Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I think Matt’s goofy for various reasons. From just what this article says, I think he’s right on this one. This is my understanding of it:

* The dev team has a disagreement about putting one of the company’s own projects on the available plugins carousel or whatever inside their main product.

* They eventually decide not to.

* The CEO says “this has been an important part of our product for 20 years. It’s silly that we’re even debating this”, and put it there anyway.

And that’s about it? Based only on what I read here, there wasn’t any compelling engineering reason not to do a thing, and the CEO made a product decision to do it. That sounds like something I’ve heard 1,000 times at different shops and I’m not sure what the problem is.

Perhaps I’m misreading this, and the main point isn’t “CEO overrides valiant dev team”, but “CEO makes recalcitrant dev team stop bikeshedding”.

I say this out of no love for Matt’s… “interesting”… decision making the last couple of years. This sounds reasonable to me though.

Leaving out the optics and personalities and internal politics, the biggest issue I see is that they added this during the RC phase, which is against their policy. It should have been pushed to 7.1.

Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict, at least if you're a business owner who wants to make money.

>Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict, at least if you're a business owner who wants to make money.

This bush league kind of attitude is why people insinuate that most software development is not "real engineering".

When Boeing or NASA lets making money get in the way of good engineering practice, people die.

> most software development is not "real engineering".

Most software development doesn't have anywhere near the real world impact of the Boeing/NASA engineering you reference.

Good engineering practice recognizes the risks and scales the effort to match it.

A CRUD app for internal users has a different set of requirements than a revenue generating SaaS app, just like a backyard fence has different building criteria than a highway bridge.

Sure, I understand the stakes are lower for blog plugins than for aircraft.

But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low. You don't decide to cut corners because you feel like it, or because it's more profitable. Mullenweg is not professional.

> But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low.

Being a professional means that you adjust what things you do according to the stakes.

For example, in software dev, you usually have tests for the code. Do you have tests for the tests? No? Why not? Why aren't you doing "the thing?"

In chip development, I usually had tests for the tests, because the stakes were higher. But I didn't usually have tests for the tests for the tests.

What does cutting corners have anything to do with the topic at hand? The situation isn't about devs getting the time to do something right, it's about programmers making a non-engineering decision that was overruled by the business in the businesses best interest. That's perfectly reasonable.

> But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low.

Not the way I understand "being a professional." All engineering, and all professions, entail the balancing of interests. There are some hard and fast rules*, like "don't do things that will kill your users." And there are some other things that are more guidelines than absolutes, such as "we don't ship feature changes in release candidates." Serious organizations understand that sometimes guidelines like the latter need to be violated for overriding business purposes.

*Even the "don't kill your users" thing is not an absolute. No car is perfectly safe, for example. We could add three more feet of crumple zone to the front and the back, but we don't, because even in safety tradeoffs have to be considered.

That's not what being a professional means at all.

You adjust your approach depending on the stakes. That shouldn't be a controversial take.

You're using "cutting corners" as a pejorative, but ultimately if the stakes are low, you may -- perfectly reasonably -- decide to allocate less time/resources to particular activities, and more to others. You can call that "cutting corners", and you'd be right, but there's nothing necessarily wrong about that: it depends on the circumstances. And there's certainly nothing "unprofessional" about it.

For the mostly-vibe-coded script to reencode a bunch of my own video files to save disk space, I skimmed the result to make sure that it wasn't going to overwrite or delete anything it shouldn't. Cutting corners? Absolutely. Perfectly fine and sufficient? Absolutely.

For the software that I write that I intend to distribute to others, that could cause data loss or other unpleasant problems for them if I get it wrong, I write the code myself, I understand how it works, and I might write tests and/or get someone else to review it, depending on my own judgment of what needs to be done.

Recognizing the difference between the the situations in the prior two paragraphs is what it means to be a professional.

>You adjust your approach depending on the stakes. That shouldn't be a controversial take.

At no time have I suggested that one cannot adjust one's approach. That's a straw man you invented.

I'm refuting the point that business considerations should always trump engineering considerations because profit.

Sure, but in this case, the engineering consideration was whether a specific plugin should be added to the list of other suggested plugins. It was literally just a business decision of whether to configure it to be one of the featured options users might want to install.

"died in a blogging accident"

RIP American democracy, we hardly knew ye.

Although humorous, this also leads to a provocatively interesting line of thought which is completely tangential to the engineering discussion.

Blogging accidents, usually involving tik-tok videos, selfie sticks, and rugged terrain or wild predators, get all the attention, but probably pale in comparison to medical or mental health issues faced by the average blogger.

