Press the Issue - SoundSage

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When the WordPress block editor was introduced, it raised questions about how and if page builders would still be used to build sites. In this episode, Devin and Aurooba chat about their feelings about the two options.

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In this episode, Rob and Brian review the biggest new features of WordPress 6.2, the integration of the Openverse image library into WordPress Core, discuss whether "Full Site Editing" is really ready to move out of Beta, and whether the Openverse is proof that web privacy regulations have become a hindrance rather than a help for the typical web user.

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Episode TranscriptAllie Nimmons:Hey, Nyasha, how are you today?

Nyasha Green:I’m doing well, Allie. How are you?

Allie Nimmons:I’m fantastic. I’m also very proud of myself because, um, I went to your Twitter recently for something and I saw your pinned tweet and I was like, oh, snap. I’ve been saying her name wrong this whole time, . Um, so if you’re ever wondering how to say Nyasha’s name properly, am I saying it properly?

Nyasha Green:You are, yeah. Yes,

Allie Nimmons:, uh, go to her Twitter. She has a pronunciation at the top of her page. Um, so it’s only taken me like nine months, but I’m pronouncing it correctly.

Nyasha Green:Okay. It’s on my website too. My website is, um, well, it’ll be up today. Yeah. And it’ll have pronunciation guide and it’ll happen now. Oh my gosh. Fane fan

Allie Nimmons:Phonetics. Alright.

Nyasha Green:Thank you. Spelling , . I can’t speak today. I might need it, but yeah, that’s

Allie Nimmons:Okay. . That’s so exciting. I’m so excited to see your website. Thank you. Um, alright, so that, that nonsequitor out of the way today. We were talking about web, A lot of people are still talking about, uh, even like, like two weeks-ish later. Um, the first ever Word, camp Asia, which was a couple weeks ago. And you and I braved, um, basically 60 hour round trip flight to Thailand to attend and speak at where? Camp Asia. And I mean, it was pretty dang fantastic. I had a really, really good time.

Nyasha Green:It was, I did too. That was definitely one of my top favorite trips, like in general. Yeah, that’s just like right under my honeymoon. So , it was really great. .

Allie Nimmons:Yeah, it was really exceptional. We both got to bring our, our partners. I got to bring my, my husband, uh, Greg, and you got to bring your husband Sean. I almost caught them mixed up for a second. That would’ve been embarrassing. , um, . Um, and yeah, it was, it was such a great event, especially for being there the first work Camp Asia that that organizing team had never put on an event together before. Um, but due to delays from the pandemic, they had actually been playing this event for four years. So it really showed, um, all the details. Really. Yeah. There was so many details covered. It seemed like everything was well thought out. Um, yeah, it was really, it was really fantastic.

Nyasha Green:Yeah. You definitely would not believe it if you attended that. This was their first time putting on an event together. It was absolutely amazing. And you can tell that they put a lot of thought into detail and that they also learned from other work camps as well.

Allie Nimmons:Mm-hmm. . Yeah. And there was a lot of things that were like, they nailed all the basics and then there were like, additional things that were just like better than I’ve, I’ve been to like a dozen word camps at this point across the, the United States, and they were just things that were just better. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna go over all of the pros and all of the things that we loved, uh, but this is, press the issue. You know, we like to be a little spicy. We like to be, um, uh, we like to provide constructive criticism. So we’re also gonna, uh, discuss a couple of, I wouldn’t even say cons, like pros and cons, I would say. Just like things that we noticed that could have been better. Things that we wished were a little bit different. Um, but, you know, overall I gave the event a 10 out of 10. Any, any improvements I had or me just being nitpicky

Nyasha Green:The same, I 10 outta 10, just like minor details. And they pay so much attention to details and feedback. I’m pretty sure whatever we have to suggest, they’re going to take it and thank you and, and run with it because they’re such great organizers.

Allie Nimmons:Yeah, definitely. Uh, so I’ll go first with, with my, with my pros. My highlights, right? Because I could list, just list everything about the event that it was great. But, uh, my highlights specifically, um, were the food. The food was the best food I’ve ever had at a Word camp. And yes, it, there was, it, it was the variety of it. It was the amount of food that you got every day for lunch. Um, and honestly it was just like novel and interesting. Cause a lot of it was food I’d never had before. Like, me and my husband would open up the box and be like, what’s that? What’s this? What is that? And like, it was just such a fun experience. Um, rather than being like, all right, well, like, I gotta eat something and then, you know, run to the next thing. It was a part of the experience was the food.Mm-hmm. . Um, they also had this orange juice that was like tangerine juice. Like I got really hyper fixated on this orange juice. It was really, really delicious. , I had like three cups of it a day. . Um, um, what was the other thing I was gonna say? Oh. So I was privileged enough to be chosen to speak. I still feel super honored that I was part of that group of people that got to speak at this event. And we had, uh, body microphones. Like they put a mic pack on the back of my dress and taped a microphone to the side of my face. And I’d never had that in a Word camp. And it’s, it was like a small thing, but it seemed like they hired an outside company mm-hmm. to come in and take care of that. Um, and it was like a small thing, but it, it really elevated the experience to something like, I felt like a professional speaker.Like I felt like I was gonna give a Ted Talk or something. Yes. Because when you don’t have to hold the microphone, like my hands were free. I felt like I didn’t have a microphone with like a cord that I was like stuck to a certain part of the stage. Like I could move around. Like, that was just really exceptional. And there was, in the sessions I was in, in addition to my session, there was no like audio issues. Hmm. Like the audio was so smooth all the time. There were no blips in the ins and outs. It was always great. Um, there’s so many things. You also, things

Nyasha Green:You, you also looked really cool with the microphone in your face. Like, like we were in a movie, like yeah, I felt like we were in a movie and I was like a background person. Like, um, this is the main actress talking and then something’s gonna break out. I have to run or something. I felt like so excited. I felt like I was

