“WordPress 6.7 is right around the corner and it’s difficult to get excited for it. How many people contributed to the release who can no longer contribute?”
That was the question posed by Jeff Chandler on October 18th. Matt’s response?
“That’s a good question. You used to be a journalist, you should count. My guess: 2 or 3, definitely under 10, out of 600+. See also: People think they’re a lot more important than they actually are.”
6.7 was released on November 12th along with a list of its 780 contributors. Let’s take a moment to thank 11 people from that list (i.e. definitely more than 10) who have since paused their contributions:
1. Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko, core component maintainer for Date/Time, announced he has stopped contributions “given recent WordPress actions against community and me personally.”
10. Tonya Mork, core committer, lead for numerous releases, and long-time contributor, announced she is pausing contributions due to being “greatly concerned about the well-being & eroding trust of contributors & users.”
The list is not complete. It took less than 30 minutes to come up with. It also doesn’t include people like Carrie Dils, Naoko Takano, Angela Jin, and many more who, though they didn’t contribute code to 6.7, added immeasurable value to what makes WordPress special. A thorough investigation would no doubt reveal even more losses, each one incredibly important to the project.
6.7 has been bittersweet. It is the community who have enabled WordPress’ success over the years. I hope every single person who has left knows that they are actually far more important than they think they are. Their absence will be felt.
Everyone who has worked at Automattic knows Matt has a well-documented history of abusive behavior. Senior leadership knows, HR knows, and the board knows. No one can credibly claim otherwise. We all share varying levels of responsibility for allowing his behavior to grow more and more erratic over the years.
Included with this post are some reviews from Automattic’s public Glassdoor profile, which testify to that behavior. Automattic actively solicits positive reviews from employees, yet the company’s overall rating (3.8) remains below the industry average, with Matt’s CEO approval rating at 62%. For comparison, WP Engine’s Heather Brunner holds a 95% approval rating on Glassdoor.
October 2nd, 2019:
Everyone is scrambling to please the CEO. And what pleases the CEO changes on a whim. There is little to no direction so everyone is left to guess about what they should work on. Many smart people left recently and you can feel the drain.
December 3rd, 2020:
an environment that allows bullying, trolling, and anonymous forums to shame people and teams
December 19th, 2020:
Toxic personalities are indulged and complaints ignored if their relationship with the CEO is good. Zero psychological safety, every tiny mistake is logged by HR and available for use against you at a later date. Ingrained cultural resistance to using anything not invented there, like proper project management tools.
November 20th, 2021:
Everyone is supposed to bow down to the ego-centric founder/CEO, who is a complete jerk. Management of teams is hit or miss. Most everyone is a workaholic. You’re expected to be on-call when you are on vacation or just not take vacation.
August 15th, 2021:
Every day you just hope [Matt] doesn’t look in the direction of your team/project or else who knows what will happen. I’ve worked at startups before but never seen an environment where literally every “suggestion” or “thought” the CEO has suddenly must be done right this second. And there is no room for people to disagree. Discourse is “welcome” but that’s because he assumes you will eventually see how he is right. Only yes-people survive and thrive here when you have to interact with Matt.
February 18th, 2022:
An extremely toxic culture that claims to support well-being, but practices a deeply engrained hypocrisy and dysfunction that fosters work insecurity, a lack of psychological safety, and renders the creed (values) void in many if not most instances. The toxicity is driven largely by a juvenile, ill-run, incompetent HR function that isn’t up to the task. HR does an extremely poor job of developing and enabling competent, mature leadership and fostering an environment that facilitates genuine, high employee morale and productivity that drives results.
November 23rd, 2022:
Inexperienced leadership and a lack of product culture. Lack of salary transparency. Chaotic organization with little collaboration across teams and divisions. Projects are killed without warning. Diversity isn’t a priority as the workforce, despite being global, is mostly white and white-passing men.
February 25th, 2023:
CEO makes a lot of quick decisions that impact other’s quality of life without input.
April 3rd, 2023:
The values advertised publicly don’t match what goes on inside. There are good people in there, but the leadership is kinda apathetic towards marginalized people. Very strong cishet-white-man-bro-code culture. No career growth for ICs. Concerns raised by marginalized people/women/queer/ND people are not heard.
June 16th, 2023:
The way the CEO talks to subordinates is beyond disrespectful and degrading, which sets a toxic example for others in senior leadership. It’s becoming an increasingly hostile place for people in marginalized groups. Lack of project management contributes to slow and chaotic processes.
June 17th, 2023:
“Positive vibes only” might have served the CEO when Automattic was a fledgling company, but somewhere it turned into toxic positivity. “Embrace the chaos” might have served a small, start-up culture, but somewhere it turned into literal chaos with no direction, no goals, no DEI, no strong leadership, no sense of belonging, or pay transparency. Democratizing the internet is a noble cause, but when companies are folded into the Automattic universe there’s little flywheel effect. Since it’s a private company, there’s no real oversight/understanding of how financially viable these businesses are. There is talk about cutting costs and getting the “headcount” down this year and this has been done in the most unorganized, confusing, and heartless way.
