AUTOMATTIC SHAKEUP
       
       2024-01-28
       
       My employer Automattic's having a bit of a reorganisation. For unrelated
       reasons, this coincides with my superteam having a bit of a reorganisation,
       too, and I'm going to be on a different team next week than I've been on for
       most of the 4+ years I've been there (I've been on Team Fire for a long while,
       which made my job title "Code Magician on Fire", but now I'll be on Team
       Desire which isn't half as catchy a name but I'm sure they'll make up for it
       by being the kinds of awesome human beings I've become accustomed to working
       alongside at Automattic.). Together, these factors mean that I have even less
       idea than usual what I do for a living, right now.
       
 (IMG) Dan, wearing an Oxford-branded t-shirt, shrugs and looks confused in front of a screen showing Automattic's "Work With Us" page.
       
       On the whole, I approve of Matt's vision for this reorganisation. He writes:
       > Each [Automattic employee] gets a card: Be the Host, Help the Host, or
       Neutral.
       >
       > You cannot change cards during the course of your day or week. If you do not
       feel aligned with your card, you need to change divisions within Automattic.
       "Be the Host" folks are all about making Automattic's web hosting offerings
       the best they possibly can be. These are the teams behind WordPress.com, VIP,
       and Tumblr, for example. They're making us competitive on the global stage.
       They bring Automattic money in a very direct way, by making our (world class)
       hosting services available to our customers.
       
       "Help the Host" folks (like me) are in roles that are committed to providing
       the best tools that can be used anywhere. You might run your copy of Woo,
       Jetpack, or (the client-side bit of) Akismet on Automattic infrastructure...
       or alternatively you might be hosted by one of our competitors or even on your
       own hardware. What we bring to Automattic is more ethereal: we keep the best
       talent and expertise in these technologies close to home, but we're agnostic
       about who makes money out of what we create.
       
 (IMG) A laptop computer on a desk, showing a WordPress wp-admin page.
       
       Anyway: I love the clarification on the overall direction of the company...
       but I'm not sure how we market it effectively (Fortunately they pay me to
       code, not to do marketing.). I look around at the people in my team and its
       sister teams, all of us proudly holding our "Help the Hosts" cards and ready
       to work to continue to make Woo an amazing ecommerce platform wherever you
       choose to host it.
       
       And obviously I can see the consumer value in that. It's reassuring to know
       that the open source software we maintain or contribute to is the real deal
       and we're not exporting a cut-down version nor are we going to try to do some
       kind of rug pull to coerce people into hosting with us. I think Automattic's
       long track record shows that.
       
       But how do we sell that? How do we explain that "hey, you can trust us to keep
       these separate goals separate within our company, so there's never a conflict
       of interest and you getting the best from us is always what we want"?
       Personally, seeing the inside of Automattic, I'm convinced that we're not -
       like so much of Big Tech - going to axe the things you depend upon (Cough...
       Google.) or change the terms and conditions to the most-exploitative we can
       get away with (Ahem... Facebook.) or support your business just long enough to
       be able to undermine and consume it  (${third_coughing_sound}... Amazon.).
       
       In short: I know that we're the "good guys". And I can see how this
       reorganisation reinforces that. But I can't for the life of me see how we
       persuade the rest of the world of the fact (Seriously, it's a good thing I'm
       not in marketing. I'd be so terrible at it. Also public relations. Did I ever
       tell you the story about the time that, as a result of a mix-up, I
       accidentally almost gave an interview to the Press Office at the Vatican? A
       story for another time, perhaps).
       
       Any ideas?
       
       LINKS
       
 (HTM) Automattic's "Work With Us" page
 (HTM) Matt Mullenweg's blog post "Automattic’s Big Re-Org"
 (HTM) My blog post from 2021 about my job title
 (HTM) Matt Mullenweg
 (HTM) WordPress.com
 (HTM) VIP
 (HTM) Tumblr
 (HTM) Woo
 (HTM) Jetpack
 (HTM) Akismet