Allie Nimmons:Part of the did cool experience . Yeah. I did feel really cool. And like in my pictures, I look cool cause I don’t have like a, a thing in my hand or, you know, oh, sorry, that was my dog sneezing. Um, yeah, it was, that was such a cool and unique experience and I hope that they continue to do that as well. Um, and then the other highlight for me, and then I’ll, I’ll let you share yours as well. Nyasha, the other highlight for me was contributor day. Mm-hmm. Um, I thought for some reason that I wasn’t gonna be able to go because they had a unique sort of thing where you had to register, sign up for contributor day. Mm-hmm. otherwise you ki you like couldn’t go, like they like wouldn’t let you in. Um, which at first I was kind of like, well that kind of sucks.Like, why are we not allowing people in? And I think that it had something to do with the amount of food that they had available. They needed to keep track of who all was coming. Mm-hmm. . Um, and I didn’t think I had signed up for it, but I did. I had a little thing on my badge that said I could go. Nice. Um, and what was super special about it, and I don’t honestly know if other Word camps have done this, and if they have, I apologize for discounting them, but they did contribute day on the first day of the word camp as opposed to traditionally doing it on the very last day. Um, and doing it on the last day was always kind of an issue because people are tired by the last day, they’re burned out. Mm-hmm. , they don’t feel like it. Like you’ve spent the last two or three days like doing things set up to sundown and like, you don’t feel it going to, it seems so optional and it’s easy to skip out on.Um, but doing it on that first day really prioritized it and made sure people went and made sure that like the event gave the feeling of this is important and you should go. Um, and it was super well organized. Like, I remember speaking to people at Word Camp us last year who were very intimidated and frustrated by contributor day because they just didn’t know what to do and mm-hmm. . And we took a lot of time in the morning on contributor day, we had every single team lead go up to the front of the room and explain what their team was about and what they did so that you knew exactly where you would fit and which team you should go to. And that was mm-hmm. , remarkable genius. Um, and I’m really curious to see details and information about like, how many new contributors maybe were signed up that day, or you know, how many people attended. Like, I wanna see how successful that day ended up being because it felt really impactful. So those are my three main highlights. I feel like, um, even though everything was so fantastic.

Nyasha Green:No, got you. Got I am I definitely piggybacking off yours. I agree with your three. First of all, the food was fantastic. I was so excited to eat every day , not just the food in Thailand, but the food at the event as well. And, um, one thing that I was very impressed by was the dietary, um, separations. Mm-hmm. , because I know, um, I’ve only been to work camp us, uh, 2022 mm-hmm. . Um, I’ve been to a lot of tech conferences though. I’ve been going even while I was, um, before I got my first tech job, I was going while I was learning. And that was by far, um, the, this was the best one I’ve ever been to. And I know at us, uh, the dietary restrictions were a little muddled, so, uh, people couldn’t eat. And yeah, that wasn’t the case that I have heard so far from this one. They had distinction by Halal, um, vegan, things like that. So I was very impressed, um, that everybody got the chance to, to try the food because it was amazing. Um, I did have some of that tendering juice too. It was so good. . It’s

Allie Nimmons:So good. There was a issue, I remember I saw on Twitter on that first day, there was a problem with the kosher options. Like the kosher option wasn’t available, but I believe that they had fixed it by the second day, which like amazing, you know? Yeah. Amazing that it got fixed. And food organizing food is so hard when you have to do all those dietary restrictions. So like, not to, you know, discount the kosher folks, but it kind of seemed like, okay, you can’t, you can’t win ’em all. You can’t get everything Exactly. Perfect. So mm-hmm. . Yeah. I agree with you as far as like, yeah, there were so many options.

Nyasha Green:Yeah. And, um, another thing I really, really loved, um, I love the specific sessions, um, that they had. I think that all the word camps and even like WordPress related or similar like camps or meetups, conferences, like do code. They have really, really good sessions. I think Sessions make the conference. Yeah. But this one to me was, there was just so many good ones from technical to just motivational. Um, going into Word Camp, I didn’t really know what to expect because it was the first, um, one in Asia. I didn’t know how it would be set up. I didn’t know, you know, I knew what the sessions would be about, but I didn’t know how they would go. And so going in, you know, I didn’t think, not saying I didn’t think much. Like they weren’t gonna be good. I didn’t think they would have such an impact on me.Um, I felt so inspired after going to the sessions. I felt like I had new ideas that were, you know, presented to me that were, for me, even though they were presented to everyone, I felt appreciated. , I felt a part of the community. I felt beloved. I just felt energy and emotions that I usually don’t feel at conferences. I usually feel good. I love them. That’s why I go to so many. But this was a special one to me. I just felt the energy and the air, and you can tell speakers like yourself, Allie, were just so passionate about what you do. And it just gave me so many ideas about my future. And I love to get inspired like that. I, I wish more, especially newbies into tech would go to conferences like this. They don’t know how life changing it can be when you’re thinking about your future and your paths you wanna take. Yeah. So the sessions were a one, my husband, who is not in technical at all, felt inspired. I asked him, we j well Michelle for shit. And I, we joked we’re like, were are you going to, uh, are you going to join the community now? And , he was like, you know what I’m thinking about it. And so it was just, you know, from a person that’s in the community and also outside, they were just so amazing. They did a great job picking speakers.

Allie Nimmons:Totally. Yeah. I remember feeling very, um, I was speaking with Laura Byrne who gave a similar talk to mine and we were remarking on the fact that there were so many talks that were specifically for non coders. Mm-hmm. , um, which I wouldn’t go so far to say it’s been a problem. But the vast majority of content at work camps since they began, has been about code and software and been focused on developers. And it’s kind of been hard to get really good content, um, by people who do not code by mm-hmm. , you know, creatives. And there were a good number of talks along those lines and Laura and I both felt very validated cuz that’s what both of our talks were about.

Nyasha Green:Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. I also really, really liked the venue. The venue was amazing. That was,

Allie Nimmons:Oh my gosh,

Nyasha Green:, that blew my mind. You, I

Allie Nimmons:Felt like I was in a theme park.

Nyasha Green:Yes. And I think they, they actually had theme park related things in there. You remember the, uh, dinosaur ?