June 20th, 2023:
They say they advocate for transparency but if you don’t suck up to the boy king CEO, consider your job gone. There is no product management or long term strategy at this place.
The company “Creed” promotes transparency, trust, and learning, but leadership does not extend any of that to individual contributors. Decisions are made in private Slack channels. CEO regularly disparages the work of entire teams, openly, in Slack and P2 communications. When presented with a months-long report/study on retaining women in the workplace, CEO’s first comment was “but what about the men?”
June 27, 2023:
There’s a strange cult-like feeling from a lot of the people who have been there for a while. If the founder said something 5 years ago, they will treat it as something that shouldn’t ever be questioned — and the founder’s actions reinforce this behavior. There seems to be a higher value placed on the philosophies of their culture and low value placed on shipping work that makes a measurable impact. If “toxic positivity” is real, it exists here. There’s a lot of dissonance between perceived value and actual impact. People who are active in sharing their opinions tend to be seen as high-value contributors while others who are actively shipping high-impact work are not.
December 14th, 2023:
The CEO likes to micromanage, going from project to project. It’s called the M-Bomb and many folks (but not white males) have been demoted or chased out of the company for not working on what he he considers as important. On the other hand, white males are allowed to make huge revenue-impacting mistakes yet not asked to resign.
Despite all the talk about openness, communication as oxygen, pay transparency does not exist, and management actively shuts down related efforts. Anything you say publicly in internal communications can and will be used against you. Many folks whom stood up to the management/CEO have been “let go”.
An entire team can be cut in one day without so much as a warning, no PIP, no documented warnings. Just gone like that, and an outright lie provided as the justification which no one believes.
April 8th, 2024:
I love working here. BUT, having a CEO that publicly attacks and disrespects individual employees and insinuates that an entire division does not do work is appalling and hurtful. He acts as though we’re not all spending our waking hours trying to make his company better. We are. I would not be surprised if we lose fantastic people because of his behaviours. It’s unacceptable. It’s disheartening to love a workplace so much and to also feel like the leader of our company finds our work to be all but useless.
April 12th, 2024:
The leadership, specifically the CEO, is more than just problematic—it’s toxic. His public outbursts on Slack, where he berates and humiliates employees, are not just stressful—they’re destructive. This toxicity has had a trickle-down effect, influencing the rest of the leads in the company. Initially, I was feeling a strong dislike towards my own lead, but I later realized that it was a result of the toxic environment created by the CEO. This became evident when he was temporarily replaced during his “sabbatical”, which markedly changed the team’s morale. Matt’s frequent micromanagement and blatant favoritism, despite other divisions significantly contributing to revenue, are demoralizing. His behavior has not only tarnished the company’s reputation but also profoundly affected the mental health of many employees, including myself, leading some of us to seek therapy. Before joining Automattic, I held the company in high regard, but I’ve become disillusioned by the stark reality of its leadership.
May 6th, 2024:
The CEO jumps into all sorts of decisions and things that he should leave to others. It happens so often, there’s a name for it (Matt Bomb).
Instead of doing layoffs, they are doing “performance management”, and letting go of people without warning or PIPs. This is being done with no history of poor performance, and folks are told past positive reviews mean nothing due to “performance feedback inflation”.
July 22nd, 2024:
The executive leadership team is bad at what they do. Like, really bad. From childish public tirades to random layoffs with no notice, this place has it all.
The CEO should step aside and let somebody more adept at leading an organization do their thing.
July 27th, 2024:
Leadership has lost any semblance of humanity.
July 31st, 2024:
Erratic leadership, especially the CEO, who was recently judged by an independent committee to have bullied and harassed WordPress community members. He also made a controversial situation on Tumblr worse via a public meltdown. The “Automattic” section of his Wikipedia page literally has more space occupied by controversy than business achievements. Internally, the term “Matt bombs” is common. He’s known to be unjustly callous if he takes a personal dislike to someone and dishes out objectively bizarre, out-of-touch, damaging directives. Promotes and surrounds himself with sycophantic yes-men who enable his toxicity.
There have been numerous poorly handled layoffs in which people in underrepresented groups were disproportionately affected. The environment is increasingly hostile to underrepresented groups. I’ve been privy to many misogynistic comments regarding women engineers.
August 1st, 2024:
You will find most people here are disengaged and checked out. Why? Because they do not listen to feedback. It’s not hard to see why when Matt Mullenweg berates people on slack. It’s one thing to give a team feedback, it’s another to use your CEO role to treat them in a disrespectful and demeaning ways. There is no trust or confidence in his leadership.
October 30th, 2024:
Abusive leader who will micromanage and publicly put down employees, and who will make surprise (and questionable) decisions driven by ego. He’s surrounded by yes men who excel in saying a lot of words with no substance. No clear direction for product lines or anything that resembles an overall company strategy.
