Staying at Automattic

It’s been a rollercoaster couple of weeks at Automattic. Lawsuits have been filed. Colleagues have been lost ¹.

The misalignment between Automattic and WP Engine burst into the open a few weeks ago, and has escalated from there. At the root of it, is a breaking of the reciprocity norm – the moral expectation that people repay in kind, what others have done for them. Both companies (and many others besides) benefit from the WordPress open source project, however Automattic contributes a lot to the WordPress open source project and WP Engine – a similar size company, does not.

The usual course of action in this scenario is to close source the project, to stop it being taken advantage of. Both Redis and Elastic Search did this in response to Amazon taking their software and not giving back. That wasn’t even an option on the table here, it’d break the Automattic creed, irreversibly fracture the WordPress community and besides that it’d be a massive undertaking, during which time WordPress would just stagnate.

Instead we have stepped up our trademark enforcement efforts and Matt, our CEO, has removed WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org resources. These actions proved controversial within Automattic, within the WordPress community, and also within the internet peanut gallery.

Automattic can be a chaotic place. Everyone is encouraged to DM Matt, to question him at company meetings and anyone can anonymously but publically give him feedback. And we do. Robustly. The result is that everyone is better informed, decisions can be changed and whilst ~1900 people will never agree completely on everything, we can usually at least disagree and commit.

This time though, finding that point wasn’t straightforward, and an offer was made to everyone. If you couldn’t agree, couldn’t disagree and commit, or just didn’t feel like Automattic was the place for you anymore, then you could leave immediately and would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher.¹

8.4% of the company – 159 people took the offer up

I sat watching the farewells pour in, sometimes in a trickle, sometimes in a surge. It was an overwhelming, uncertain few days. You didn’t know who’s name would appear next.

I’ve been at the company, working in the WordPress.com division for a little over three years. I don’t know nearly everyone who left, but I know a bunch of them. People I admired for their technical chops, or for their behaviour – their empathy, kindness and bravery. People I’d hung out with at company conferences and people I’d have liked to have known better.

Thankfully, my team and immediate leadership remained intact ❤️. For myself, I didn’t even think about taking the offer out. Six months salary is nowhere near enough enticement to leave people I love working with and a culture I love working within. Our commitment to open source is stronger than ever, and our values are not only lived, but rhyme deeply with my own.

If our creed resonates, if you like async, written work and if you want to work for the best company at distributed working, we’ve lost 159 people, we need more people to work with us and continue the mission.

What follows is a broad, simplification of events so far. I’m not here to write a history book ↩︎
The offer was more generous and more nuanced than this, for example those on parental leave or paid sabbatical received more, people were allowed to keep their (usually very expensive) laptops, monitors and other equipment ↩︎