Automattic open to hiring ex-Twitter individuals or even entire teams | Hacker News Reader

Automattic open to hiring ex-Twitter individuals or even entire teams

automattic.com

58 pointskif42 comments

"We are open to bringing over individuals — even entire teams — if there’s a clear path to have a 10x impact on Tumblr’s growth and revenue."

OOOOOf. Big miss to create contrast from Elon there Automattic.

Don't get me wrong, I love Automattic and WordPress is my jam but boy am I disappointed they bungled the messaging here.

If I'm an engineer escaping a tyrant with unrealistic expectations, I certainly don't want to join another company... with unrealistic expectations.

If you increase Automattic's revenue by 10x you deserve to OWN Automattic.

Maybe that part was referring to "entire teams." I.e. if we are going to keep an entire team intact, rather than pick a few people, then they better make a huge impact.

10x Tumblr growth and revenue, not Automattic’s

We hire if there is 10x-impact on tumblr's growth AND revenue.

It seems they only hire people that can increase there revenue from 65 million to 650 million dollar.

That is not hiring or worth a blogpost.

Imagine being a former twitter employee during these last few weeks:

> Elon: You are either okay with "hardcore" wage theft or out on your butt.

> Automattic: Wow, isn't Elon the worst! Come work for us. All we need is that you grow our past-its-prime blogging platform 10x.

Forgot Charlie Brown, y'all are being treated like the football. I'm sorry, you deserve better.

10x is about management skills, not technical skills.

Catmull's team did it with Disney Animation - they took low performers and made them high performers with a better process.

However, you have to start with a process that works. Does automattic have a process that works?

10x revenue isn't hard if you're going from $1 to $10. Going from $10 to $1000 is harder. Going from $1,000 to $10,000 is even harder, etc.

A team of engineers can't go to 10x by themselves. It doesn't work that way.

Does recruiting a whole team from another company actually works? I wonder if it is common practice for startups that come and go to move entire dev teams like they do in the show "Sillicon Valley" in Season 5.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)

Never witnessed it in person but I can see the appeal of hiring a team of people who hopefully have a degree of trust and cohesion over a fresh team of strangers. Downsides might be that the team has baggage or the team as a whole fails to integrate into the wider culture

It's not entirely uncommon to acquire a small company (2-15) as an acqui-hire. I've seen it work well, and I've seen it work poorly. It generally works well when the acquired product is entirely abandoned.

I don't know about recruiting, but I know of at least three groups I've worked with (at different companies) that have indeed migrated together

Easily the most effective people I've seen at any of the organizations. It's been interesting as an outsider to watch

edit: The peer comment from 'djtango' is on the mark in regards to fitting with the wider culture.

These groups are effective, but they also cause waves. It can be crazy when it's a unified team holding a position instead of newbies being steamrolled by status quo

> Does recruiting a whole team from another company actually works?

yes, it is called company acquisition

Buy a great team and kill the product.

Yep - aquihires :) it’s not always full company that moves though

If you are an ex-tweep and are reading this, we just launched a dedicated page for you to reach out: https://automattic.com/work-with-us/twitter/

(What was the previous link on the submission, out of curiosity?)

Reading about this, it seems that Automattic is trying to revive Tumblr (which was severely mismanaged in Verizon/Oath days), not for WordPress or other ventures. Good luck to them, but I fear that the ship has already sailed.

Eh, it doesn't seem like a bad time to try it, honestly. There's a clear market for things which are quite like twitter but not actually twitter, suddenly, and Tumblr is squarely in the category of things which are quite like twitter (arguably, a lot of twitter was heavily inspired by Tumblr in the first place; I believe it had a reblog/retweet mechanism, likes, and hashtags, before Twitter did).

I think this is less _visible_ because Tumblr's basic UX is so unlike Twitter's, but there's a lot of functionality crossover.

For celebrities, it feels like Instagram is the best prepared to capitalize on any migration from Twitter.

But for news/politicians, I’m curious how well Reddit could do. The main difference being the central object on Reddit is the subreddit versus the individual user. Curious how much UX tweaks it’d take for more people to follow billgates/AOC on Reddit.

Too bad Meta laid them off too.

Reddit is a disaster. Even their Ask Me Anything is prehistoric compared to what it could be.

Outside of that look at HN as an example of an independent subreddit at its best.

