.archive.org/web/20241026031947/https://bullenweg...
Holy moly.
I never heard of this drama before.
This was crazy:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WPDrama/comments/1hlp08d/what_drama...
That was wild.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2y7eyp3zpo
Matt Mullenweg is the elephant.
Since Matt regularly comments here, and given the expression chosen; I'm pretty certain that they know who the elephant is.
His account has been inactive for almost all of 2025, I think his legal team must have taken away the password.
He has alts he uses that are probably still active.
Matt commenting here was part of the reason he is in the mess he is in.
the author of that email has been having a very public breakdown for months now, mostly consisting of being a prick and trying to harm the community and a competitor.
> This restructuring will result in an approximately 16% workforce reduction
Probably the most salient detail for non-Automattic employees. Everything else was generic fluff.
> non-Automattic employees
non-Automatticians. Yes, they literally used this term in TFA.
I know this really bugs some people but every tech company these days has a demonym for its employees.
It doesn't mean that employees have some cultlike adoration for the company. It's just very convenient inside the company to have a single short word to refer to all employees of the business.
> a single short word
> “Automattician”
The word you’re looking for is employee.
I checked my list, and the fact that employees of Automattic are called "Automatticians" did not make my list of things to be outraged about. Maybe next week.
Pointing out the error in your claim implied nothing about outrage.
"Employee" is ambiguous because it doesn't convey which business someone is an employee of. A company-specific demonym is short and precise.
> It doesn't mean that employees have some cultlike adoration for the company
No, but it does mean that the company wishes that employees had some cult like adoration. The line between proud of the company one works for and being cult like is not rigid, and moves depending on the company
I get it, it's just kind of a meme at this point after a couple years of these boilerplate RIF announcements. Cmd-F for "difficult decision" + whatever the demonym is and you're basically guaranteed hits.
Just say "all employees" then. Lots of companies use contractors who don't have employee benefits, do they count as "Googlers" or whatever the stupid stand-in moniker is?
Some companies even have a name for people after they left the company, like "xooglers" for Google and "outfluxers" for InfluxData
get hired back to become a refluxer, train as a hardware engineer to become a flux capacitor...
Plus severance will be paid but didn't say how much.
I was thinking this is a boilerplate firing email though!
I wonder if it's better or worse than the voluntary termination deal they offered to employees last year (first 6 months, then 9 months pay).
It’s worse. Max I’m seeing is 9 weeks.
Yikes. Meanwhile, the people who took the buyout last year got 6 months (or 9 if they waited for the second round).
Much worse.
> how much
With so many countries and legal frameworks to comply with, there's never going to be a single answer for this.
It’s looking like countries with better worker protections saw zero layoffs.
Given what I know of the situation (which admittedly isn't much), wouldn't the best course of action be to shitcan the CEO?
From Reddit discussions, if they can be trusted, there is nobody who can remove Matt from any position. It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.
> It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.
My understanding is that the investors signed proxy voting rights over to Matt. They are mostly ordinary shares, and may be revocable. [1]
[1] https://ma.tt/2021/08/funding-buyback-hiring/
I am confused -- so if investors don't like the CEO, there is nothing they can do? Other than maybe taking their part of the money out?
Even "taking their part of the money out" is not guaranteed. Again, it's a privately traded company, so there's no open market. You have to find someone willing to buy your shares from you and make a deal with them.
he'd already be out if it was simple to force him out
Let this be a lesson to anyone investing in a startup: don't give any cash unless there's real corporate governance.
but the opposite is true too: don't take money from investors unless they let you keep control of your company. for every case like this there are probably a dozen cases where investors took control of a company and ruined it for the sake of making money.
How did they "ruin" a company if that company made money?
Not all humans are driven by the same motivations.
Presumably if you as a founder are not driven by a desire to make money and your investors are, you 100% should be ousted. This is the principal-agent problem at work.
> Presumably if you as a founder are not driven by a desire to make money and your investors are, you 100% should be ousted
Presumably, the real world is a bit more nuanced than that.
There is no reason why you cannot run a company for different motivations than "get as rich as possible" while still accepting investments from people whose sole motivation is "get as rich as possible". While difficult, it is possible to align people even when they have different motivations.
Same with trading your time for stock options (that you hope are eventually negotiable shares); trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.
Dilution is a real problem. If they want you to act like a Founder, you should have protected equity like one.
