I never thought about taking the offer, but last week took a toll on all of us. It was a weird and sad week. So the Woo DM worked not only as it usually does, a week to bond with
colleagues, have fun and collaborate in person. It was also one hundred times more energizing than it usually is. It had that little taste of “we are here because we believe in
this. LFG!!!”. A togetherness that feels special. We could talk, discuss, and share our concerns, opinions, memories and new ideas for the future of Woo and WordPress.
…
That’s a good summary of the week, I feel. It was weird and sad, especially to begin with, but it grew into something that was energising and hopeful. There was, in particular, a
certain solidarity, of us being the ones who stayed. It’s great to be reminded that my experience is shared.
Whether or not somebody chose to stay for the same reason as me, or as Rosie, it felt like a bonding experience to be among those who made that same decision. I’m glad we got to have
this meetup (even though I’m feeling a bit run-down by a combination of exhaustion, jetlag, and – principally – some kind of stomach bug I’ve contracted
somewhere along the way, ugh).
I’ve spent the last week1 in Tulum, on Mexico’s beautiful Yucatan Peninsula, for an Automattic meetup.
And as usual for these kinds of work gatherings, it was magical (and, after many recent departures, a welcome opportunity to feel a closer
connection to those of us that remain).
Obviously, meeting in-person with my immediate team2 was a specific goal for the event.
Only after deciding the title of this blog post did I spot my own accidental wordplay. I mean that it was metaphorically magical, of course, but there also happened to
be more than a little magic performed there too, thanks to yours truly.
I made magic a theme of a “flash talk”. After that ~350 people was a suboptimal audience size for close-up magic and offering to later replicate
the trick I was describing in-person to anybody in the room… I ended up performing it many, many more times.
No, I mean that the whole thing felt magical. Like, I’ve discovered, every Automattic meetup I’ve been to has been. But this is perhaps especially true of the larger
ones like Vienna last year (where my “flash talk” topic was Finger for WordPress; turns out I love the excuse to listen to
other people’s nerdity and fly my own nerd flag a little).
There’s plenty of reasons it was a magical trip, as I’ll explain. But after arriving late and exhausted, this view from the doorstep of my bedroom the
following morning was a great start. I made a habit of a pre-breakfast swim each morning in the warm Caribbean waters.
Our events team, who are already some of the most thoughtful and considerate planners you might ever meet, had gone above and beyond in their choice of location. The all-inclusive
resort they’d booked out for pretty-much our exclusive use was a little isolated and not the kind of place I’d have chosen for a personal holiday. But it provided all of the facilities
my team, sibling teams, and division could desire for work, rest and play.
One day, I returned to my room and discovered that in the course of their tidying, the hotel’s housekeeping team had been asked to tidy up any stray charging cables using
reusable Automattic-branded cable ties. These are the kinds of nice touches that show how hard our events coordinators think about their work3!
As usual, an Automattic meetup proved to be a series of long but energising days comprising a mixture of directly work-related events, social team-building and networking opportunities,
chances for personal growth and to learn or practice skills, and a sweet sprinkling of fun and memorable activities.
A particular treat as a trip to swim through a cenote – caverns formed by sinkhole erosion of the limestone sediment by
rainwater, often considered sacred to the Maya – complete with fish, bats, and the ugliest spiders you’ll ever
see.4Harvey Mackay said5 that if you choose a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. That might not ring
true for me every day of my working life, but it certainly feels significant when I’m at Automattic meetups.
Work that feels like fun, and fun that contributes to work? Is that the secret sauce? My colleague Boro and I certainly tried to bring that energy to our workshop on the philosophy of
code reviews, pictured.
Our meetups might not feel like “work” (even when they clearly are!), but rather like… I don’t know… a holiday with 400 of the coolest, friendliest, most-interesting people you could
ever meet6… which just happens to have
an overarching theme of something that you love.
Recently-developed changes to strategic priorities, and the departure of a few of our colleagues during the recent aforementioned “realignment”, meant that my “superteam” – my team and
its siblings – had a lot to talk about. How can we work better together? How can we best meet the needs of the company while also remaining true to its open-source ideology? What will
our relationships with one another and with other parts of the organisation look like in the year to come?
All the best meetings take place in bars, right?
Every morning for a week I’d wake early and walk the soft warm sands and swim in the sea, before meeting with colleagues for breakfast. Then a day of networking and workshops, team-time
activities, meetings, and personal development, which gave way to evenings with so much on offer that FOMO was inevitable7.
I continue to appreciate the ways that Automattic provides the time and space for me to expand my horizons. Whether that’s at one end of a spectrum learning a new technical skill. or
at the other sitting-in on a “sound bath”8.
Automattic remains… automaggical to me. As I rapidly approach five years since I started here (more on that later, I promise,
because, well: five years is a pretty special anniversary at Automattic…), it’s still the case that routinely I get to learn new
things and expand myself while contributing to important and influential pieces of open source software.
Our meetups are merely an intense distillation of what makes Automattic magical on a day-to-day basis.
At home, I usually start my day with a skim of my RSS reader from bed. But with the sea calling to me, first, each morning of the Tulum
meetup, I instead had to suffice with reading my feeds from the nearest available hammock to the beach on my doorstep.
4 The spiders, which weave long thin strand webs that hang like tinsel from the cave roof,
catch and eat mosquitoes, which I’m definitely in favour of.
6 Also, partially-tame trash pandas, which joined
iguanas, agouti, sand pipers, and other wildlife around (and sometimes in) our accommodation.