Allie Nimmons:Yes. I saw a sign for that on one of the, like the second or third day. And I was like, wait, what? There’s like a dinosaur park, like e every day that I went into this. So for those of you who, who, who were not there or who didn’t kind of follow along the event was at the top, the fir the top floor, or maybe it wasn’t even the top floor of this, technically it was a mall, but it was the most extravagant, gigantic, intricate, expansive mall I’d ever been in in my whole life. Yes. It was beautiful and gigantic. And there were like, on one level there were just cars. Mm-hmm. , like, there was like a BMW dealership, like inside the mall. And again, like we said, there was like a, a dinosaur. It was like a kid’s dinosaur park. There was a IMAX theater, there were like big terraces at balcony. Like there was a waterfall from the ceiling. Like, that place was insane. That

Nyasha Green:Was, that was

Allie Nimmons:Incredible. So beautiful. And I know that you and Sean did what me and my husband did at, at a couple points where it’s like, okay, I’m feeling a, maybe a little claustrophobic. There’s a lot going on. I’m gonna go shopping . Mm-hmm. , . Let me go down a couple levels and I’m gonna go get some souvenirs. Like, it was perfect.

Nyasha Green:It was, it had everything there. You technically, if you just went from the hotel to the mall, you had, uh, a crazy great experience. Mm-hmm. just doing that. And I think that’s really amazing for accessibility. Mm-hmm. and that’s really amazing. People who, you know, may be intimidated by going to a new country. I know I’ve, I’ve never been to the Asian continent and I, you know, I was, didn’t know what to expect. And I am definitely going back to Bangkok. I don’t know when I can fly that long. But , I definitely wanna go back.

Allie Nimmons:Yeah. It was really fun. And you’re right, I didn’t really think about that. It was, it did feel very accessible. Cause like here in the US we’re used to malls, right? Mm-hmm. , like that’s not a, that’s not a new thing. So it kind of almost felt, yeah, like being home, but just in a really different, unique way. Mm-hmm. , um, everything was in English. Like all the signs and everything. Everybody in the mall that I encountered at least spoke English. And so it, it didn’t feel as scary as it might have done. Um, it was a really, really perfect venue, like mm-hmm. . Yeah. It was a great choice. All right. So I’m gonna go into, um, I really only have two things that I didn’t love about the event. Um, the first one was the speaker room. So usually for speakers there’s a, a speaker room or a green room or just a room set off that’s just for speakers where you can leave your bag and leave your laptop and have it be safe.You can sit, sit in a quiet place and work on your slides. You can chat with other speakers. And I really had to hunt for the speaker room. I had to ask like multiple people. Like some of the volunteers didn’t know what I was talking about. And when I finally found it, there wasn’t anybody in there. So then I felt kind of weird cause I was like, well, if I leave my stuff, like part of the, part of the benefit of the speaker room is like, there’s kind of a way somebody in there who, who’s like watching everybody’s stuff. Mm-hmm. . So there wasn’t anybody in there. There wasn’t any stuff in there. And I was like, well, I don’t feel comfortable really leaving my stuff in here. And Nyasha, there were no power outlets in that room. Hmm. So like, my laptop was dying and I needed to work on my slides and I was like, I finally found the room and I can’t plug my computer inside to go find somewhere else.And so I was, I was kind of frustrated about that. Um, cuz it’s something that I’ve come to expect mm-hmm. as a speaker. And so I think that like, maybe it just wasn’t something that they deemed important, like important this go around. And I might be the only speaker who really missed it. Um, but that was a little bit like, I was like, oh dang, I’m like disappointed. Um, the other thing that I didn’t love that I I hope is different next year is the sponsors area. Hmm. The area that they had for the sponsor booth was just way too small. Mm-hmm. . And I don’t think that that could have really looking at that space, I don’t know how much that could have been helped. Um, maybe in future years. Some sponsors are in a different area, like the smaller sponsors are in one area and the bigger sponsors are, I don’t know, but mm-hmm. Usually that’s one of the highlights of an event for me is like hanging out in the sponsor area. There’s a lot of people I know that work at these companies, so I could hang out, bug them at their booths, you know, pick up swag, take my time, play the games. Uh, you always run into people that you know and you can stop and chat. But the sponsor area was impossible to get. It was like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, it was impossible to move through. It was so crowded. Um, and there were people not only at the booth, but just kind of standing around talking and you’re like pushing your way through. And like, it gave me so much anxiety. Um, and so I didn’t really get a lot of swag from Word Camp Beha. I was kind of disappointed cuz I was like, I went in there one time and I was like, not again.I can’t do that . And what I was told after the fact was, and this may or may not be true, this is just something that one person happened to tell me culturally speaking, um, in a lot of Asian countries for an event like this, the focus is more on the networking and a little bit less on the, the sessions. Mm-hmm. And so a lot of people came to the event purely to hang out in this area and talk to these companies and not to go to the sessions. So maybe it wasn’t that the the area was too small. Maybe it was that it was expected that more people would be in the sessions and instead more people were in this one area. I don’t really know. Oh. Um, but yeah, I hope that next year they are able to account for that a little bit more and find a way to expand that area or maybe have a dedicated networking room or I don’t know, something like that to lessen up the traffic in that area because it, it caused me a lot of anxiety.

Nyasha Green:No, I agree with you. I, uh, I went through twice and once was for swag and I was like, this is too much. I got pushed a couple times. I was like, this is too many people Uhuh, I’m leaving . And then the next time was just actually to like, you know, looking for someone to I agree. I did not get as much swag as I usually do. Um, that was very, like you said, it gave me anxiety too. And I’m usually, I’m pretty okay with crowds, but that was like, we were packed in at some part and I, I, I cannot be packed in mm-hmm. and I, I, it is, it sets me crazy. So.

Allie Nimmons:And you’re tall. I’m five too. So like I I was like drowning in all these people. It’s crazy.

Nyasha Green:Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is. And um, that kind of leads up to one of my, one of my just minor issues. Um, I know this is a source of hot debate sometimes, but I really wish that the mask mandate was enforced a little bit more. Mm-hmm. Um, because, you know, in other parts of the, if you went outside the conference there, it was definitely enforced. Um, not in the mall, but outside, um, on the airline. Korean air definitely was enforced. Um, it was so many people that was, that was probably the biggest conference I’ve ever been to. And even if we weren’t still dealing with Covid, I just think having that many people in one area during flu season is, yeah. You know, without mask is a bit of an issue. And they did have hand sanitizer, um, things like that. But I, I know I definitely got sick on the way back. Mm-hmm. . Um, when I got home and , I was thinking, you know, and I wore a mask most of the time. I, I, I think I only took my mask off when I was outside and yeah. So, um, I just wish that, you know, mask mandates were, you know, especially since cases are rising again all over the world, I wish it was enforced a little bit more.