With apologies to Louis XIV, Matt is Automattic.
L'etatt, c'est M'att.
For the unaware (or under-aware): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%89tat,_c%27est_moi
Probably apocryphal. A lot of people these days only know it from Star Wars.
i am unaware of the star wars reference. can you explain that one please?
"I am the Senate": https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/bjj2ry/politics_b...
wait, did he put his name in the company name?
if so, that's what we in the narcissist-identifying business call a "tell".
Or it just sounded like a fun joke for a good company name... I mean you are not wrong, but pretty much any successful young entrepreneur must have some degree of excessive appreciation for themselves, and this one was already achieving that status at 19.
Knowing a number of successful entrepreneurs, many having hit success early as well - most don't need to enshrine themselves in the company name. It is indeed a tell.
If that wasn't enough of a tell, his behavior in the last few months spelled it out clearly, circled the relevant parts with a big fat red marker, and installed a blinking neon sign saying "narcissist".
i don't think that is how a tell works. of course now we know. hindsight and all that.
to decide whether it is actually a tell, we need to look at statistics of company names containing references to the owners/founders and their behavior. and i don't think that statistic bears out. naming your company after yourself is the traditional thing to do. "automattic" is just on the more clever side.
the tradition is changing only because it is becoming more and more popular to name your company after the product you are selling. now, putting your name into the product name, that maybe could be a tell. but even here there are exceptions: debian for example.
Yes but this isn't really much of a crime or tell to me. The name is great as far as I'm concerned.
And he's full of himself and completely wrong in this crusade he launched for some reason, completely indefensible acts left & right for over a year.
Both true.
It's easy to call that a "tell" in light of Matt Mullenweg's recent activities. No one was saying shit when Wordpress was the darling of Web 2.0.
Justifiable evidence of Matt Mullenweg's unhealthy/excessive narcissism only surfaced within the past year or so (I'm fuzzy on the timeline, cut me some slack ya?). Automattic the company has been so named for, goodness, close to twenty years now.
It could be Matt's been a narcissist from the start. But people also change and not always for the better so maybe he became a "narcissist" much later in life and his chosen company name just so conveniently fell into the narrative.
There are CEOs in bigger spotlights with a bigger case for narcissism who don't put their names on any of their companies (emphasis on the plurality). One of them has a name with a similar inflection pattern to other well-known albeit fictional narcissist, Tony Stark.
I don't know what "Automattic" as a company name says about Matt as a person. I'll tell you what it is though: a damn good pun, one I would gladly score myself given the chance.
Yeap, Automatic is not a good trade name but Automattic is great!
> wait, did he put his name in the company name?
Yes.
Yes. He also calls the employees Automatticians. So they're all just Matt.
guess their jobs were just automatted away!
Mentioning "our revenue continues to grow" seems quite out of place in an announcement like this.
I disagree - it's not properly addressed, but it's nice to see it at least brought up.
Layoffs are always awful, but seeing companies talk about "changing economic realities" amongst continuing revenue and profit growth - often all time highs - is a real morale killer for those who are left behind.
Microsoft/Amazon/Alphabet/Google are trillion dollar megacorps who are insanely profitable, but they're firing people because they no longer have to pretend we care about you at all and will instead try to cater to Wall Street (who will never be happy - if I had $10000 for every quarter where a big tech corp "beat expectations" and the stock dropped anyway I'd retire). It's a hard pill to swallow and will increase bitterness and cynicism in the remaining workforce and kill any chance of your employees caring about your vision or putting in any extra effort.
> they no longer have to pretend we care about you at all and will instead try to cater to Wall Street
The company isn't "catering" to wall street, wall street is their boss. The owners of the company vote on what they want the company to do, and hire the person in charge of the company. And besides, do you care about your company? If you got a job offer to make twice your salary doing something you'd enjoy more than what you do now, would you stay with your current company out of care for them? Maybe you would, but I know of almost no one who feels that way towards their employer, outside of those working for small tech startups with their friends.
