> “We were unaware that Matt redirected sign-up emails until current Automattic employees contacted our support team,” a spokesperson for Blind told me, adding that they’d “never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees from signing up for Blind by redirecting emails.”
I get that it’s creepy that this is being done, but I highly doubt that nobody at Blind has “never seen” this. Blind sends spam using multiple different domain names trying to get people to sign up. The domains are rotated so they can get around blocking on the email server, and the fact they do it means they already know that companies try to block them.
The next paragraph in the text is a lot more interesting:
Some of the most commonly discussed topics on Blind are protected speech in the U.S.—pay, job terminations, critiques of workplace conditions—which we believe workers should be free to access and discuss.
What are the consequences (in the US) of a company blocking that?
That being said, blanket blocking access to a forum might still be ok? You do not know specifically what would be discussed there.
The NLRB does not allow you to use company time and company property to do non-company things.
You can use your own break time to discuss salaries. There is nothing a company can do to prohibit that.
It's really that simple.
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...
> You may have discussions about wages when not at work, when you are on break, and even during work if employees are permitted to have other non-work conversations. You have these rights whether or not you are represented by a union.
If you consistently have - and consistently enforce! - a "no non-work conversations" policy, that can include salary discussions. Suddenly adding a new "no talking!" policy in response to people organizing wouldn't fly, either.
There is no reality where any employer willfully enabled employees to literally not do work while being paid to work.
This is a silly discussion to be having.
It would have to say that there are to be no off-topic conversations during work of any kind, and it would have to have been demonstrably enforced. If it's a new policy that somehow is only ever invoked when someone talks about salaries, you're in for a world of hurt.
> There is no reality where any employer willfully enabled employees to literally not do work while being paid to work.
If it's like any other significantly sized tech company, there's probably a pool and ping-pong table somewhere. It's also possible to talk while working.
This is silly.
Go read your contract. It most likely has something exactly like this in it, in addition to spelling out what you are allowed to use company property and time for. This is employer 101 level stuff folks.
> demonstrably enforced
Telling someone to get back to work once in a while is enforcement.
You can continue contorting this into some sort of pro-union/organization thing - but it is not.
These people literally:
1) Started their work day
2) Used their company-provided computer to browse the internet instead of working
3) Used their company-provided email address to sign up for a non-work-related website
4) If successful in creating the account, would proceed to spend company time gossiping about company policies.
On it's own that's a terminatable offense and a gross misuse of company time, money and property.
You previously posted "Unskilled labor probably shouldn't be livable", so you'll have to excuse my doubts about your pro-worker stance.
> These people literally:
There's actually no evidence that occurred. I have my work email on my personal phone, and I can receive a 2FA code outside of work hours; I could sign up for Blind without ever once using company hardware or time.
Again, if Automattic has a history of permitting occasional non-work browsing/emailing - which they almost certainly do - sudden specific targeting of payment discussions would be a violation of the NLRA.
I'm glad you enjoy my work. No, unskilled labor should not be livable. It's literally, unskilled.
> Again, if Automattic has a history of permitting occasional non-work browsing/emailing - which they almost certainly do - sudden specific targeting of payment discussions would be a violation of the NLRA.
That's a HUGE leap and assumption you are making here, isn't it? Sudden targeting of payment discussions? Do you have any evidence to suggest that is the only non-work-related topic being targeted here?
No. Scroll up. I started with this, for context:
"You'd want to be very sure that at no point an email/text along the lines of 'let's do this, because people are discussing salaries' was sent that might show up in discovery."
> Do you have any evidence to suggest that is the only non-work-related topic being targeted here?
https://www.teamblind.com/sign-up has the tagline "Real salary data from verified employees"; it's a pretty single-purpose site. Matt had Blind signup emails intercepted and sent to him instead.
What other possible purpose of targeting this specific site could there be, if not to impact disclosure/awareness of salaries within Automattic?
Your entire premise and the assumptions it's built upon are absurdly false and sensationalist.
There was no wrong doing here by the company - no matter how slimey their leadership may currently be.
Spending time on a social media website is not protected by any law.
Is there some sort of "remind my in 6 months" thing? I'd love to come back so we can discuss how nothing came of this.
You can discuss anything you want on your time using your own property.
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...
> You may have discussions about wages when not at work, when you are on break, and even during work if employees are permitted to have other non-work conversations. You have these rights whether or not you are represented by a union.
> > You may have discussions about wages when not at work, when you are on break, and even during work if employees are permitted to have other non-work conversations. You have these rights whether or not you are represented by a union.
So which employer expressly allows you to use company time and property to do non-company things? Oh, right... none.
So you clocking into work (figuratively or literally), logging into you company computer, browsing to a non-work-related website and gabbing all day is not protected.
Virtually all companies permit non-disruptive non-work discussions during the work day. "How was your weekend?", for example. Unless you're something like a voice actor, they can even usually occur while you work.
This is not a union/organization issue. This is a very simple case of employees goofing off on the clock and being surprised the company found out about it.
There wouldn't even be an article about this had any of this occurred after hours or on breaks. The fact that breaks aren't even part of the discussion tells you without ambiguity these people were stealing company time, money and resources instead of doing the thing they were hired to do.
If it takes you "a couple hours" to complete https://www.teamblind.com/sign-up, that's on you.
