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.
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...
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.
> 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?
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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."
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.
Relevant comment from 24 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43309837
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Yes. He also calls the employees Automatticians. So they're all just Matt.
guess their jobs were just automatted away!
> wait, did he put his name in the company name?
Yes.
> 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.
Pointing out the error in your claim implied nothing about outrage.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 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
“While our revenue continues to grow,”
Hard to read further than that…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
It may also have been part of his reason for doing so. Panic/desperation.
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.
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"
This is well handled.
AI is eating the world.
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.
If only we had real leaders...
You can trust me, facile3232, instead. I will improve upon all things the leader of automattic.com failed to improve upon.
You got this random internet stranger
We do, but the sociopaths outcompete them.
[dead]