For almost everyone I know, their mindset is that they're going to do the best job they can right up until something better comes along, at which point they'll switch to something better. And I fully expect that if my best work is no longer worth more to them than my salary, they'll lay me off. In the meantime, they're paying me a ridiculous amount of money to do a job I enjoy. It's a deal that 99% of the world is envious of, and I don't think it should inspire bitterness and cynicism
> they're paying me a ridiculous amount of money to do a job I enjoy
> It's a deal that 99% of the world is envious of, and I don't think it should inspire bitterness and cynicism
First of all, I think it takes a lot of guts to continue to have this attitude in the current economic climate. Or, in your case, immense skill, but not everybody - not even everybody in the big tech companies - has that.
I think the bitterness and cynicism stems from not enjoying the work. As crazy as this sounds - it's the intangibles as much as the cash: for example, knowing the company will fight your efforts to improve things.
In this case, the "our revenue continues to grow" is not transparency, it's deliberately obfuscating the increase in expenses that led to layoffs being necessary. Not mentioned is the insanely expensive legal battle that they launched with WP Engine, which is already a massive drain on resources and a huge financial risk given how strong WP Engine's case is.
"Our revenue continues to grow" doesn't matter if unnecessary expenses outstrip it.
I might agree with you, if the "why we're making changes" section had listed even one reason to lay people off.
Our revenue continues to grow, and will be even more profitable as we lay off 16% of the employees.
The tone being set is not a good one to be sure.
Are they being profitable? Didn't automattic take venture capital somewhat recently, suggesting that's not the case?
When was anyone naive enough to think their company cared about them?
On the other hand, why should a company keep people around that they don’t need?
And the last point, speaking more about Microsoft/Amazon/Google, if you have worked for either company for any length of time, there is no excuse for you not to have a nice nest egg to tide you over especially considering the severance amounts they give you.
You might be forced to sully yourself and become an “enterprise developer” and make around what most of the 2.8 million developers in the US.
And yes, I did a bid at Amazon and within three years, I paid off some debt, saved a chunk of change, got my 3.5 months severance package and found another job quickly that was my target compensation (not enterprise dev).
I think it's just saving face. That statement could be true if revenue was growing at 1% or 10% or whatever.
If opex is growing at a faster rate than revenue, and it’s not a VC situation, then layoffs are a popular way to curtail opex — typically business leadership cannot effect changes that would eventually impact themselves, so, the board and executive layer prefer to mass-layoff workers and middle management first and then let the remaining leadership fight for their life to present optimized plans. This is of course a terrible approach, because — as Taskmaster quite enjoyably demonstrates — even the smartest people tend to make a lot of asinine judgment calls under duress and deadlines; but when the alternative is to admit weaknesses of leadership, it’s certainly a logical enough course of action.
> They also have our enduring gratitude for their time with the company.
I hope the RIF'd employees can pay rent with that gratitude.
If I were considering using Wordpress for anything, which I am not, this would end those plans. If they're laying off and keeping the CEO, they must be in dire financial straits. That message says "we're doing all the right things and have good leadership with a track record of making good decisions, but we have no alternative but to fire a sixth of our employees". That's not a good sign.
Executive behaves like a child, labor suffers the consequences.
I used to be a big admirer of Matt and Automattic, but after this whole WP Engine episode I've lost respect. I shut down my old wordpress blog, still working on importing the posts as org-mode files onto my new site, I no longer recommend WP to non-techies that ask me how to build a website.
I hope WordPress (and Automattic) turn the ship around but its not looking good at this point.
I wonder if the CEO throwing a tantrum that another company was using "their" open-source (thus, not theirs) code wasn't the real problem, but it made investors take a closer look, and they noticed that Automattic has less of a moat then they thought.
Haven't seen any public reporting on this yet, but from internal conversations this seems to include a 60% workforce reduction at Tumblr, which now only has a few remaining engineers.
I actually started paying the subscription for my Tumblr account a couple years ago. I don't get much direct benefit from it, I do it because it's the only social media site I use and enjoy, and I was hoping it would help keep it from shutting down. 60% workforce reduction is not great.
i dont mean to kick a dead horse, but a "few remaining engineers" for what is effectively an outdated clone of a microblogging site, a few engineers, seems like a lot still
what microblogging site do you think Tumblr is a clone of? and outdated compared to what, exactly?
Yeah, that’s my understanding as well
I wonder what this means for the future of Beeper.
I'm wondering the same thing. Considering they were just acquired, I'm concerned. Especially since as far as I know, they still are operating under a free model.
HR wranglers? Damn, that’s simultaneously hilarious and terrifying
"Either I'm an idiot, or something is going on that you don't understand. Let's check back in a month. :)"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1glejno/comment/...
