I’ve had a few breakups, but I’ve only been made redundant once. There’s a surprising overlap between the two…
And with that, I’d better get back to it. Today’s mission is to finish checking-in on my list of “companies I’ve always admired and thought I should work for” and see if any of them are
actively looking for somebody like me!
(Incidentally: if you’re into open source, empowering the Web, and making the world a better place, my CV is over here. I’m a senior/principal full-stack
engineer with a tonne of experience in some radically diverse fields, and if you think we’d be a good match then I’d love to chat!)
A master class in how not to lead through crisis is continuing at Automattic and it’s rough to
watch.
After Matt Mullenweg sets off a firestorm by going “scorched earth” on WP Engine in September 2024 (if you don’t know the story) there’s been one dodgy decision after another but through it all Mullenweg and his
executive leadership team continue to blame the lack of success and growth on staffers.
October 2024: Make two “alignment offers” to root out anyone willing to speak sense to the madness of all the
#wpdrama. 159 walk in the first and 25-30 in the second. Allege that the people who chose to leave were low performers and now that everyone left is
aligned things should be better.
January 10: Matt Mullenweg states “There are no layoffs plans at Automattic, in fact
we’re hiring fairly aggressively and have done a number of acquisitions since this whole thing started, and have several more in the pipeline.”
April 2: Automattic decimates its engineering staff in a 280 person layoff with a paltry severance compared to
alignment offers. Leaving many feeling like suckers for showing loyalty.
April 8: The engineering lead admits that just this week they are beginning to see the gaps in engineering
due to the layoffs.
April 9: CFO accidentally sends a Slack message to the entire company that not only do engineers need to, but all of
Automattic needs to “Get aligned, get productive, deliver or move on”.
The call is coming from inside the house. The C-suite is failing to get real alignment because “leadership” at
WordPress.com, Automattic, et al. is not, and have not, been leading. They haven’t come up with an executable commercial plan for the company in nearly a decade. Any time they get
close to doing so a shiny object appears and **poof** on to something else.
I’m not sure whether I agree with everything Kellie asserts, but I’ve certainly been concerned about the direction of management for the last year or more. Obviously I’d be biased,
speaking as one of the “suckers” who showed loyalty in October only to get axed in April…
But for a while now it had felt like my reasons for staying were entirely about my love for (a) my team, a full half of whom got laid off at the same time as me anyway, and (b)
WordPress and the open source space it represents, which of course Automattic’s
been distancing itself from.
(Incidentally – and speaking of open source – I’m quite enjoying the freedom to contribute to ClassicPress, which previously might have been
frowned-upon by my employers. I’ve not got a first PR out yet, but I’m hoping to soon.)
So yeah… while I might not agree with all of Kellie’s sentiments (here and elsewhere)… I increasingly find I have the clarity to agree with many of them. Automattic seems to be a ship
on fire, right now, and I really feel for my friends and former colleagues still aboard what must be an increasingly polarised environment, seemingly steering hard towards profits over
principles.
I’m in an extremely rural area and I needed a phone call with my lawyer about my recent redundancy. Phone signal was very bad, so I resolved to
climb a nearby hill and call him back.
“I’m at a crossroads,” I said, when I finally found enough bars to have a conversation with him.
“In your life?” he asked.
“I guess,” I replied, “But also, y’know, literally.”
I’m off for a week of full-time volunteering with Three Rings at 3Camp, our annual volunteer hack week: bringing together our distributed
team for some intensive in-person time, working to make life better for charities around the world.
And if there’s one good thing to come out of me being suddenly and unexpectedly laid-off two days ago, it’s that I’ve got a shiny new laptop to do
my voluntary work on (Automattic have said that I can keep it).
Apparently Automattic are laying off around one in six of their workforce. And I’m one of the unlucky ones.
Anybody remote hiring for a UK-based full-stack web developer (in a world that doesn’t seem to believe that full-stack developers exist anymore) with 25+ years professional experience,
specialising in PHP, Ruby, JS, HTML, CSS, devops, and about 50% of CMSes you’ve ever heard of (and probably some you haven’t)… with a flair for security, accessibility,
standards-compliance, performance, and DexEx?
With visa complications and travel challenges, this is the very first time that my team – whom I’ve been working with for the last year – have ever all been in the same country, all at
the same time.
You can do a lot in a distributed work environment. But sometimes you just have to come together… in celebration of your achievements, in anticipation of what you’ll do next, and in aid
of doing those kinds of work that really benefit from a close, communal, same-timezone environment.
Hanging with my team at our meetup in Istanbul, this lunchtime I needed to do some accessibility testing…
(with apologies to anybody who doesn’t know that in user interface design, a “kebab menu” is one of those menu icons with a vertical line of three dots: a vertical
ellipsis)
I’m visiting Istanbul to meet with colleagues, but we took some time off from our meetings and work this afternoon to come and get lost in the Grand Bazaar. While browsing the amazing
diversity of stalls I found myself staring at the floors, which are made of the same kind of limestone as my kitchen floor (in which my kids love hunting for fossils!). Wouldn’t that
make a great Earthcache, I thought… and it turns out it anyway is one! So I spent a little while hunting for the best fossil I could find (I’d hoped for a gastropod of some kind, but
had to settle for a bivalve), and sent the answers to the CO. Fantastic stuff. TFTC! FP awarded. And,
possibly, FTF!