For comparison, studies of police officers in the US have found that heart disease, cancer, and suicide are the leading causes of deaths.

It was a reference to this: https://xkcd.com/369/

> Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict

This is an excellent way to get stuck with only the engineers sucky enough to have to put up with that, which is not the norm.

However, in this specific case, it looks like engineers were making a product decision, not an engineering one, and management decided to make a different product decision. That feels categorically different than "mauve has more RAM".

Business is wordpress.com, this is wordpress.org -- explicitly not part of Automattic but an "independent" open source project.

Obviously it isn't, but that's what Matt likes to pretend.

This is something people seem to miss. His position as CEO of Automattic creates a huge conflict of interest with his position at the non-profit foundation.

This is an example: the foundation's code gives special treatment to an Automattic product.

I don't think anyone but Matt is missing the significance of that.

People do not know about it. Look at the current top rated comment on this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47824925

I wrote that comment.

Oops, sorry, did not notice.

Were you aware of it and its relevance to this decision at the time you wrote the comment? My interpretation of your defence of it as just the CEO making a product decision was that you did not know. If you did know it seems to miss the point which is that he made a decision that was better for his company but worse for Wordpress.

It would be fine if Wordpress was developed by Automattic, but its not.

I was aware of it, but as an outsider, this actually seemed like a reasonable decision. Wordpress sites that allow external comments need some kind of comment moderation, lest they become instant spam cesspits. The CEO said hey, we're adding this section to feature suggested plugins, and we should add this long-time anti-spam plugin to it. In a vacuum, that looks fine to me. I'd rather see them emphasizing comment moderation than talking up a commercial add-on. Sure, this is a subscription they sell to businesses, so it's not a charitable work. It's one of the more defensible subscriptions I can think of, though.

And I really don't see it as worse for Wordpress. It's the kind of thing I think they should be recommending because it benefits the whole ecosystsem.

To be super clear, I am far, far from a Matt/Automattic (same thing) fanboy. I think this was a good decision in spite of my opinion of him, not because of it.

> The CEO said hey, we're adding this section to feature suggested plugins, and we should add this long-time anti-spam plugin to it. In a vacuum

The lead developer of a not for profit project said lets favour the anti-spam plugin that is provided by the company I am CEO of. Is that an entirely impartial decision?

> And I really don't see it as worse for Wordpress. It's the kind of thing I think they should be recommending because it benefits the whole ecosystsem.

All the Wordpress core committers apart from the two that work for Automattic disagree with you as far as I can tell.

Some people have a view of open source contributors as some sort of amorphous mass of strangers, and that leads to unrealistic suppositions. The contributors aren't really amorphous, they exist, they're knowable, they have personalities and jobs.

A project such as wordpress(.org) depends very strongly on those who do the work. And in the case of Wordpress, that's some spare-time volunteers, some employees of other companies, but the biggest group is Automattic employees. If you do most of the work, as Automattic does, the project depends on you and you get to call the shots.

I understand that point, but I disagree. Automattic controls the process, which keeps a lot of initiatives out because there's no reasonable expectation of improvement unless it aligns with Automattic.

I don't believe the project would fold were Automattic to quit -- there's a lot activity outside of the core that is alienated by Matt's behavior. Might well be an improvement if the focus of .org isn't about what .com needs, but about what .org wants to offer to users.

They just wound back half the RC for Wordpress 7 at the last second to tweak some features for Matt. I don't know if he's right about it, but they did it.

What you are missing here is that Matt (in his role running the project for the non-profit Wordpress Foundation) made a decision to overrule everyone else and favour a product from Automattic (CEO, Matt).

Agree. And the meta point, after reading through to the core committer channel on the WP slack is that it's clear he's now more involved in the project again and making decisions. I haven't been involved for years, but while I was it seems he had other priorities (understandable).

But the rapid changes from AI are an existential threat to the long-term viability of WP. Rather than bike shedding about something relatively trivial, they need to focus on the bigger issues, which it's apparent he's trying to do.

Interestingly, the culture that sustained WP over the last 2 decades may now be working against it. Culture is really hard to change, but he now seems to have his 'wartime CEO' hat on trying to do it, which is the right move.

goofy is a pretty nice way of say he has a history of dressing up his shenanigans by literally... lying lol. the fact that wpengine debacle was framed as a defense of OSS should tell you a lot, probably don't even need to look at the details to know that it's usually him trying to profit while framing it as something moral.

Notice the distinct lack of me sticking up for him outside this very specific case.

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