Leaving out the optics and personalities and internal politics, the biggest issue I see is that they added this during the RC phase, which is against their policy. It should have been pushed to 7.1.
They just wound back half the RC for Wordpress 7 at the last second to tweak some features for Matt. I don't know if he's right about it, but they did it.
> Business objectives should override engineering policies when the two are in conflict
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".
This is something people seem to miss. His position as CEO of Automattic creates a huge conflict of interest with his position at the non-profit foundation.
This is an example: the foundation's code gives special treatment to an Automattic product.
Some people have a view of open source contributors as some sort of amorphous mass of strangers, and that leads to unrealistic suppositions. The contributors aren't really amorphous, they exist, they're knowable, they have personalities and jobs.
A project such as wordpress(.org) depends very strongly on those who do the work. And in the case of Wordpress, that's some spare-time volunteers, some employees of other companies, but the biggest group is Automattic employees. If you do most of the work, as Automattic does, the project depends on you and you get to call the shots.
I understand that point, but I disagree. Automattic controls the process, which keeps a lot of initiatives out because there's no reasonable expectation of improvement unless it aligns with Automattic.
I don't believe the project would fold were Automattic to quit -- there's a lot activity outside of the core that is alienated by Matt's behavior. Might well be an improvement if the focus of .org isn't about what .com needs, but about what .org wants to offer to users.
> most software development is not "real engineering".
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.
Sure, I understand the stakes are lower for blog plugins than for aircraft.
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.
That's not what being a professional means at all.
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.
What does cutting corners have anything to do with the topic at hand? The situation isn't about devs getting the time to do something right, it's about programmers making a non-engineering decision that was overruled by the business in the businesses best interest. That's perfectly reasonable.
> But being a professional means you do the thing even when the stakes are low.
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.
Although humorous, this also leads to a provocatively interesting line of thought which is completely tangential to the engineering discussion.
Blogging accidents, usually involving tik-tok videos, selfie sticks, and rugged terrain or wild predators, get all the attention, but probably pale in comparison to medical or mental health issues faced by the average blogger.
For comparison, studies of police officers in the US have found that heart disease, cancer, and suicide are the leading causes of deaths.