...1 month later...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/64/wpengine-in...
“While our revenue continues to grow,”
Hard to read further than that…
This might not have happened if Mullenweg hadn’t sued his competitor, then went off the deep end and hurt everyone.
Another interpretation would be a common cause for both this and the litigation, i.e. pressure to improve financials.
That's an unbelievably terrible course of action. If you have financial issues, don't try to get out of it by litigation. Only litigate if you absolutely have to, and you have been wronged. Don't do it because you are trying to improve your bottom line.
Yes, i think that's the consensus. But it didn't start with litigation, it started with a 'creative' approach to generating new licensing revenue.
I think this is a bit unfair.
Who among us can really say they haven't gone off the deep end, burned every drop of good will that ever existed towards them and their projects, sued a competitor and got hilariously burned by the judge, all while burning hundreds of millions of your companies value (blackrock marked them down 10%, which is 750 million)
This is just a normal thing that happens. It could have happened to anyone.
It may also have been part of his reason for doing so. Panic/desperation.
on the positive side, it's a small thing monetarily, but retention of company laptops is a nice goodwill gesture
Many of them are fully depreciated and worth nothing, or nearly so, on paper anyway. Any new employees won't want an old laptop. And it will cost time and money to deal with shipping, storage, cleaning, re-imaging, etc. On average, the bean counters must figure it's cheaper to let people keep them.
Worth maybe $1000, not even half a month's rent in almost any major US city
They’re mostly high specced, newer M model MacBook pros
They do say they have employees in 90 countries…
Eh, from the company's perspective this is logistically easiest--the laptop's value is hardly worth the effort.
a lot of companies ask for equipment to be returned due to security concerns, or just on principle
A company which is even moderately "OK" at IT will already have the means to instantly lock and securely wipe devices of any employee at a moments notice. Doing this during a RIF is a hell of a lot better than making the mail room deal with a bunch of filthy laptops.
A large bunch of big companies, including some of the biggest on the planet don't even sell past-end-of-life laptops to their current employees.
Let that sink in. They're not even willing to <<sell>> old laptops, they would rather scrap them and contribute to pollution and overall waste.
If they sell to (ex-)employees they sell to consumers. This then includes consumer warranties etc.
However what large companies do is to get an agreement with a refurbishing company, which will collect and refurbish them and and pay the corporation some share.
This works in some mix calculation - the well treated machines can be sold well, some machines can be used to reuse some parts and some machines are nothing but cost for disposal.
If you scrap a laptop you get a nice, auditable, chain of custody from the end user to the company that will certify it's been destroyed. If you sell someone their old laptop you need to ensure that it's actually been wiped, not just "I copied my files over and started using the new one". I've seen a few IT departments be not great at "Sam got their new laptop two weeks ago, someone should follow up now to see if the wipe on the old one happened".
One choice won't get you fired, the other might save you a bit of cash.
I'm talking about some companies that should have the best IT departments on the planet.
Writing off equipment through depreciation is a time honored thing for corps. If they sell them, they are no longer a write off. That's now more work for the bean counters.
Then donate them.
Isn't that essentially what they are doing when the let the employees keep them?
My original comment in the thread:
> A large bunch of big companies, including some of the biggest on the planet don't even sell past-end-of-life laptops to their current employees.
It's good that Automattic is doing it, I was wishing it was an industry standard procedure, for all past-end-of-life hardware, not just layoffs and not just laptops.
Right now FAANG, for example, which you'd expect to have the very best of everything, as far as I know don't give old laptops (and other old hardware) to employees, they don't even sell them. They send them to be recycled or whatever, but the best action is to reduce and reuse, recycle should be the last option.
Plus an employee is likely to be willing to accept their old device since they know it's performance and general behavior.
klarna allowed us to buy our work phone and macbook paying only the tax value. We had to give them the devices so they would be wiped out by a third party, then they mailed them to my home.
MacBooks and iPhones are amongst the easiest to wipe remotely.
You can wipe them fully (which would be the recommendation for MacBooks) and remove just work-installed apps on an iPhone.
Absolutely. I was in charge of that at a previous job, and telling Jamf to nuke the device did the job the next time it was turned on.
This is a G move, without a doubt the best way I've heard of this being done.