Allie Nimmons:Yeah, I agree. And that wasn’t even something I had thought of in the moment. I was just like, I don’t know, like, it didn’t really occur to me, but definitely in retrospect, like my husband got a really bad cold when we got home. Mm-hmm. . Um, and yeah, having that many people packed in like that, who had come from, you know, we had a lot of people coming from the United States, but we had people coming from Europe and like the Philippines and India and mm-hmm. South America. Like we had people coming from all over the world and, um, yeah. I’m, they haven’t released any numbers, um, in terms of like if people have reported Covid cases after the fact mm-hmm. , um, I know that’s happened a couple times for password camp events or WordPress events. Um, I haven’t heard anything

Nyasha Green:We get, we did get one, I got one email yesterday. Yeah. It was, it was very, it was like, was it late yesterday or early yesterday? It was recent, but there was Oh, okay. Well it’s one, at least one person reported they did have Covid at the event.

Allie Nimmons:Okay. Well, yeah. And there was , there was, oh gosh, I, I don’t know how many attendees now. It was something like 1500 attendees. So that’s relatively unsurprising. Mm-hmm. , I’m honestly kinda surprised there was only one. Um, and you know, maybe that’s only the, that’s only one person who, who reported it reported mm-hmm. , but yeah. And that’s, I mean, that could have been a great opportunity as well for more swag. Like, you know, word Camp Asia masks, or something like that. Awesome. That would’ve been so cool. Um, but yeah, I agree with you. I hope that, um, I mean maybe for next year that might not be as much of a concern. I hope it’s not as much of a concern. Oh no. . Um, but that could be something definitely for Word Camp Europe to take into consideration is, um, you know, that’s in a couple months. Yeah. Let’s, let’s, you know, I don’t, I don’t know how much these event organized can do as far as enforcement of mask mandates. Mm-hmm. , but highly recommend and reminders and like, you know, you can’t come into this area or this room without a mask and you know, that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Nyasha Green:Or passing them out as well, like offering them and stuff.

Allie Nimmons:Yeah, definitely. Cool. Well I think that’s a pretty comprehensive look, um, at the pros and cons if you wanna call it that. Um, and yeah, if you attend the word Camp Asia, uh, out there at home, we would love to hear like, did we, what was your highlights? Like, were there improvements that you saw that we missed? Um, and all of that kind of stuff all meant to be positive and kind, constructive criticism cuz you know, overall they really absolutely knocked it out of the park. So yes. Anything we say here that’s for improvement, quote unquote is, you know, coming from the kindness most helpful place. Cool. All right, well thank you so much Nyasha for chatting with me. I always love recording episodes with you. Same . Alrighty, we’ll catch you in the next one.

The post WordCamp Asia 2023 appeared first on MasterWP.

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At State of the Word a few weeks ago, Matt Mullenweg announced plans to begin labeling plugins in the WordPress directory based on cost and backing from the community. In this episode, Allie and Nyasha discuss the pros and cons to this plan and the ways in which this plan may affect plugin developers.

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"Freemium" is the idea that a product is free, with the goal of upgrading customers to a paid or premium version. It's a common model within the WordPress ecosystem. In this episode, Nyasha and Rob discuss what goes into building a freemium model, using their own first-hand knowledge.

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Despite the success of Kids Camps in past years, WordPress doesn't do much to intentionally introduce young people to WordPress. In this episode, Allie and Topher discuss both the challenges and possibilities surrounding bringing younger generations into the WordPress community.

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AI, or artificial intelligence, is a growing field in tech where computer software has been trained to make assumptions about the data its given. In this episode, Topher and Nyasha talk about the morals and ethics of AI and the potential problems of inherent bias built into it. In the conversation, they discuss specific examples of proprietary code causing not only general problems, but very specific problems.

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WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg's annual State of the Word speech was held December 15, 2022 in New York City. In this episode Allie Nimmons and Rob Howard recap the highlights of Matt's speech - things they are excited about, things that confuse or worry them.. and together they try to answer the question: what is the biggest challenge facing WordPress right now?

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In our final episode of the year, producer Allie Nimmons takes you through the highlights of her favorite episodes, with a glimpse into why they stand out. We really hope that you enjoy our final episode of 2022, and we cannot wait to press more into issues with you in 2023.

Press These LinksListen to the episodes mentioned in this episode:

A Look Back at WordCamp US 2022
How Other Open Source Projects Raise Money
Screen Readers and Beyond: How Web Accessibility Makes Lives Better
Toxic Scorekeeping: The Case Against ‘Five for the Future’
Is Working from Home a Trap for Women
Does Market Share Matter?
How Did the Pandemic Affect WordPress Contributors?

Episode TranscriptMonet Davenport:Welcome to Press the Issue, a podcast for MasterWP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show at masterwp.com/presstheissue. Press the Issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do, now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash visit learndash.com. Our mission at MasterWP is to bring new voices into WordPress and tech every day. The new MasterWP Workshop series does just that. Our new live and recorded workshops on everything from code, to design, to business turn WordPress fans into WordPress experts. Find the workshop for you at workshops.masterwp.com. Use the code Podcast 10 for a 10% discount.

Allie Nimmons:Hi, I’m Allie Nimmons, and I’m the producer of this podcast, Press the Issue. We launched this podcast on June 1st of this year, 2022, and in the past six months, we’ve produced 25 unique episodes all about issues that we wanted to explore in WordPress, open source, and beyond. In our final episode of the year, I’m going to take you through the highlight of my favorite episodes, with a glimpse into why they stand out to me. I really hope that you enjoy our final episode of 2022, and we cannot wait to press more into issues with you in 2023.

One of the biggest things to happen in WordPress this year was the first back to in-person WordCamp US since 2019, and so this episode definitely feels like a highlight to me. In it, we took a different approach to our usual episode structure, and had multiple team members weigh in on what made the event so special for them. For me, it felt like a homecoming, so I loved hearing others talk about this event being their introduction to WordPress events. Here’s Devin Egger talking about how this camp was his first, and what that was like for him.

