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Comment by hn8726 | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

> Automattic announced that it would restrict its contributions to the open source version of WordPress. The company would now only put in about 45 hours a week total — down from nearly 4,000 a week — so as to match the estimated hourly contributions of WP Engine.

source: https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-spons...

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>down from nearly 4,000 a week

Do they really pay that many people to work on development? That's 100 fulltime jobs.

It does seem like throwing investor money at 4000hrs/week open source development was a ZIRP

Automattic has over 1,700 employees. [0] They had more than 1,900 before the buyouts and departures. [1] With that many people, I’m sort of surprised that they only had around 100 full time staff working on WordPress core.

[0]: https://automattic.com/press/

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240801231830/https://automatti...

Full time employees? 1700 employees from 90 countries sounds to me like they are counting anyone that's ever contributed anything as an employee.

Ah I see, I thought you were talking about him personally.

Are you under the impression he himself has been a meaningful contributor in the last decade?

I thought I read a comment somewhere in all of this where he said that he was actually doing coding, yes, but (a) I could well be mistaken and (b) he could well have been talking rubbish.

I think you misinterpreted him funding development. Read the linked article. Should clear you up. He was funding (via Automattic) an estimated 4k+ hours of work per week and is cutting that back to 45. Not himself coding but people that work for him.

He doesn't actually do any development himself at all. IIRC his last commit was something like 15 years ago.

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