One former employer had this policy, and also refused to provide a way to ship said equipment back. No one was happy with my alternative solution: leaving it at the police station instead.
Is that what you proposed or what you actually did? I want a story!
I actually did it. This was back in the times when you could get a job the next day, and my new employer didn't want me keeping anything from the old employer by the time I started. Old employer was dragging their feet on the shipping label and made it clear that failure to return the equipment would be considered theft. I gave them a week of daily reminder emails with an approaching deadline (no response), then handed it to the cops as abandoned property. Got a few HR calls immediately afterwards asking how to pick it up, and an annoyed police call asking me not to do it again.
> made it clear that failure to return the equipment would be considered theft
Is "please arrange for a courier to retrieve it" not the end of your obligations?
In a situation where everyone (including me) was acting reasonably, sure. But I was slightly gruntled from being pushed out for filing a safety report, and keeping it in my possession would have technically violated my new contract. Giving it to the police was clearly not stealing it and didn't require going out of my way to help them solve a problem of their own creation.
On the other side of this, I doubt the police would have done anything if they reported it stolen.
There are questions online about "what if a former employee doesn't return their laptop." They almost always end with "send a threatening letter in legalese." They stop after that because the the next step is get a $300 per hour lawyer involved for a $600 laptop.
I love this. Bravo.
When I left microsoft, I kept everything EXCEPT data bearing devices. I got the sense they REALLY didn't want to have to collect the laptops either, but the VPs were forced to by compliance.
We always let our ex-employees keep their laptops because a. why not? and b. I don't need laptops for positions that no longer exist.
I was at a company that let people keep laptops (after they were wiped) largely because the severance was so meager it seemed they expected people to sell the laptops for some extra cash. :p
doubtful it was considered extra cash, but just now not needing to spend cash on replacing the laptop with personal money
“Welcome to your new job at HighSpeed TopFlight. Here’s an old, used laptop.”
I’ve had that happen to me at a new job. It disnt make my new employer shine.
One of my key metrics for evaluating employers is Time To Second Monitor.
And yet only one company I've ever worked for went this way.
I wish more did; it really is such a small goodwill gesture to departing employees.
companies that collect their laptops from laid off => where do these laptops go? how they recycle them?
It's a huge "depends". Different areas have different recycling opportunities. Some hardware providers have their own buyback/replacement programs. Also some companies may want to reimage and reuse the returned hardware. Finally you want some stock of temporary laptops available for people who are waiting for repairs so some functioning used ones are great for that.
Yeah at the BigCorps I was at, old laptops (as long as they weren’t more than 3-4 years old) were usually reimaged and kept on hand as spares or for interns, etc. But I imagine after a large layoff they ended up with way more than they’d ever actually need.
Redistributing them to new employees/interns is very common, especially if the laptop is only 1-2 years old.
There's a parallel timeline where he admitted he messed up, stepped down, hired a real CEO, put someone else in charge of the nonprofit, and the downward slide he caused started to reverse.
This comment thread is just hilarious. When a CEO of a VC-backed startup that you admire does things you disagree with, you find ways to justify their actions. When a CEO that is running an actually successful business and wishes to defend that business legally, you trash him. Be better.
Matt needs to be better, you're hilarious - he is the common denominator
>A comprehensive package covering severance pay and benefits.
What does this mean in term of monthly wages?
I was a technical lead for the Romanian branch of an US company. They fired me along with my team and other teams. The reason was they were profitable but they missed the ARR by a million or something. Last year they did the first firing round, this the second.
When they announced they will fire us, they also announced they will hire more sales people. The ratio of business people/tech people was already 7:1 before that. They also said a programmer should produce 5 times the money the company spent with him, and we were at 4 point something.
Now I have found a position at a local company which takes care of its people even in harder times.
Judgement aside, I've gotta respect the humane way this org does layoffs. There's some slags in here about founder being "sociopath", but I'm just seeing a really humane founder with maybe some control issues.
Trump, who betrays everyone for personal benefit, there's a sociopath. Mullenwag's just got some personality vices that served him as underdog, and didn't adapt to when he gained power
Tough break for Matt Mullenweg, who unfortunately was caught up in this reduction in force. I am sure this unexpected change will afford him new opportunities. Wishing him the best!
for others who took this at its word, this sarcasm. matt is unaffected.
As a great man once said: "some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make"
[dead]
AI is eating the world.
This is well handled.