Devin Egger:I was really excited to go to this, and the opportunity to meet so many people in-person in the WordPress space was just so exciting and so awesome to meet. So many people that I’ve either worked with online, or met online, or watched their videos, or taken their classes, it was just an awesome opportunity to meet these people in-person. And getting the chance to see everyone face-to-face really sets in the idea that it’s a community, and that we’re all a part of this WordPress community, and a good reminder that we’re really all in this together, and we’re all here because we dig WordPress, and we’re all about the same thing.

So my least favorite thing coming back from WordCamp US actually came after the fact, and when I got home and I realized that all the workshops in the surf room weren’t actually recorded and available for future playback, and I just didn’t have enough time to go see all the things that I wanted to see, and get to attend all the events and the sections that I wanted to go to. And so I was really hoping when I got back home that I’d be able to catch the workshops that I missed, and just a little bit bummed that I didn’t get to do that. But that being said, the ones that I did get to go to and participate in were very educational, and I learned a lot more than I expected going into it. So I’m happy that I did get to go see the ones I got to see, and I’m really excited to go to my next WordCamp.

Allie Nimmons:So much about producing this podcast has been about finding hard questions to answer, and in the WordPress world, we aren’t short on those. I wanted us to look at things like the economics of WordPress, things we struggle with as an open source community, accountability, and all that kind of stuff. So in this topic, looking at how other open source projects make money, is a great summary of what Press the Issue was all about this year. In this clip from the episode, Brian Cords and Rob Howard, look at an example of Vue versus WordPress, and how each one handles producing content and information from a financial perspective.

Brian Coords:When you look at Vue, how do you see their ability to be very popular in the open source world, but also very clearly an opinionated private… A lot of private interests in that group. Do you see the similarities or differences between Vue and WordPress?

Rob Howard:Yeah, I mean, I think from a code standpoint, they largely are similar in their philosophies and what they’re building. And I think, again, there’s this just acceptance within the vue.js world, that, “Hey, we have sponsors paying for stuff, here they are. We want you to be a sponsor, here’s where you can type in your credit card number to be a sponsor.” So they make it just very easy. Again, the approach of accepting money, it just makes everything more efficient. But of course, the flip side of that is then once you accept that money, you have to have a mechanism for accounting for it in a way that the community can accept as fair. So I think that probably is maybe the hardest part psychologically, is saying, “Okay, if somebody gives me a million dollars to help with WordPress, now I have to show that I’m using it in a way that is legit and fair.” And actually, there’s quite a bit of work associated with that.

Allie Nimmons:One of the biggest problems facing WordPress right now, from my perspective at least, is how we handle accessibility. I’ll give an honorable mention to our How Accessible is WordPress episode, which basically took an hour to say not accessible enough. But something that I wanted Press the Issue to do is to pose solutions to problems as much as it identifies and asks questions about them. Here’s Teron Bullock and Devin Egger’s Screen Readers and Beyond, How Web Accessibility Makes Lives Better. In this episode, they talk about the issues with WordPress accessibility, and the work still yet to be done. So let’s listen to a bit of that.

Teron Bullock:Why can’t I just maybe make the website black and white, or puts a button in there that toggles the experience or something? Why isn’t that enough? What would you say to that particular web developer? Do you think that the tools, and thinking about it basically from the bare minimum mindset is enough?

Devin Egger:I don’t, because first of all, there’s a lot more work to be done. I think that’s one of the bigger points is that I don’t think we’re ever done thinking about accessibility, and… Just for example, in my article, I talk a lot about website accessibility, but that’s not even going into the idea of authoring tools being accessible, and one of the people’s qualms with WordPress, is that it’s not exactly very accessible as an authoring tool. I didn’t have time to get into that in the article because it was already way too long, but there’s a lot more work to be done.

Teron Bullock:Right.

Devin Egger:And if we’re always taking a retroactive stance to it instead of a proactive stance, so if we’re always playing catch-up, then I don’t think we’re really doing anything justice, because we’re not really thinking about it in the right way. And I think the right way to think about it is just to look at your website that you’re building. And again, whether you’re a designer, or whether you’re a content writer, or whether you’re a developer, there’s a chance for you to sit down and look at the thing that you’re creating, and go, “Well, what if I couldn’t use my arms? What if I didn’t understand things quite as well as people…”

The disabilities that are more overlooked, such as cognitive abilities, or learning abilities. Like I said earlier, it’s easier to just close your eyes and think, “How would I interact with this website?” But if you’re making a website that has this crazy design, that one thing’s over here, and one thing’s way over there, and the typical buttons are not in the typical places, and this button is really small, or whatever, those are all things that we don’t really think about in typical website accessibility, like adding alt tags, or adding visually hidden elements that are screen reader only elements. The organization and the structure of the website is not something we always think about, but it’s also very important.

Allie Nimmons:The MasterWP team has come under a bit of fire this year for attempting to kind of shatter some rose-colored lenses when it comes to WordPress. In this episode, which was honestly a bit nerve-wracking for me to publish, myself and Rob Howard discussed the case against the Five for the Future Initiative. I’m really proud of this episode, because I think we tackled a complex problem, and pick apart our issues with it, as well as pose resolutions that sit right with us as invested community members. Here’s a bit of that episode.

Rob Howard:It’s very difficult to unpack and navigate even who works for whom in a lot of these situations. So I think that that is not necessarily an issue that is at all solely related to Five for the Future, but I think that that need for more clarity all around also applies to this question of, well, is this 5% number an appropriate thing for us to be measuring and keeping track of?

Allie Nimmons:Yeah. And I think about it too like, “Is this Five for the Future thing appropriate for everyone?” I think there’s value in an individual looking at it like, “Okay, yeah, this is something that I can work toward. If I decide I’m going to start with 1%, then next month I’ll try for 2%, and something to build toward as far as making the time to contribute.” That’s not the same experience as a giant company like GoDaddy to look at, and say, “Well, maybe we should do that too.” Sometimes I wonder if Five for the Future should be something that is aspirational to individuals, and there’s maybe a different system of accountability for larger companies and organizations, because I think what we owe to WordPress is different.

