Within Automattic there are a ton of really talented people who want to great things and are genuinely invested in making the web a better place.
There’s also a group of others that don’t do much aside from…
- Share irrelevant opinions on P2 without any real understanding of what is going on.
- Site Field Guide pages that say very general things should be done if particular ways. Heaven forbid you forget to link to every loosely related P2 post in your Slack messages.
- Tell people that they should use MGS to find the answer to their question because they are “sure” it’s there.
- Keep a record of Slack messages and P2 comments from Matt to reference if someone suggests doing something he disagreed with.
- Repeat what others have said in their own words so it looks like they have a valuable opinion and are worth keeping around.
I could probably go on, but I don’t want to.
Automattic has a toxic leadership problem, and it’s turning into a toxic culture problem. They’re luring talented people in with the promise of great benefits, but they’re also leveraging all of those “benefits” as a way to push complacency on people.
No one seems to understand what it means to execute on any idea completely and there’s a history of throwing strong leaders to the wolves.