👋 Farewell Automattic

A week ago today, I started just another week of work. It was supposed to be a normal week with nothing major planned.

On Wednesday morning, I sent my HR representative a Slack DM and told her I wanted to leave the company.

On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 158 other employees contacted HR with similar intentions to leave the company.

In case you've missed it, there's been a lot of drama surrounding the WordPress ecosystem and Matt Mullenweg, Automattic's CEO and head of the Open Source WordPress project. It's a mess with many important details, but there's a good summary about it here and here.

Matt asked anyone who did not align with his motives or actions to leave the company and made a generous offer to ensure that no one was left hanging financially.

I took the offer.

There are two reasons:

Firstly, I'm not aligned with the actions taken. I tried aligning but just couldn't. Whenever I started feeling somewhat aligned, some new fact or action would come up, taking away a lot of mental headspace. As Steve Jobs famously said: Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

Secondly, I was holding myself back. I didn't feel creatively challenged anymore. I was in charge of (and nailed 💪) a lot of significant technical projects, but they didn't give me the energy I get when working on the things I love to work on, which are smaller and more quirky.

So what's next?

I have no clue, and that's frightening fine.

The offer details are no secret since my ex-CEO shared them with the world. I receive six months of pay, which gives me the comfort to think about what I want to be doing next.

I've been working nonstop for almost twenty years now, and I've dreamed of having the luxury to step back for some time.

Some things I plan on doing these first weeks:

• Finish an app that's been sitting at 95% done on my hard drive since before COVID-19.
• Maybe work on some other ideas I've been having.
• Clean the cellar.
• Read.
• Give my family all the attention they need.
• Keep working out daily. A couple of weeks ago, I started doing 30-minute bike training sessions every day before work, and it's refreshing.
• Get on top of all things on the web again. I've missed being on the cutting edge of technology.
• Write a blog post about the good, the bad & the ugly of working two years at a fully remote company. (spoiler: it's mostly good)
• Avoid all drama.

After I finish all that, I hope I will better understand what's next for me.

One thing I hope to keep doing is making the web a better place™.