Tumblr's only major problem was policy and the drive for ever-more ad impressions to please investors. Automattic could pay off what they spent on Tumblr by passing a hat around at one of their meetups, and they eased up on the policy. A lot of people really liked Tumblr, and it fills a lot of gaps that nothing else really fits. Automattic has enough trust from their handling of WordPress that people are trickling back in.

Culturally, Tumblr solves the problem of blogs where it's hard not to feel like a post is wasted if it's not a big, serious article. Tiny posts, images, links, and goofs get around just as well as big, serious posts. It solves in one platform what the fediverse is trying to solve with an awkward amalgam of Write.as, Pixelfed, and Mastodon. It might get there with a few years of iterations, but Tumblr is there today if you can stand a centralized platform. They at least let you use your own domain, unlike Twitter.

I agree, a lot of popular Twitter folks are Tumblr refugees after the great purge ("female presenting nipples"). It was always the policy that ruined Tumblr, the concept has a lot of potential

Very cool. I think whole teams got laid off at Twitter - DEI, human rights, ethical AI, social good, coms and more. Be great if they could find a home at automattic still as a team

How would any of those teams provide a path to 10x revenue?

Prevention.

It only takes one class action lawsuit.

Twitter also laid off the staff cartoonist, I understand.

Hiring whole teams is a recipe for disaster. You don't want to maintain the Twitter culture as that might be incompatible with Automattic's culture.

Have you seen it happen before?

I've seen it happen twice in my career. One of the times it was a huge success, the other was a disaster.

The first one was probably a success because there was just one developer before, so there wasn't really any culture and he quickly got absorbed in the group that joined the project.

The second case wasn't that successful and the group that joined refused to adjust to the existing culture when it came to processes and guidelines, and instead tried to run their own race because that worked at the previous place they came from. They were all fired after a couple of weeks

Divorcing an employee from prior company culture is all about shock therapy. When you transplant a team from one company to another then breaking past culture is your number one priority or you will never get the loyalty of those employees to the new company's cause.

Commentators who question and chastise the motives of Elon and what he's doing to Twitter don't understand that you have to break the current culture at the earliest opportunity or you have lost the momentum to do it. It is why old Twitter is dead and those left are so fine-tuned to the Cult of Elon.

It's just basic psychology TBH.

> Divorcing an employee from prior company culture is all about shock therapy. When you transplant a team from one company to another then breaking past culture is your number one priority or you will never get the loyalty of those employees to the new company's cause.

WTF is this nonsense? Have you ever changed jobs before, or worked in a corporate environment?

You didn't provide an example. There should be several to choose from if it's basic psychology.

When Musk became Tesla CEO in 2008 and pushed out the founders, did he purge the engineering staff as well?

That's smart move imho. Usually engineers and other people that worked at Twitter went through a very strict hiring process. So hiring them is equal (usually) to hiring very skilled and smart people.

I think this is a clever talent funnel. These individuals will obviously still be vetted and interviewed, but it feeds on the ongoing manipulation of, “if you worked in big tech you’re exceptional and deserve special treatment.”

Lol and immediately "bring 10x growth to tumblr" lol. If they can do that they'll just make a tumblr clone and put them out of business.

But if Automattic holds out a few years, maybe they can buy the whole thing for 0.3% of what Elon paid.

What if I pretended to be an ex-twitter employee? How will they vet this as they aren't exactly going to get references from people when almost the entire company has been gutted.

There are entire companies who get paid to verify the employment history of job applicants.

See for example this dust-up about Apple:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/10/apple-a...

I can only speak for the U.S. but most companies don’t vet previous employment through references taking a person at their word.

If they are concerned about vetting, paystubs and official bsckgroune checks are much better ways to go.

What kind of official background checks are available to US companies not working with classified stuff? I guess like, none? Maaybe some states offer this as a service?

It isn't through the government, but the credit bureaus and paycheck processors provide these services. They can also provide salary history.

I work in the trucking industry. There are many private companies that provide full employment history checks, criminal background, driving record, drug and alcohol testing history, etc. Two off the top of my head are Asurint and HireRight.

Yeah, these aren't any kind of "official" background checks though. You're just buying a report of very questionable quality from a data broker.

It's often not very difficult to create false records in these reports.

Third party payroll verification would be an option.

This is the same way companies check for dual employment.

Companies like ADP/Equifax provide services that will confirm past and current employment, income, ect.

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