Last month my pest of a dog destroyed my slippers, and it was more-disruptive to my life than I would have anticipated.
Look what you did, you troublemaker.
Sure, they were just a pair of slippers1, but they’d
become part of my routine, and their absence had an impact.
Routines are important, and that’s especially true when you work from home. After I first moved to Oxford and started doing entirely remote work for the first time, I found the transition challenging2.
To feel more “normal”, I introduced an artificial “commute” into my day: going out of my front door and walking around the block in the morning, and then doing the same thing in reverse
in the evening.
My original remote working office, circa 2010.
It turns out that in the 2020s my slippers had come to serve a similar purpose – “bookending” my day – as my artificial commute had over a decade earlier. I’d slip them on when I was at
my desk and working, and slide them off when my workday was done. With my “work” desk being literally the same space as my “not work” desk, the slippers were a psychological reminder of
which “mode” I was in. People talk about putting on “hats” as a metaphor for different roles and personas they hold, but for me… the distinction was literal footwear.
And so after a furry little monster (who for various reasons hadn’t had her customary walk yet that day and was probably feeling a little frustrated) destroyed my slippers… it actually
tripped me up3. I’d be doing
something work-related and my feet would go wandering, of their own accord, to try to find their comfortable slip-ons, and when they failed, my brain would be briefly tricked
into glancing down to look for them, momentarily breaking my flow. Or I’d be distracted by something non-work-related and fail to get back into the zone without the warm, toe-hugging
reminder of what I should be doing.
It wasn’t a huge impact. But it wasn’t nothing either.
The bleppy little beast hasn’t expressed an interest in my replacement slippers, yet. Probably because they’re still acquiring the smell of my feet, which I’m guessing is
what interested her in the first place.
So I got myself a new pair of slippers. They’re a different design, and I’m not so keen on the lack of an enclosed heel, but they solved the productivity and focus problem I was facing.
It’s strange how such a little thing can have such a big impact.
Oh! And d’ya know what? This is my hundredth blog post of the year so far! Coming on only the 73rd day of the year, this is my fastest run at
#100DaysToOffload yet (my previous best was last year, when I managed the same on 22 April). 73 is exactly a fifth of 365, so… I guess I’m on
track for a mammoth 500 posts this year? Which would be my second-busiest blogging year ever, after 2018. Let’s see how I get on…4
Footnotes
1 They were actually quite a nice pair of slippers. JTA got them for me as a gift a few years back, and they lived either on my feet or under my desk ever since.
2 I was working remotely for a company where everybody else was working
in-person. That kind of hybrid setup is a lot harder to do “right”, as many companies in this post-Covid-lockdowns age have discovered, and it’s understandable that I found it
somewhat isolating. I’m glad to say that the experience of working for my current employer – who are entirely distributed –
is much more-supportive.
3 Figuratively, not literally. Although I would probably have literally tripped
over had I tried to wear the tattered remains of my shredded slippers!
Using WordPress internally at Automattic as a productivity tool is great… until you have to call in sick three days in a row and Jetpack treats your “streak” as an “achievement”! 😅
It’s possible I don’t understand social media any more. To be fair, it’s possible that I never did.
This is something between absurd and hilarious. Aside from the 100 year plan (which is fascinating, and I keep meaning to share my thoughts
on), I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be advertising. Maybe it’s trying to showcase how cool it is to work with Automattic? (It’s
not… exactly like it’s depicted in the video. But I’d be lying if I said that fewer than 50% of my meetings this week have included a discussion on snack foods, so maybe we are
I guess at least a little eccentric.)
I think I understand what it’s parodying. And that’s fun. But… wow. You don’t see many videos like this attached to a corporate YouTube account, do you? Kudos for keeping the Internet
fun and weird, WordPress.com.
Today was my first day back at work after three months of paid leave1. I’d meant to write about the overall experience of my sabbatical and the things I gained
from it before I returned, but I’m glad I didn’t because one of the lessons only crystallised this morning.
This is about the point on the way back from the school run at which I pull out my phone and see what’s happening in the world or at work. But not today.
My typical work schedule sees me wake up some time before 06:30 so I can check my notifications, formulate my to-do list for the day, and so on, before the kids get up. Then I can focus
on getting them full of breakfast, dressed, and to school, and when I come back to my desk I’ve already got my day planned-out. It’s always felt like a good way to bookend my day, and
it leans into my “early bird” propensities2.
Over the last few years, I’ve made a habit of pulling out my phone and checking for any new work Slack conversations while on the way back after dropping the kids at school. By this
point it’s about 08:45 which is approximately the time of day that all of my immediate teammates – who span five timezones – have all checked-in. This, of course, required that I was
signed in to work Slack on my personal phone, but I’d come to legitimise this bit of undisciplined work/life-balance interaction by virtue of the fact that, for example, walking the dog
home from the school run was “downtime” anyway. What harm could it do to start doing “work” things ten minutes early?
