As of today we are 1,733. But that may go up soon, we are hiring aggressively to fill roles of some people who left and meet increased customer demand! https://automattic.com/work-with-us/
Edit: I stand corrected. OP is asking how many employees are in the WordPress "division", which I cannot find a public source for and is kind of hard to tally.
Matt said yesterday[1] that ~100 employees work on wordpress.org, one chunk of what encompasses the WordPress "division".
there's another comment above from someone who appears to work there, stating approx 80% of total staff work on WP and 20% on the other properties, so the percentage seems inline across the company & "divisions"
The handling of this is so bizarre it makes me want to sympathize with Matt (even though some of the information against him seems pretty damning), grab him by the shoulders and yell "please, for your sake, get offline, listen to your lawyers - this can't be healthy".
Matt, please, I know you're not going to listen to some random stranger, but maybe think about distancing yourself from this and getting some perspective from people that aren't as emotionally invested in this and listen to people like your lawyers, pr people, other senior management, etc.
There's nothing to indicate that they're hiring a lawyer to deal with this situation. That was just speculation on the part of the parent comment. They probably just need to fill a vacancy in their legal division.
The job specifically asks for a JD with 8+ years of experience. The position will lead corporate, securities and governance work. This is not a junior attorney.
Yup, that’s what I was referring to - but they’re already doing a lot of weird stuff, so hiring someone internally to handle litigation (or similar) would be the kind of dumb I would expect.
And, while I'm not invested in this in any aspect, I feel: About time! I appreciate an executive with the passion/guts/ignorance to push a direction that's controversial and not safe. I'm really sick of working for companies that have no opinion or passion, and do a bunch of boring things.
Please don't make assumptions on time zones, it's rude.
Also, I am very much listening to the advice from my friends and lawyers, and even some random internet strangers. Happy to change my mind if presented with new information.
While I don't deny CMSs has been a big part of my money income for decades, and CMS are a great entry both for designers, developers and business, Wordpress is probably the most horrible one. His popularity IMHO is just a matter of timing and good usability (which I won't deny), but not is not backed by a good code design and implementation behind.
Drupal or even PHP Nuke was much better designed. I.e: Wp calls every published object post as it was designed as blog for posting.
Almost all CMS provide class oriented architecture, object caching, multilanguage, clean separation between base code, customer code and customer data, safe defaults (like all forms for commenting enabled),...
They made several acquisitions that have nothing to do with WP which probably inflated the headcount a good bit.
For example they own Pocket Casts, a podcast application on Android (bought from NPR - I really wish NPR had decided to keep it, I feel like they would have been much better stewards).