As a woman who has worked from home since 2016, I feel very attached to, and fond of this next episode. It’s Nyasha Green and Sammi Sim, Is Work From Home A Trap for Women. It’s an extremely thoughtful and introspective episode about some of the emotional aspects of being a woman in tech in 2022. This episode helped me understand a lot about how working from home benefits me, and makes my life harder. So here’s a bit of Nyasha and Sammi sharing their thoughts about how culture affects women and their work.

Sammi Sim:I think a lot of how I feel and what I do is because of my upbringing. Some people may relate, but for me, culturally, the expectations started at an early age. I think we were always just taught that we always needed to tend to household chores, cooking, cleaning, while still always taking care of everyone around us. It becomes overwhelming, because it just seems like it’s out of habit, you can’t help but to naturally feel this way.

Nyasha Green:Yeah, I definitely understand that. Just a little bit about me, I was raised in… I still live in the Southern United States, so the culture here is that women do household chores, women take care of children, some women don’t work, but in this day and age, especially financially, you’re expected to do all of that and your household chores and taking care of people, and things like that. And ever since I was a child, it really did seem like a trap for me, watching my mother work 12-hour shifts at a factory, and still having to cook, bathe us, do our hair, watching my grandmother, or listening to stories of her be a full-time housekeeper while raising nine children, especially when my grandfather passed away, it just always seemed like a, “No, I don’t think I can do that.” To me. How much of your culture do you think played into that?

Sammi Sim:I think a lot of it. Even now as an adult, I think those expectations still sit very high, especially from the men in my family. I still get up, and make sure I get my kids ready, bring them to school, and I come home and I do a little bit of chores. I log into work, I’m working, and then I still have to make sure I have dinner. It’s almost like it’s expected of me, and if I wasn’t doing it, I’m not doing what I need to do as a mother, as a wife.

Allie Nimmons:There are things I know a lot about when it comes to WordPress, and there are things that go right over my head. When it comes to economics, market share, business, all those sorts of enterprise level, long-term businessy focused topics, I struggle. But thankfully, because we share the load here at Press the Issue, there are other people, aside from me, ready and available to talk about these things with a level of expertise. In this episode, Rob and Brian team up again to discuss whether market share in WordPress really matters. Here’s a bit of that episode.

Rob Howard:It’s really hard, so if you look at Shopify, they were zooming during the pandemic, everybody thought that they were the future. And in many ways, that’s true, they did have a ton of success, they still have grown a lot, but if you look at their stock price, because their growth has slowed down, everyone started selling their stock. So even if they have the correct mindset, they’re still constrained by this need to grow fast so investors buy your stuff. So I think that is just one of the downsides of being a public company. Certainly WordPress benefits from, number one, not having too many public companies who were stuck in that quarterly mindset.

Allie Nimmons:One of the main goals when we started this podcast was to take a wide sweeping view of WordPress topics in more highly produced editorial style episodes, as opposed to the more common conversational style. This episode was the first one that we did in that style, and it’s probably the episode that I’m personally most proud of. The editing by Monet Davenport and Teron Bullock absolutely shines in this episode, and I’m able to explore a seriously important topic with other members of the community. Here’s veteran WordPress developer and event organizer, David Bisset, sharing his perspective on how the pandemic affected WordPress events, and what we can learn from that experience.

Allie Nimmons:So how did the move to virtual affect people’s relationship with creating and using WordPress software?

David Bisset:I had someone tell me that, “Thanks to seeing people from Taiwan on the meetup.” And the people from Taiwan giving comments that they would… These people, it helped them appreciate that the plug-in they were developing or writing, they maybe should add some additional translations or features to make it easier to use, just because they heard other WordPress people on the meet-up from another country.

Allie Nimmons:What kinds of effects, in terms of challenges, came to organizing within the pandemic experience?

David Bisset:So while there is a drop-off on our meet-ups, there’s always the same core people that you see every time, some of them only have one or two hours to spare a month just to be there sitting and listening. As a volunteer and an organizer, I don’t think we should ever take that for granted. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any challenges, however, I would probably say that virtual meet-ups there, there’s a struggle sometimes some of the instructional experience, some tutorials and walkthroughs from speakers could be better in-person. But on a positive note, thanks to the virtual meet-ups, organizers are able to secure speakers that specialize in skills. So the person that wrote this plug-in, or the person that’s worked on WordPress core, they can virtually speak to the meet-up.

Allie Nimmons:Thank you so much for listening with me. Please let us know on Twitter what your favorite episode of Press the Issue was this year, what kind of topics and issues you’d like us to explore next year, and we’ll see you in 2023.

Monet Davenport:Thank you for listening to this episode. Press the Issue is a production of MasterWP, produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted, edited, and musically supervised by Monet Davenport, and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

The post 2022 Highlight Show appeared first on MasterWP.

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The pandemic ushered in a new era of remote work. And there was a huge disparity between how different companies adapted to the change. In this episode, Rob and Topher dive into their experiences with all types of in person hybrid and remote office settings. they discuss the best settings for managing remote teams, how the sudden shift to remote work has affect how we live, and if we should push for an all-remote future.

Press The Issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do, now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash, visit LearnDash.com.

Our mission at MasterWP is to bring new voices into WordPress and tech every day. The new MasterWP Workshop series does just that. Our new live and recorded workshops on everything from code to design to business, turn WordPress fans into WordPress experts, find the workshop for you @workshops.masterwp.com. Use the code podcast10 for a 10% discount.

Monet Davenport:

Topher DeRosia:Hey, Rob.

Rob Howard:Hey, Topher. How’s it going?

Topher DeRosia:It’s going great. Today we’re going to talk about the future of remote work, and I have some really good questions for you to kick it right off with.

Rob Howard:Excellent. We have been doing remote work for a long time, so hopefully I’ll have some good answers for you.

Topher DeRosia:Yeah, let me ask you that. I’ve been doing it for 12 years now, almost 13. How long have you been remote?

