* The dev team has a disagreement about putting one of the company’s own projects on the available plugins carousel or whatever inside their main product.
* They eventually decide not to.
* The CEO says “this has been an important part of our product for 20 years. It’s silly that we’re even debating this”, and put it there anyway.
And that’s about it? Based only on what I read here, there wasn’t any compelling engineering reason not to do a thing, and the CEO made a product decision to do it. That sounds like something I’ve heard 1,000 times at different shops and I’m not sure what the problem is.
Perhaps I’m misreading this, and the main point isn’t “CEO overrides valiant dev team”, but “CEO makes recalcitrant dev team stop bikeshedding”.
I say this out of no love for Matt’s… “interesting”… decision making the last couple of years. This sounds reasonable to me though.
This is an excellent way to get stuck with only the engineers sucky enough to have to put up with that, which is not the norm.
However, in this specific case, it looks like engineers were making a product decision, not an engineering one, and management decided to make a different product decision. That feels categorically different than "mauve has more RAM".
Obviously it isn't, but that's what Matt likes to pretend.
This is an example: the foundation's code gives special treatment to an Automattic product.
This bush league kind of attitude is why people insinuate that most software development is not "real engineering".
When Boeing or NASA lets making money get in the way of good engineering practice, people die.
Most software development doesn't have anywhere near the real world impact of the Boeing/NASA engineering you reference.
Good engineering practice recognizes the risks and scales the effort to match it.
A CRUD app for internal users has a different set of requirements than a revenue generating SaaS app, just like a backyard fence has different building criteria than a highway bridge.
But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low. You don't decide to cut corners because you feel like it, or because it's more profitable. Mullenweg is not professional.
You adjust your approach depending on the stakes. That shouldn't be a controversial take.
You're using "cutting corners" as a pejorative, but ultimately if the stakes are low, you may -- perfectly reasonably -- decide to allocate less time/resources to particular activities, and more to others. You can call that "cutting corners", and you'd be right, but there's nothing necessarily wrong about that: it depends on the circumstances. And there's certainly nothing "unprofessional" about it.
For the mostly-vibe-coded script to reencode a bunch of my own video files to save disk space, I skimmed the result to make sure that it wasn't going to overwrite or delete anything it shouldn't. Cutting corners? Absolutely. Perfectly fine and sufficient? Absolutely.
For the software that I write that I intend to distribute to others, that could cause data loss or other unpleasant problems for them if I get it wrong, I write the code myself, I understand how it works, and I might write tests and/or get someone else to review it, depending on my own judgment of what needs to be done.
Recognizing the difference between the the situations in the prior two paragraphs is what it means to be a professional.
At no time have I suggested that one cannot adjust one's approach. That's a straw man you invented.
I'm refuting the point that business considerations should always trump engineering considerations because profit.
Not the way I understand "being a professional." All engineering, and all professions, entail the balancing of interests. There are some hard and fast rules*, like "don't do things that will kill your users." And there are some other things that are more guidelines than absolutes, such as "we don't ship feature changes in release candidates." Serious organizations understand that sometimes guidelines like the latter need to be violated for overriding business purposes.
*Even the "don't kill your users" thing is not an absolute. No car is perfectly safe, for example. We could add three more feet of crumple zone to the front and the back, but we don't, because even in safety tradeoffs have to be considered.
Being a professional means that you adjust what things you do according to the stakes.
For example, in software dev, you usually have tests for the code. Do you have tests for the tests? No? Why not? Why aren't you doing "the thing?"
In chip development, I usually had tests for the tests, because the stakes were higher. But I didn't usually have tests for the tests for the tests.
But the rapid changes from AI are an existential threat to the long-term viability of WP. Rather than bike shedding about something relatively trivial, they need to focus on the bigger issues, which it's apparent he's trying to do.
Interestingly, the culture that sustained WP over the last 2 decades may now be working against it. Culture is really hard to change, but he now seems to have his 'wartime CEO' hat on trying to do it, which is the right move.
In a vacuum, probably not a huge deal, and maybe for people who actually use WP the idea that this is basically something up to a judgment call makes sense. At least from my outside perspective, it sounds a bit like what's on the default page is basically being left up to the whim of the CEO without any real concrete explanation, which would be mildly concerning even if the CEO wasn't someone who's been making the news a lot the past couple years from getting into pissing matches with competitors, causing 8.4% of his employees to take a blanket offer to leave: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/automattic-workers-quit-...
His usual response is "but we're also sponsoring .org with developers" ... yeah, that's true, with developers who do Automattic's bidding and ensure that .org is pursuing .com's needs. He'd have to pay those developers either way, but this way he can call it a charitable donation.
Comment spam is terrible and will continue to get worse.
Decent alternatives exist.
Increasing the visibility of Akismet should help increase revenue.
This is 100% a financial move.
I went looking earlier this year and found nothing even close to Akismet on a price-to-effectiveness basis.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/honeypot/
/r/wordpress will probably have others.
This is also more proof that open source owned by a company will never do what a community wants. Sure you can patch a bug if you fork the code, but nobody wants to do that, so it's not much different than using a proprietary product. Better to use open source not owned by a company, as the incentives are aligned with functionality rather than corporate profit.
If you don’t need WordPress, you can choose from thousands of other options.
It introduces a new prominent page in your wordpress settings that recommends popular services to you. All other services are behind a link that says "Find more connectors in the plugin directory" and are less visible.
See image https://developer.wordpress.org/news/files/2026/03/image-1.j..., which is the second image on "What’s new for developers?" at https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2026/03/whats-new-for-d...
>Fueled-sponsored core committer Peter Wilson
>Bluehost-sponsored core committer Jonathan Desrosiers
>Human Made-sponsored core committer John Blackbourn
This is a terrifying way to describe people.
When I did OSS work paid for by my employer, I was careful to note and credit who paid for the PR.
"I'm so self important I've decided I get to order you to do illogical things."
Some people see leadership as a responsibility. Some people see it as a chit.
I really detest the latter group.
But it seems the clean, sustainable, long-term way to do this was to have the akismet plugin simply self-register. Why was this hack easier than just doing that?
God I love this place, a simple fking question gets downvoted.
