It’s a bit hard to perform close-up magic to an audience 40 metres deep, so I pre-recorded my favourite card trick! Then I talked over it, explaining to colleagues from my division why
it’s my favourite bit of slight-of-hand, and what great magic tricks have in common with great code.
I feel like I’m likely to have to perform a lot more illusions at the bar later today!
It’s 05:30 local time on the third day of my work meetup in Tulum, on Tyne Caribbean Coast of Mexico, and I was just woken by incredibly heavy rain. I got up and stepped out until it,
and was surprised to discover that it’s almost as warm as the shower in my bathroom. In the distance, beyond the palm trees and over the hill, the booms of thunder are getting closer.
Beautiful weather for a beautiful place.
Max props to my employer for providing pronoun pins not just in a diversity of options but also offering blank ones for people not represented by any of the pre-printed options.
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.
…
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!
…
This was a really bold move, and gave many people I know pause for consideration. “Quit today, and we’ll pay you six months salary,” could be a pretty high-value deal for some people,
and it was offered basically without further restriction2.
Every so often, though, I spend time with a company that is so original in its strategy, so determined in its execution, and so transparent in its thinking, that it makes my head
spin. Zappos is one of those companies
…
It’s a hard job, answering phones and talking to customers for hours at a time. So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the
company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.
After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people
to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its
new employees to quit!
…
I’m sure you can see the parallel. What Zappos do routinely and Automattic did this week have a similar outcome
By reducing – not quite removing – the financial incentive to remain, they aim to filter their employees down to only those whose reason for being there is that they
believe in what the company does3. They’re trading money for
idealism.
Buried about half way through the Creed is the line I am more motivated by impact than money, which seems
quite fitting. Automattic has always been an idealistic company. This filtering effort helps validate that.
The effect of Automattic’s “if you don’t feel aligned with us, we’ll pay you to leave” offer has been significant: around 159 people – 8.4% of the company – resigned this week. At very
short notice, dozens of people I know and have worked with… disappeared from my immediate radar. It’s been… a lot.
I chose to stay. I still believe in Automattic’s mission, and I love my work and the people I do it with. But man… it makes you second-guess yourself when people you know, and respect,
and love, and agree with on so many things decide to take a deal like this and… quit4.
There’ve been some real heart-in-throat moments. A close colleague of mine started a message in a way that made me briefly panic that this was a goodbye, and it took until half way
through that I realised it was the opposite and I was able to start breathing again.
But I’m hopeful and optimistic that we’ll find our feet, rally our teams, win our battles, and redouble our efforts to make the Web a better place, democratise publishing (and
eCommerce!), and do it all with a commitment to open source. There’s tears today, but someday there’ll be happiness again.
Footnotes
1 For which the Internet quickly made me regret my choices, delivering a barrage of
personal attacks and straw man arguments, but I was grateful for the people who engaged in meaningful discourse.
2 For example, you could even opt to take the deal if you were on a performance
improvement plan, or if you were in your first week of work! If use these examples because I’m pretty confident that both of them occurred.
3 Of course, such a strategy can never be 100% effective, because people’s reasons for
remaining with an employer are as diverse as people are.
4 Of course their reasons for leaving are as diverse and multifaceted as others’ reasons
for staying might be! I’ve a colleague who spent some time mulling it over not because he isn’t happy working here but because he was close to retirement, for example.
Harry Segell’s 1938 play Heaven Can Wait went on to inspire such an extraordinarily long legacy of follow-ups.
I’ve only seen the most-recent few and my experience is that the older iterations are better, so I probably ought to watch Here Comes Mr. Jordan, right?
This morning’s actual breakfast order from the 7-year-old: “A sesame seed bagel with honey, unless there aren’t any sesame seed bagels, in which case a plain bagel with honey on one
half and jam on the other half, unless there aren’t any plain bagels, in which case a cinnamon and raisin bagel with JimJams on one half and Biscoff on the other half.”
Some day, this boy will make a great LISP programmer. 😂
Look at the following list of words and try to find the intruder:
wp-activate.php
wp-admin
wp-blog-header.php
wp_commentmeta
wp_comments
wp-comments-post.php
wp-config-sample.php
wp-content
wp-cron.php
wp engine
wp-includes
wp_jetpack_sync_queue
wp_links
wp-links-opml.php
wp-load.php
wp-login.php
wp-mail.php
wp_options
wp_postmeta
wp_posts
wp-settings.php
wp-signup.php
wp_term_relationships
wp_term_taxonomy
wp_termmeta
wp_terms
wp-trackback.php
wp_usermeta
wp_users
What are these words?