Rob Howard:So I started freelancing from a home office in 2005, so it’s been a long time. It’s been basically my whole career. I had very few office type jobs early on, so I’ve always by nature enjoyed the home office life, and I’ve even had chances to do the big office thing and chosen not to over the years with different business partnerships and stuff like that. I’ve always liked it, and of course, the world changed very rapidly a couple years ago and work from home became a thing that everybody was doing, whether they were experienced or not, or whether they liked it or not.

Topher DeRosia:Yeah. I did about 13 years at a desk in an office at some point in my career.

Rob Howard:Nice.

Topher DeRosia:So we all know COVID pushed many into remote work abruptly, and many people individually are finding it to be a better work style. They’re like, “This is better than me at the office.” But I know some corporations are saying now we need to get everybody, get everybody back in the office. What would make a company choose that? Why would they choose not to keep their people remote if they already are because of COVID?

Rob Howard:So I think there are some benefits obviously, to the company, and I think there are some drawbacks, especially if you are just not used to managing people who are not physically in front of you. So I think that’s the majority of where CEOs and other leaders are saying, “Hey, I don’t feel like we’re as productive. We got to get back to in-person.” I think what they’re saying in large part is, “I can’t tell what you’re doing and it’s harder to manage this group of people because we’re not in the same room together.”

For me, I’ve always been operating and working that way, so it wasn’t really a change. I can get in their heads and be like, “Yeah, that would be hard.” But that was not a change for us, so in a way, the companies who were already remote actually ended up being light years ahead in terms of their management skills because there is a very different management style and set of behaviors and mindsets that you need to manage people who are not in the same room or even in the same city as you.

And then of course, we have companies that manage remote workers who are all over the world in Asia and South America, and Europe and North America. So there’s a lot of different skills and techniques for that.

I think the first people I heard saying it were the JP Morgan, Wall Street folks who were like, “We got to get back into the office and crush it with our investment banking work, and that has to be done in person.”

It reminds me of the movies where everybody is in a room and they’re screaming on their phones and they’re selling stocks, and it’s a mad house atmosphere.

And then you also hear it from Silicon Valley. Twitter and Elon Musk tried to bring people back, then they abandoned that idea, but they’re certainly not the only ones who are doing that. And I think that there definitely has been a push to get workers back in the office who are doing these, quote unquote, knowledge work, office work type jobs.

And I think it’s mostly a question of tradition and surveillance. That would be the two big things that I think are pushing people.

They won’t say that out loud. They’ll say, “Oh, we’re more productive in the office,” but you ask them for data to support that, and that data is minimal if nonexistent.

But I think the idea that a manager should know basically what you’re doing or be able to look at you all the time and check on you is definitely a part of that, and I think that’s an old school idea that obviously, isn’t necessary and isn’t really even good for a lot of employees and a lot of managers, but that’s how people are used to operating so they’re eager to get back to that.

There’s also challenges just around geographical pay structures as well, which I think companies are quietly struggling with. So this question of, “Okay, If we’re in San Francisco and I hire you, you’re going to get paid an outsize salary because of the nature of the housing market and the cost of living in that particular city.”

So if you look at these companies that are based in… [inaudible 00:05:07]

Topher DeRosia:And then you move to Oklahoma.

Rob Howard:Yeah. If these companies are based in California, they’re often pegging pretty high salary numbers because they are assuming that that employee needs to rent or buy home in that area. They’re going to be exposed to all these higher cost of living things.

But like you said, you moved to Boise, you moved to Oklahoma, and all of a sudden you might have been getting paid $350,000 at Google, but maybe 50% of that was really a San Francisco location bonus or increase.

So obviously, the companies are struggling to figure out… It’s hard to give somebody a pay decrease when they move. That’s just not good for morale. But they’re also saying, “Well, if we could hire people anywhere, why are we paying exorbitant rates, because based on this peg to this general location?”

Topher DeRosia:Why do we even have an office in California in San Francisco?

Rob Howard:Exactly. So obviously, there’s several ways you can go from there, but one of the ways you can go is, “Okay, everybody just has to show up in San Francisco.” And that’s obviously not the only city, but it’s certainly the biggest spot in the tech world where this is happening. But I think you could say the exact same thing about Wall Street and people living within commuting distance of Manhattan and stuff like that.

Topher DeRosia:One of my previous jobs was at a company called Big Commerce, and they were an everybody in the office place.

I was remote, but out of 800 employees, less than 1% were remote. It was really, really rare. And I would go to the office maybe quarterly and spend a week, and I experienced some people that actually thrive in the office environment. They really did well talking to people face-to face, just get up, walk down the hall, ask them a question, go back to your desk, that sort of thing. And so I can see where there’s room for not remote work, but then again, there are people like me.

So then when COVID hit, they all split up. Of course, everybody went home. And now that it’s over, some people are going back to the office, but certainly not all.

Way more than 1% are staying at home now, because for those people it works better to stay home.

Rob Howard:I think it’s also a different skill set. So the skill set you described, managing by walking around, it was actually innovative in the ’50s and ’60s, this idea of we should be a community of employees. That’s something that emerged in Silicon Valley in the Hewlett Packard days many decades ago.

And that style is not incorrect, but it is a completely different skill set from what we do, which is managing a remote team. And there’s different tools, there’s different techniques and strategies.

One of the things that I do is even with 20 or so employees, I do a lot of one-to-ones with every employee. And that is a component of a remote management strategy that I think works to get the best parts of the management by walking around system without requiring everybody to be in the same place. And there’s other stuff like that too.

And we’ve even seen just being good at using Slack and other asynchronous tools is a skill set, and we’ll often start working with a client or another organization, and we’ll be like, “Oh my gosh, nobody here at this other organization knows what they’re doing with these tools.”

And you actually see people who get frustrated by asynchronous communication. So they haven’t developed that skill set of communicating effectively via asynch yet, and they’re asking, “Hey, can we just hop in a quick call, or whatever?”

And that’s where you get friction between a team that’s all in on remote work and a team that’s still learning.

That being said, I think for me, the benefits outweigh the negatives by a lot. And I think the biggest benefits really flow to the people who don’t want that 60 plus hour per week work week structure.

