Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said the company is “very understaffed” amid the ongoing drama between WordPress and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress. “There is,” he said. The WordPress co-founder took to the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Wednesday.
The story started with Mullenweg calling WP Engine “the cancer of WordPress.” Mullenweg criticized WP Engine, claiming that WP Engine does not contribute enough to open source projects and that WP Engine's use of the “WP” branding misleads customers into thinking it is part of WordPress. .
The controversy led to backlash from engineers and even Automattic employees. On October 3, 159 Automattic employees who disagreed with Mullenweg's direction for the company and WordPress as a whole quit the company with severance packages.
After 159 Automattic employees signed initial contracts that included six months of severance, Mullenweg posted another adjustment offer on the Automattic Slack on Oct. 17. This second contract provided nine months of severance, but gave the employee only four hours to respond.
“In the original contract, we shut off access the same day,” Mullenweg said. “The second deal, we said, 159 people left. We're hiring as fast as we can because our business is growing significantly. So for the second deal, we said, 'We have 159 people left.' If it's a leaker, we'll cut off access right away. But for others, we might just let them stay until next year. We’ve hired some other people just because we needed to hire them.”
Mullenweg's comments indicate that Automatic was trying to catch employees who were sharing internal information with the press about the ongoing drama.
Mullenweg acknowledged that before the story began, Automattic had approximately 1,900 employees, and that its current workforce is approximately 1,700.
The WordPress co-founder confirmed that Automattic hired 26 people in October amid the drama.