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.