> There wouldn't even be an article about this had any of this occurred after hours or on breaks.
You can't just make shit up to win an argument; there's absolutely no way of telling whether or not these emails were generated during breaks. All we know is Matt intercepted them. They could've signed up outside of work hours, during breaks, on vacation, etc. and Matt would still have been receiving them.
If it's anything like most other tech companies, breaks aren't even formal, let alone tracked/timestamped.
https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-lab/division-2/...
If CEO came to me and said "we need to archive all email to or from this recipient", the only unusual part of that ask would be the person requesting it.
We have The Work Number but no way to reasonably implement your suggestion. We’re cogs, just toast.
That’s a pretty bad design decision. It’s also not a good idea to access such forum from you work computer, even when not using the company email.
How would you design it?
1. Have the signer upper send a provided email from their own Gmail account to their own company account. Then show the message's DKIM headers to blind. Now Matt has to find emails from employees personal mailboxes to their corporate mailboxes but he can't tell what the content is about.
2. Employ a graph of email forwarders (humans) selected from existing blind users. Use them to forward challenge email payload to the signer upper. Now Matt has to find emails from anyone to anyone and still doesn't know what the content is about.
You realize that Blind isn't exclusively for software engineers right? Lol
It's kind a funny, the whole point of the last offer was that you rip off the band-aid once and for all. But giving people a 4-hour window before you spend a week doing increasingly crazy things didn't really give people enough of a taste of things to come.
I'm also not sure why the CEO is being so pernicious with these tiny windows. Why only give your people 4 hours with no advance notice?
People want to draw obvious comparisons to the offers at Twitter and 37 Signals, but at least with those employees were a) given enough notice to discuss things with friends/family and b) knew what they were signing up for. I'm not sure if the Automattic employees who missed the window last week knew they were going to be engaging in supply chain attacks against their own ecosystem a few days later.
Especially since the company is proudly remote with employees all over the globe, and some of them might not even be awake to see this 4-hour window email.
This strikes me as performative and manipulative to show there are no more "dissenters".
To be able to brag about how few took the offer.
I can't imagine what that does to a company's output. What happens to everything those 159 people were working on? Surely not everyone else had intimate knowledge of their work, unless they were just customer support staff or something.
Also, often the people who leave at the drop of a hat are the more talented ones because they're not (or less) worried about the financial repercussions of doing so knowing they can get work elsewhere.
More likely than not I'd find a job before 9 months.
I'd probably make screenshots and videos of the offer and me resigning just to make sure I get my $$.
I've been unemployed for almost a year. I would not take a buyout in this engineering market. It is brutal.
After all, let’s say that WP Engine gives in and pays Matt 10% of their revenue. Then… who’s next? Can Automattic be trusted as a steward of the software, ever? I suppose if Matt sells the company it might be possible. Nope, the fork is inevitable and some company(s) will need to sponsor it.
Don't fool around with tyrants:
With something like this going down, I'd wonder if my employer will even be around in 9 months. I'd also worry that my employer could "go for broke" and just close its doors on me, leaving me with nothing.
So, yeah, I'd have to really love my job to stay.
Agreed. The idea that people are staying for financial reasons or due to a tough job market doesn't really hold up when you've got a full 9 months of severence.
They could act as a check against one person going absolutely insane and destroying a company and hundreds of jobs in the process. (except in obvious cases like Musk or Zuckerberg of course, where they basically run everything and the board never pushes back)
He's listed as a BDFL, but perhaps without the Benevolent [1]?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life
I get that it rubs people the wrong way when private equity is taking competition and making money off your work. But such is open source. Burning the whole thing to the ground seems extreme.
The Board should step in.
I use wordpress at a non-profit and would go to some meetups and went to a word camp. Wordpress always seemed about people solving problems related to making a website. People were pretty nice, and Gutenberg while controversial was already done by the time I was using wordpress. Its pretty good for a in web layout tool. I think a lot of good will is being used up here. Wordpress survives on its community and plug ins, not on its technical merits.
Being open source it can always be forked. If only there was a company that has revenue that could take a fork and run with it...
I wonder how much influence the VCs had in these decisions or if any of these decisions will cause them to step in and make changes.
> In the “Alignment Offer,” Mullenweg offered Automattic employees six months of pay or $30,000, whichever was higher, with the stipulation that they would lose access to their work logins that same evening and would not be eligible for rehire.
> One hundred and fifty-nine people took the offer and left. “However now, I feel much lighter,” Mullenweg wrote in his blog.
Awesome. I'd love to see more offers like this.
Wonder how many of those that left were in the "six months of pay" bracket. I suspect most of them were in the $30,000 bracket. If you make less than $60k/year, it's significantly easier math to decide to take the payout and find another job.
It's a company town.
So if he keeps making the financial benefit of leaving more attractive, we should see significant uptick in people who accept? If you support Matt, Automattic is probably becoming an increasingly awesome place to work!
If you're in a toxic work environment, don't say shit on or near employer devices or over their networks. It will be used against you. I've heard too many stories of people getting screwed as a result of this at companies small and large, and I've experienced it firsthand. If you need to check something or log into a personal account, do it on your personally owned device and over a non-employer network. If you're at work, use your cell connection directly or through tethering. Employers can legally do this, so cya.