These two messages show the problemat(t)ic relationship between Matt, Automattic, and WordPress. Is WP Engine taking advantage of Matt’s personal website? Or are they taking advantage of the Open Source community? Which is it?
Also, “We believe it’s important to prioritize the community’s contributions…”. Really? Is that why he’s been banning contributors left or right for speaking out against his bullying? That’s caring for the community?
It’s very common for bullies to accuse their victims of exactly what they are doing. This makes them feel like their actions are a fair reaction instead of an intentional attack. Matt has been acting surprised that WPE filed a lawsuit against him after he spent a whole week attacking them.
Another common tactic is for the aggressor to try to make their problem the problem of others. Matt continues to say that WPE is attacking the WordPress foundation and the opensource community. No, they are not. They are suing Matt for weaponizing the opensource community.
Matt states “Freedom of Speech is not Freedom of Reach”. Hmmm…. like how he blocked all WPE users and employees from accessing the opensource platform? Like how his has repeatedly banned random people for as little as adding emojis to his childish posts? Is that speech, or is it reach?
Hey Matt, have you looked in the mirror recently?
Matt might be kind most of the time. But anyone who’s been in the community long enough knows that he has also frequently been a petty bully, willing to pay $100K to buy a domain and steal traffic from a business or call a journalist’s boss to try and get them fired.
As with most bullies, they usually pick on weaker people who have no chance to retaliate. This time he picked a fight with someone that might hit him back.
On the afternoon of Wednesday October 16 Matt Mullenweg, CEO posted a follow up buy-out offer to his staff:
“New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That’s water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt. Here’s a new one: You have until 00:00 UTC Oct 17 (-4 hours) to DM me the words, ‘I resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offer’ You don’t have to say any reason, or anything else. I will reply ‘Thank you.’ Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep you [sic] office stuff and work laptop; you will lose access to Automattic and W.org (no slack, user accounts, etc). HR will be in touch to wrap up details in the coming days, including your 9 months of compensation, they have a lot on their plates right now. You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won’t be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.”
He added that this about the offer:
“We have technical means to identify the leaker as well, that I obviously can’t disclose,” he continued. “So this is their opportunity to exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance and probably a big legal case for violating confidentiality agreement.”
Within the hour he announced that he had just spoken to the leaker and accepted their resignation. Within minutes a post to the Access-Checklist P2 would reveal the identity to the entire company.
When asked if the offer was still valid he confirmed that it was. Shortly after he would board a flight to Hawaii.
Other Automatticians had messaged him to accept. A single additional name would be added to the Access-Checklist P2. With no further updates many assumed that only two people accepted this offer.
Slowly through calls, texts, and rumors word began to swirl that several other people had messaged him to accept the offer but the promised acknowledged response never came. The previous offer came the day ofter Mullenweg announced that going forward all resignations would be effective and have their access removed the same day.
The purgatory of limbo would stretch over two days before a question was posited about the status of the offer. Mullenweg replied:
“I’ll work on an official statement. Probably after we do the hiring offer for WPE employees. We’re really short staffed at the moment!
That may be awkward for someone who DM’d and will have a later last day (could be next year, even), but my priority is people staying, not people leaving. I’m hearing from people staying that they’re stretched thin right now, so we need to hire and ease that overload.
It’s not a time for a bunch of people to leave at once.
So, I ask people to continue fulfilling their confidentiality and work contracts.”
As a response to a question it’s unclear how many Automatticians are aware of this reply and of this ongoing limbo or what it means for their employment. The stress of having been put into a situation where they had to make a life changing decision about their future within hours, in many cases after having only been made aware of it from friendly colleagues who contacted them to let them know another window of opportunity has opened must be significant.
Aside from the tortuous human impact of such a switcheroo what he’s done may not be legal in California according to section 12964.5(b)(4) of the CA Gov Code which stipulates that employees are to receive a reasonable time of not less than five business days to consult an attorney when receiving an offer of separation.
And don’t forget that he’s also planning to make offers to WP Engine staffers. Prioritizing his petty vendetta over the well-being of his current staff.
If you have, somehow, been missing all of the drama, you should really catch up. I am not going to summarize it all here or anything, and it would be a betrayal of trust on the level of Photography Matthew’s own to provide details that are not already publicly available.
However. There is a fairly good blow-by-blow that is being hosted on the site Bullenweg. It’s not exactly brief, but it’s great 🍿 material. Theo of t3.gg has also been doing so good videos discussing the drama (this one in particular is fantastic).
I think that the biggest lesson that we can all take from this is that no amount of wealth can make you either likeable nor sane.
And following closely behind this is that there’s probably an argument somewhere in here for there to be some significant guardrails surrounding this kind of power. Think about all of the things that you rely on in your life. Who actually has control of them? Is it just one single person? If they went off the rails, would there be anyone to stop them from setting it all on fire?