Here. Here is where work happens (or, y’know, anywhere I take my work laptop to… but the crucial thing is that work has a time and a place, and it doesn’t include “while walking the
dog home after dropping the kids at school”).
But walking the dog isn’t “downtime”. It’s personal time. When I’m looking at your phone and thinking about work I’m actively choosing not to be looking at the
beautiful countryside that I’m fortunate enough to be able to enjoy each morning, and not to be thinking about… whatever I might like to be thinking about! By blurring my
work/life-balance I’m curtailing my own freedom, and that’s bad for both my work and personal lives!
My colleague Kyle recently returned from six months of parental leave and shared some wisdom with me, which I’ll
attempt to paraphrase here:
It takes some time at a new job before you learn all of the optimisations you might benefit from making to your life. This particular workflow. That particular notetaking strategy. By
the time you’ve come up with the best answers for you, there’s too much inertia to overcome for you to meaningfully enact personal change.
Coming back from an extended period of leave provides the opportunity to “reboot” the way you work. You’re still informed by all of your previous experience, but you’re newly blessed
with a clean slate within which to implement new frameworks.
He’s right. I’ve experienced this phenomenon when changing roles within an organisation, but there’s an even stronger opportunity, without parallel, to “reboot” your way of
working when returning from a sabbatical. I’ve got several things I’d like to try on this second chapter at Automattic. But the first one is that I’m not connecting my personal phone to
my work Slack account.
2 Mysteriously, and without warning, at about the age of 30 I switched from being a “night
owl” to being an “early bird”, becoming a fun piece of anecdotal evidence against the idea that a person’s preference is genetic or otherwise locked-in at or soon after
birth. As I’ve put it since: “I’ve become one of those chirpy, energetic ‘morning people’ that I used to hate so much when I was younger.”.
The first weekend of my sabbatical might have set the tone for a lot of the charity hacking that will follow, being dominated by a Three Rings volunteering weekend.
The first fortnight of my sabbatical has consisted of:
Three Rings CIC’s AGM weekend and lots of planning for the future of the organisation and how we make it a better place to volunteer, and better value for our charity users,
You’d be amazed how many churros these children can put away.
The trip to Spain followed a model for European family breaks that we first tried in Paris last year2,
but was extended to give us a feel for more of the region than a simple city break would. Ultimately, we ended up in three separate locations:
The PortAventura World theme park, whose accommodation was certainly a gear shift after the 5-star hotel we’d come from4 but whose rides kept us and the kids delighted for a
couple of days (Shambhala was a particular hit with the eldest kid and me).
A villa in el Vilosell – a village of only 190 people – at which the kids mostly played in the outdoor pool (despite the
sometimes pouring rain) but we did get the chance to explore the local area a little. Also, of course, some geocaching: some local caches are 1-2 years old and yet had so few finds that
I was able to be only the tenth or even just the third person to sign the logbooks!
I’d known – planned – that my sabbatical would involve a little travel. But it wasn’t until we began to approach the end of this holiday that I noticed a difference that a holiday
on sabbatical introduces, compared to any other holiday I’ve taken during my adult life…
Perhaps because of the roles I’ve been appointed to – or maybe as a result of my personality – I’ve typically found that my enjoyment of the last day or two of a week-long trip are
marred somewhat by intrusive thoughts of the work week to follow.
I’m not saying that I didn’t write code while on holiday. I totally did, and I open-sourced it too.
But programming feels different when your paycheque doesn’t depend on it.
If I’m back to my normal day job on Monday, then by Saturday I’m already thinking about what I’ll need to be working on (in my case, it’s usually whatever I left unfinished right before
I left), contemplating logging-in to work to check my email or Slack, and so on5.
But this weekend, that wasn’t even an option. I’ve consciously and deliberately cut myself off from my usual channels of work communication, and I’ve been very disciplined about not
turning any of them back on. And even if I did… my team aren’t expecting me to sign into work for about another 11 weeks anyway!
🤯🤯🤯
Monday and Tuesday are going to mostly be split between looking after the children, and voluntary work for Three Rings (gotta fix that new server architecture!). Probably. Wednesday?
Who knows.
That’s my first taste of the magic of a sabbatical, I think. The observation that it’s possible to unplug from my work life and, y’know, not start thinking about it right away
again.
Maybe I can use this as a vehicle to a more healthy work/life balance next year.
Footnotes
1A sabbatical is a perk offered to
Automatticians giving them three months off (with full pay and benefits) after each five years of work. Mine coincidentally came hot on the tail of my last meetup and soon after a whole lot of drama and a major
shake-up, so it was a very welcome time to take a break… although of course it’s been impossible to completely detach from bits of the drama that have spilled out onto the open
Web!
5 I’m fully aware that this is a symptom of poor work/life balance, but I’ve got two
decades of ingrained bad habits working against me now; don’t expect me to change overnight!
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