Automattic

• Decent benefits for US-based roles that align with international standard minimums.
• Remote work environment, asynchronous for some support roles, with the expectation of 24/7 availability for most other roles.

• Product leadership is completely absent. Product teams are literally led by engineering and infrastructure roles, naturally resulting in hostile product offerings with poor performance that users hate.

• Zero job security. Entire teams just disappear overnight without explanation.

• Lots of technological dead ends. Absolutely no innovation. Internal tools look and feel like they’re from 2014. External-facing tech using PHP + Javascript is just barely keeping up with competition – the primary product strategy is just to “be better than Vercel.”

• A tremendous amount of unleveraged overhead roles in HR, Leadership, and Developer Experience, all contributing to broken internal processes for hiring, feedback, and compensation. For ICs in engineering, these roles heavily restrict any meaningful agency and impact.

• American-centric “work harder, not smarter” SV grind culture still exists. More hours === more productivity. For foreign labor markets, local labor laws protecting working hours and hours per week are written out of contracts entirely.

• Very long hours for high-level engineering roles. No room for agency or impact beyond just fixing bugs in code from others that have been let go before you.

• Anti-inclusive: DEI candidates, seriously: do not waste your time. Your experience will be painful. Just say 'yikes' and move on.

None, they're not interested.

For potential employees: 99.9% of the company’s problems can be attributed to the pure incompetence of CEO Matt Mullenweg.

If you are considering an engineering role at Automattic, I strongly encourage you to read Matt’s thoughts on capitalism and the future of work, and review how he treats the people he works with – it's all publicly available on his blog and Twitter.

More directly: Do not work at Automattic if Matt Mullenweg is still CEO. As a senior engineer, working at Automattic felt like a huge waste of time.