Silver Lake and WP Engine's attacks on me and Automattic, while spurious, have been effective. It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.
So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher. But you'd lose access to Automattic that evening, and you wouldn't be eligible to boomerang (what we call re-hires). HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.
I've been asking people to vote with their wallet a lot recently, and this is another example!
And guess what? They left
159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay! 63.5% were male. 53% were in the US. By division it impacted our Ecosystem / WordPress areas the most: 79.2% of the people who took it were in our Ecosystem businesses, compared to 18.2% from Cosmos (our apps like Pocket Casts, Day One, Tumblr, Cloudup). 18 people made over 200k/yr! 1 person started two days before the deadline. 4 people took it then changed their minds.
Earlier, his company did a bellicose post about the lawsuit:
Last night, WP Engine filed a baseless lawsuit against Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, and WordPress.org. Their complaint is flawed, start to finish. We vehemently deny WP Engine's allegations—which are gross mischaracterizations of reality—and reserve all of our rights. Automattic is confident in our legal position, and will vigorously litigate against this absurd filing, as well as pursue all remedies against WP Engine. Automattic has retained Neal Katyal, former Acting Solicitor General of the United States, and his firm Hogan Lovells, LLP, to represent us.
Neal has been adverse to Quinn Emanuel a number of times, and won every case.
Mr. Katyal stated:
I stayed up last night reading WP Engine's Complaint, trying to find any merit anywhere to it. The whole thing is meritless, and we look forward to the federal court's consideration of their lawsuit.
Our focus is and has always been protecting the integrity of WordPress and our mission to democratize publishing. From our earliest days, our highest priority has always been our customers. WP Engine can hardly say the same.
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You may think you're hot stuff, the Fred Astaire of this topic — but if you're Fred Astaire, I'm Ginger Rogers: Anything you can do, I can do — backwards, without looking, and in high heels.
You're a computer systems engineer? Wow! Have you publicly called out the CEO of Intel for the untrustability of their encryption blackbox silicon? Have you explained at an ELI5 level the feasibility and utility of peer-to-peer communications network routing? How about explaining fast fourier transforms to a college kid? These are just the things in computer science I've been gilded for. That doesn't count the parts where I picked up the comment of an actual climate scientist that demolishes every single claim made in your oldest gilded comment. Or the two years worth of reddit gold other people gifted me just for being the flagbearer of that comment. That doesn't cover where I kneecapped a transphobe's Loaded Question in an AMA in /r/science. Oh, and then there was the one where I explained morphological diversity and the evolutionary basis of intelligence in Aves and Mammalia.
And those are just the gilded comments.
That doesn't cover the comments where I haven't been gilded, like when I shredded the methodology of a trash poll conducted to produce misleading public support figures on the question of whether trans people ahould be allowed to use a restroom.
The thing is, that once someone has been a scientist, they never stop being a scientist. They never stop thinking rationally and critically. They tear apart obvious bullshit with ease after years of doing peer review with actual scientists, after working with their advisors and departments to produce a worthwhile and defensible doctoral thesis, even.
Your most recent gilded comment is a regurgitation of a Stormfront / White Supremacist blogosphere talking-points memo, which in turn was based on a bullshit misread of a statistical publication, by conflating causation with correlation.
And no, my capslock key isn't stuck; I prised it off my keyboard two decades ago so that I would have to be cognisant of holding Shift with my pinky while typing, so that I wouldn't accidentally hose up Windows 2000 source code. Every capitalised letter I write is intentional.
I have no more time to play slapbox with you.
Snapshots:
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/04/159-employees-are-leaving-automattic-as-ceos-fight-with-wp-engine-escalates/:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
He did a whiny blog post:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
a bellicose post about the lawsuit:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
WordPress.org:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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