Thank You, Automattic

A little over a year ago I wrote a post called Why I Stayed. I stared down a six month buyout and just kept working on ActivityPub for WordPress. But I did want out, I just didn’t know what to do, yet. And funny enough, it was nearly six months later that I was caught up in the layoffs, possibly one of the most long-serving employees in that cohort. Let’s just say that my severance was quite a bit better than the earlier buyout, for which I am very, very grateful.

Because I immediately knew that I was done in software. Had been for some time, as my uneven performance no doubt showed. I have been on an inner healing journey these last few years, and the better I got, the less I liked the life of somebody working out of an empty house, communing only with avatars and computers most of the day. I wanted to be around people. I wanted to do things with my hands. If possible, I’d like to be around my kids and my wife more.

In a case of eerie timing, my wife exited her business partnership of nearly equal duration to my a8c tenure a mere five days prior to my layoff. Also a nice buyout. And we made a very tidy sum selling the cabin we bought with the stock options¹ in my a8c comp package. So we have a very nice nest egg for whatever comes next.

Eliding a whole bunch of tangled process,² we’re moving to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to open a pizza bar! My wife has designed and built some of Winnipeg’s best hospitality spaces over the past decade, including BabyBaby, Select Start, Harth, Nonsuch, and Rose Cafe. And one of the benefits of working from home was that I got into bread, first sourdough, then baguettes, and finally pizza. I threw several pizza parties over the summer and “this is the best pizza I’ve ever had” was a common review.

Life will look something like: wake without alarms, have breakfast, do homeschool with the kids, (10 and 5), and transition to the restaurant downstairs (yes we’re living upstairs) to do the daily prep tasks for opening around 5pm. My daughter will charm everyone. My son will learn at breakneck speeds once he’s not constrained by the far-too-easy schoolwork he’s been doing, and be my kitchen helper to boot. And if we do it right, we’ll never see winter again. We’re very, very tired of winter.

Seven months ago I was laid off. One month from now we fly to Mexico as a family. We decided all this in late July and it’s been a flurry of varied activity since then to get us down there. Immigration status, multiple visits by just my wife to Mexico while I single parented and worked on fixing up defects in our houses so we can rent them out while we’re gone.

You can follow our journey on IG if I ever get over my distaste for the platform:

View this post on Instagram

So that’s what I’ve been up to. I’m writing this to procrastinate getting a fire inspection, responding to a plumber, selling crap on Marketplace, and sorting clothes into donate/store/toss piles. I have a huge list of home handyman tasks crossed off and a too-large one to come over the next month. I’m flying to Mexico in two days to pay for our building permit.

I grew up at Automattic, joining in 2012 as employee 130 or so.³ I was 33, still childless, and had recently given up on a life as a pastor or something like that.⁴ I dove in, spoke at WordCamps, and had a jolly good time. I learned so much, got to work with great people on interesting projects, visit cool places for meetups and conferences.⁵ My wife and I had our kids and I got to really be there for that thanks to the generous parental leave policy. Heck, it would have been inconceivable to have our daughter, who has Spina Bifida, without it.⁶

But I was unhappy. It didn’t have much to do with a8c itself, although the usual politics exist there and I was not very good at them.⁷ Basically I had a lot of trauma and although it made me initially glad to not be around people as much as they stressed me out, it also made me worse, as the human bodymind is not really built for extended soltitude. Fortunately I was able to use my 2022 sabbatical to do a lot of intensive inner healing work, when I finally discovered my C-PTSD amidst intensive psychedelic therapies. This made such a big difference for me that I strongly considered trying to become some form of psychedelic facilitator.⁸ I made use of the empty house, but I grew weary of it.

Folks at a8c who quit or get fired usually get the chance to post on an internal blog called farewella8c.⁹ Due to the nature of the mass layoff, myself and 180 others never got this opportunity. So this is my version.

I will never thank everyone who deserves it. But to Ian, thanks for recruiting me (even when I was a dick about it) while we started the Winnipeg WP meetup. To Krista and Andy and Julian and Kevin: it was a pleasure serving as your Winnipeg holiday party convener for all these years. To Payton and all of the Gravitons, Ian, Cain, Kirk, Mel, and Taegon, the best team I ever had. Except maybe for Custom with Lance, Matias, Erick, Finke, Chris, Sherri, Richard, and Miguel? Or maybe for Team Fediverse, my last port of call, with Pfefferle, Eric, Obenland, and honourary members Alex and Jeremy and James. But that would give Cylon short shrift, my longest-serving team with a complete changeover around me, to Marco and Jacopo and Noah and Addie and Jeremy and Grant and Erick and uh, damn, I could use a Matticspace and/or hrp2 search right now to patch my memory gaps here.¹⁰ Shoutout to Anne and Bubel and Adam and Sara and Taegon (again) and Ramon and whoever else I’m forgetting in Customer Marketing, and Rob and Dan and Eric and Jesse in Jetpack Growth. And from my time in Triton: Andy and Mel and Bob and Greg and Matias and Payton and Kate and Cody. And then the GM crews over the years, shoutout especially to the mid-suite in Park City with characters like Shaun and Stephane and Skelton and Jeff and Gary and Brian and Bryan and Boren and Kev and Erick and Miguel and Takashi and those who got more than they bargained for. Shoutout to 517.

And a special thanks to Matt, who said, when he hired me over Skype back in 2012, that he was really done with hiring any more Matts. And I was typing with Colemak to boot! I’m grateful you gave me a shot anyway. Thank you for building a company that reflects your generosity of spirit.

Now the obligatory photo wall. Sucks that I can’t cull them from internal P2s from meetups and that I didn’t take a lot of photos since my colleagues took so many. I never imagined that they would

1. I was one of the last to receive them back in 2012 ↩︎
2. Initially we were just going to live in Mexico for the winter to dodge Winterpeg. Things snowballed from there. ↩︎
3. I was somewhere around #50 in service time when the axe fell. ↩︎
4. Fun fact I only became a web developer because I expected the type of church I would build wouldn’t have paid staff. They call this being a tentmaker in the church planting world. ↩︎
5. Vegas, SF (at least 3x), NYC, Boston, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Montevideo, Berlin, Hawaii, London, Salt Lake City, Denver, Seattle, Orlando, Munich, Strasbourg. Very few would I have ever visited otherwise, and Berlin and Hawaii are especially treasured memories as my wife joined me at the end of both. ↩︎
6. It would have been hard to resist all the voices subtly and overtly encouraging us to abort our darling girl without the vast space that the benefit brought us. ↩︎
7. I was part of a project team that was hard at work on a full site block-based editor before we were supplanted internally by what became Gutenberg. Our approach was theme-centric and we called it Stranger Themes. The a8c repo is gone but I pushed it up here for nostalgia: https://github.com/mattwiebe/stranger-themes ↩︎
8. This still may happen in the future. ↩︎
9. I’m old enough to remember when they were just on hrp2 before growth made that too noisy and we had to spin out farewella8c ↩︎
10. I can see your faces. But the handle/avatar association is gone. I had ALOT of teammates over nearly 13 years. ↩︎