Well, all the ones that contain an underscore _ are names of the WordPress core database tables. All the ones that contain a dash - are WordPress core file
or folder names. The one with a space is a company name…
…
A smart (if slightly tongue-in-cheek) observation by my colleague Paolo, there. The rest of his article’s cleverer and worth-reading if you’re following the WordPress Drama (but it’s
pretty long!).
tl;dr: I’m tidying up and consolidating my personal hosting; I’ve made a little progress, but I’ve got a way to go – fortunately I’ve got a sabbatical coming up at
work!
At the weekend, I kicked-off what will doubtless be a multi-week process of gradually tidying and consolidating some of the disparate digital things I run, around the Internet.
I’ve a long-standing habit of having an idea (e.g. gamebook-making tool Twinebook, lockpicking puzzle game Break Into Us, my Cheating Hangman game, and even FreeDeedPoll.org.uk!),
deploying it to one of several servers I run, and then finding it a huge headache when I inevitably need to upgrade or move said server because there’s such an insane diversity of
different things that need testing!
I can simplify, I figured. So I did.
And in doing so, I rediscovered several old projects I’d neglected or forgotten about. I wonder if anybody’s still using any of them?
DNDle, my Wordle-clone where you have to guess the Dungeons & Dragons 5e monster’s stat block, is now hosted by GitHub Pages. Also, I
fixed an issue reported a month ago that meant that I was reporting Giant Scorpions as having a WIS of 19 instead of 9.
Abnib, which mostly reminds people of upcoming birthdays and serves as a dumping ground for any Abnib-related shit I produce, is now hosted by
GitHub Pages.
RockMonkey.org.uk, which doesn’t really do much any more, is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
Sour Grapes, the single-page promo for a (remote) murder mystery party I hosted during a COVID lockdown, is now hosted by GitHub
Pages.
A convenience-page for giving lost people directions to my house is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
Dan Q’s Things is now automatically built on a schedule and hosted by GitHub Pages.
Robin’s Improbable Blog, which spun out from 52 Reflect, wasn’t getting enough traffic to justify
“proper” hosting so now it sits in a Docker container on my NAS.
My μlogger server, which records my location based on pings from my phone, has also moved to my NAS. This has broken
Find Dan Q, but I’m not sure if I’ll continue with that in its current form anyway.
All of my various domain/subdomain redirects have been consolidated on, or are in the process of moving to, to a tinyLinode/Akamai
instance. It’s a super simple plain Nginx server that does virtually nothing except redirect people – this is where I’ll park the domains I register but haven’t found a use for yet, in
future.
It turns out GitHub pages is a fine place to host simple, static websites that were open-source already. I’ve been working on improving my understanding of GitHub Actions
anyway as part of what I’ve been doing while wearing my work, volunteering, and personal hats, so switching some static build processes like DNDle’s to GitHub
Actions was a useful exercise.
Stuff I’m still to tidy…
There’s still a few things I need to tidy up to bring my personal hosting situation under control:
DanQ.me
This is the big one, because it’s not just a WordPress blog: it’s also a Gemini, Spartan, and Gopher server (thanks CapsulePress!), a Finger server, a general-purpose host to a stack of complex stuff only some of which is powered by Bloq (my WordPress/PHP integrations): e.g.
code to generate the maps that appear on my geopositioned posts, code to integrate with the Fediverse, a whole stack of configuration to make my caching work the way I want, etc.
FreeDeedPoll.org.uk
Right now this is a Ruby/Sinatra application, but I’ve got a (long-running) development branch that will make it run completely in the browser, which will further improve privacy, allow
it to run entirely-offline (with a service worker), and provide a basis for new features I’d like to provide down the line. I’m hoping to get to finishing this during my Automattic
sabbatical this winter.
A secondary benefit of it becoming browser-based, of course, is that it can be hosted as a static site, which will allow me to move it to GitHub Pages too.
When I took over running the world’s geohashing hub from xkcd‘s Randall Munroe (and davean), I flung the site together on whatever hosting I had sitting
around at the time, but that’s given me some headaches. The outbound email transfer agent is a pain, for example, and it’s a hard host on which to apply upgrades. So I want to get that
moved somewhere better this winter too. It’s actually the last site left running on its current host, so it’ll save me a little money to get it moved, too!
Right now I run this on my NAS, but that turns out to be a pain sometimes because it means that if my home Internet goes down (e.g. thanks to a power cut, which we have from time to time), I lose access to the first and last place I
go on the Internet! So I’d quite like to move that to somewhere on the open Internet. Haven’t worked out where yet.
Next steps
It’s felt good so far to consolidate and tidy-up my personal web hosting (and to rediscover some old projects I’d forgotten about). There’s work still to do, but I’m expecting to spend
a few months not-doing-my-day-job very soon, so I’m hoping to find the opportunity to finish it then!