7 I slightly feel like I missed-out by skipping the board gaming, and it sounds like the
movie party and the karaoke events were a blast too, but I stand by my choices to drink and dance and perform magic and chat about technology and open source and Star Wars
and blogging and music and travel and everything else that I found even the slightest opportunity to connect on with any of the amazing diverse and smart folks with whom I’m fortunate
enough to work.
8 While I completely reject the magical thinking espoused by our “sound bath” facilitator,
it was still a surprisingly relaxing and meditative experience. It was also a nice chill-out before going off to the higher-energy environment that came next at the poolside bar:
drinking cocktails and dancing to the bangin’ tunes being played by our DJ, my colleague Rua.
A conversation about staying private and stripping EXIF tags on blogs lead to shdwcat asking the question “what would happen if you took a picture on the moon?”
…
However, I figured we could do better than “a point high above the Earth.” If you could state the coordinate system, you should be able to list an actual point on the moon.
…
It’s a fun question. Sure, you need to shoot down the naysayers who, like colin, rightly point out that you couldn’t reasonably expect to get a
GPS/GNSS signal on the moon, but still.
GPS on Earth
GPS (and most other GNSS technologies) fundamentally work by the principle of trilateration. Here’s the skinny of what happens when your GPS receiver – whether that’s your phone,
smartwatch, SatNav, or indeed digital camera – needs to work out where on Earth it is:
It listens for the signal that’s transmitted from the satellites. This is already an amazing feat of engineering given that the signal is relatively quiet and it’s being transmitted
from around 20,000km above the surface of the planet1.
The signal fundamentally says, for example “Hi, I’m satellite #18, and the time is [some time].” Assuming your GPS receiver doesn’t contain an atomic clock2, it listens for the earliest time –
i.e. the closest satellite (the signals “only” travel at the speed of light) – and assumes that this satellite’s time represents the actual time at your location.
Your GPS receiver keeps listening until it’s found three more satellites, and compares the times that they claim it is. Using this, and knowing the speed of light,
it’s able to measure the distance to each of those three satellites. The satellites themselves are on reasonably-stable orbits, so as long as you’ve been installing your firmware
updates at least once every 5-10 years, your device knows where those satellites are expected to be.
If you know your distance from one satellite, in 3D space, you know that your location is on the surface of an imaginary sphere with a radius of that distance, centered on the
satellite. Once you’ve measured your distance from a second satellite, you know that you must be at a point where those two spheres intersect: i.e. somewhere on a circle. With a third
satellite found and the distance measured, you’re able to cut that down to just two points (of which one is likely to be about 40,000km into space, so it’s probably not that
one3).
Your device will keep finding more passing satellites, measuring and re-measuring, and refining/averaging your calculated location for maximum accuracy.
So yeah: that tiny computer on top of your camera or within your wristwatch? It’s differentiating to miniscule precision measurements of the speed of light, from spacecraft as far away
as half the circumference of the planet, while compensating for not being a timekeeping device accurate enough to do so and working-around the time dilation resulting from the effect of
general relativity on the satellites4.
GPS on Luna
Supposing you could pick out GPS signals from Earth orbit, from the surface of the moon (which – again – you probably can’t – especially if you were on the dark side of the
moon where you wouldn’t get a view of the Earth). Could it work?
I can’t see why not. You’d want to recalibrate your GPS receiver to assume that the “time” satellite – the one with the earliest-apparent clock – was much further away (and therefore
that the real time was later than it appears to be) than an Earth-based GPS receiver would: the difference in the order of 1.3 seconds, which is a long time in terms of GNSS
calculation.
Again, once you had distance measurements from three spatial satellites you’d be able to pinpoint your location, to within some sphere of uncertainty, to one of two points. One would be
on the moon (where you know that you are5), and one would be on the far side of the Earth by almost the same distance. That’s a
good start. And additional satellites could help narrow it down even more.
You might even be able to get a slightline to more satellites than is typically possible on Earth, not being limited by Earth curvature, nor being surrounded by
relatively-large Earth features like mountains, buildings, trees, and unusually-tall humans. It’s feasible.
How about… LPS?
If we wanted to go further – and some day, if we aim to place permanent human settlements on the moon, we might – then we might consider a Lunar Positioning System: a network of a dozen
or so orbiters whizzing around the moon to facilitate accurate positioning on its surface. They’d want to be in low orbits to avoid the impact of tidal forces from the much-larger
nearby Eath, and with no atmosphere to scrape against there’s little harm in that.
By the time you’re doing that, though, you might as well ditch trilateration and use the doppler effect, Transit-style.
It works great in low orbits but its accuracy on Eath was always limited by the fact that you can’t make the satellites fly low enough without getting atmospheric drag. There’s no such
limitation on the moon. Maybe that’s the way forward.
Maybe far-future mobile phones and cameras will support satellite positioning and navigation networks on both Earth and Luna. And maybe then we’ll start seeing EXIF metadata spanning
both the WGS-84 datum and the LRO-ME datum.
Footnotes
1 That’s still only about a twentieth of the way to the moon, by the way. But there are
other challenging factors, like our atmosphere and all of the obstructions both geographic and human-made that litter our globe.
From safely outside of its predicted path, just around the Yucatan coast, Hurricane Milton seems like a forboding and distant monster. A growing threat whose path will thankfully take
it away, not towards, me.
My heart goes out to the people on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico who find themselves along the route of this awakened beast.
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.
Departures have been experienced across virtually all divisions, but not always proportionally.
(These numbers are my own estimation and might not be entirely accurate.)
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?
