Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

The article says that ~80% of the departures (126 people) were in the WordPress division, but doesn't indicate the size of that division. That's a much more interesting number than 8% of the company as a whole—depending on the size of the division and the sub teams affected that could be an enormous amount of WordPress brain drain.

For scale, Automattic has previously indicated that "over 100" people work on WordPress full time [0]. How many of those ~100 were part of the 126 WordPress employees who left?

[0] https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/09/26/our-wordpress-contribu...

View on HN

WordPress division doesn’t mean the open source one, it means anyone working on WordPress related products, like jetpack, Woo, VIP, dotcom… The rest work on non-wp like tumblr, dayone, beeper and other apps.

tumblr's backend is migrating to WP apparently

Two months ago, this sounded like a pretty cool idea.

a buddy of mine who works on wordpress said that matt basically announced that without any prior discussion & that it has never come up since

Most of Tumblr's staff no longer works on Tumblr. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/tumblr-is-reportedly...

> The posted memo states that a majority of the 139 employees working on product and marketing at Tumblr (in a team apparently named "Bumblr") will "switch to other divisions."

I realize that, but the question remains: if 80% of the people who quit came from a single division, the percent of the company that quit is somewhat irrelevant. That division is the one we're interested in here, and it might have been completely gutted for all we know.

Division is probably the wrong term used, we have several divisions, you can categorize them into 2 categories: - WordPress ecosystem (majority). Around 80% of the company. - Non-WordPress ecosystem (minority). Around 20% of the company.

The % of people who left is consistent between those 2 divisions.

Oh, you could have said you work for Automattic!

How's the distribution of departures by tenure and level? We know one of them was Executive Director over WordPress—is she an outlier or does the departure list skew to the top?

And within the "WordPress division", is the spread even between groups, or does it skew towards some groups over others?

> is the spread even between groups, or does it skew towards some groups over others?

Spread mostly evenly. I'm not sure I'm allowed to share tenure, I'm mostly going to share what was here, but tenure felt logical, most people who left were on the 3-5 years range, most of people in Automattic joined in that period of rapid hiring.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com