So if you have young kids, or if you just have a life that it does not include 60 to 80 hours of office time per week and two hour commutes back and forth into the city, there’s 100 reasons that you might not want that lifestyle. And what remote work does is opens up the opportunity to achieve these higher value career goals or aspirations without necessarily having that requirement to do the brutal commute and the brutal hours in the office, and spend time away from your loved ones, or ignore your physical and mental health in exchange for more time in the office and you’re sleeping under the desk and stuff.

That’s a very common archetype in the Wall Street and Silicon Valley lifestyles, pre-COVID.

I think if you want to do that, more power to you, but I never want to do that regardless of my…

When I was 23 and single, I didn’t want to do that, and now that I have a kid, I don’t want to do that. And it’s like that was never my thing, so I definitely cannot identify with that as a badge of honor. But some people do think that is a power move to work in that way, so they’re certainly welcome to do that, but I think the increased prevalence of remote work opens up more career opportunities for people who don’t want to be, what I would describe as unnecessarily, performatively intense workers.

You want to do good work, but you want to also have a life. And I think working from a home office is conducive to that. Being able to move to a different city that is a better fit for you. It’s not just cost of living, it’s also, “Hey, I actually want to live near my aging parents, and they can’t live in San Francisco. It’s insanely prohibitively expensive, but maybe I moved to the Denver suburbs or I move to New Mexico, or Phoenix or something, and now I have different and better family and social connections in those places.”

Obviously, there’s a lot to unpack there, but I would definitely say that I think the CEOs of the Big Wall Street and Silicon Valley companies probably were overly optimistic about getting people to come back because there’s just a lot of benefits to not having to commute and not having to be physically in a certain chair, in a certain office building.

Even this morning we’re recording this, it’s 10:00 AM my time, and I just finished dropping my son off at school and running errands for an extra hour this morning. That would’ve been impossible if we both had to meet up at a certain office in Denver instead of being in our respective home offices.

Topher DeRosia:I do have to say, as a developer, some of the most powerful programming I’ve ever done was paired programming, sitting elbow to elbow with another developer and looking at the code together, and there’s a big draw there, but the people I know who do it full time also want to work remote. And so there’s been a bunch of progress made in the last few years for remote paired programming where you don’t have to sit and share a screen. And that’s really exciting. That feeds right into part of the future of remote work.

Rob Howard:Yeah, that’s awesome.

Topher DeRosia:I think that’s going to be a huge thing when we work that out.

Rob Howard:And that’s a good example of the thing where that is clearly a solvable problem like, “Hey, I want to work with Topher to write some code, but we are in different cities.” Obviously, you can figure it out. Using basically the same technology we’re using to do this podcast right now, you could do pair programming or something similar to it.

So that’s the kind of thing where I think earlier in the pandemic, there were a number of people who were just… They would throw their hands up and be like, “Oh, we’re never going to be able to collaborate again.”

But I don’t think that’s panned out in reality. I actually think that thinking about our team and the other remote companies that I know, we’re doing a pretty good job. We’re still creating cool stuff.

I really don’t think that the myth of the spark of creativity that can only happen in a room together has actually been demonstrated to be real over the last few years. And obviously, I can’t prove that an invention that would’ve happened failed to happen. That’s a falsifiable statement. But I haven’t noticed in the teams that we’ve worked with that are, let’s say above average in terms of how good their remote work. They seem to be enjoying life more and collaborating just as much as they would’ve in an office, in my view at least.

Topher DeRosia:All right. So my next question, we both know many companies that do remote only, and it’s great for them and us, but is it so inherently better that we should work to change society to work that way, to make companies who are perfectly happy in office switch? Do we have any responsibility there? And the specific example I’m thinking of is if everybody worked from home, there’d be a ton less gas burned.

Rob Howard:True.

Topher DeRosia:You know what I mean?

Rob Howard:Yeah.

Topher DeRosia:That would be great for the environment.

Rob Howard:Yeah, that’s definitely true.

And I also think it would change the way that we build housing and the way that we choose where we live, which could have positive or negative effects environmentally, but I think certainly, a world with less gas burning vehicles would be a better place in the long term.

I bought an electric car recently so I’m super pumped about never using gas. Obviously, there’s different side effects, but I think it’s overall a better thing.

I think it certainly would be better in some obvious ways, but I’m also hesitant to say that there’s no weird externality that we’re not thinking of that would offset that. But I think for me, I’m pretty hesitant to try to externally force other companies to do something from a societal standpoint. But I think what we can do is say, “Let’s compete and see who gets better employees,” and it makes recruiting easier and it creates better staff and ultimately, creates a stronger company.

And I think what we’re going to see is the companies that have flexibility are going to attract, for lack of a better word, better employees and better talent because of that, in most situations. And I think we’re going to see them thrive in different ways than the companies that are, quote unquote, stuck in the workplace.

And obviously, that being said, even the people who can work from office jobs are still a minority of the total working populations, so there’s still always going to be commuting, there’s still always going to be movement of people within cities and suburbs, and exurbs and everything.

But I think particularly, for the reasons that I mentioned about, just increasing flexibility also tends to increase diversity within an organization and allow people who might otherwise get burned out of a high intensity office workplace to stay and thrive, and build great careers.

To me, that’s really the biggest thing. I think the questions about housing, and traffic and commuting, there are so many different complexities to that.

I don’t think remote work is necessarily a cure all for those things. However, I do think that it is a cure for a lot of the burnout problems and a lot of the sort of… I’m not sure exactly what the word is, but if you think about who is… There’s this huge gap where people start careers in their 20s and 30s, and then eventually, there ends up being a tremendous gap between the earnings and career trajectory of the people who work 60 to 80 hours per week versus the people who work 30 to 40 hours per week.

And you see that in women who take time off after having children. You see that in people who just opt out of the high intensity Wall Street style work structure.

And what you end up with is a divergence that is not simply a linear arithmetic of, “I work more hours and I get paid more,” but it’s in fact, that people in many industries tend to progress to higher levels of the corporate ladder because they are workaholics essentially.

So if we can remove the workaholic advantage, I think that actually is better for everybody because ultimately, when you hear somebody talk about, “Oh hey, I slept at the office last night and whatever,” they always try to frame it as, “Because I’m so dedicated and I’m like, “I want to teach people that you can really be devoted to the mission.”

And I’m like, “What is your mission? You guys build an app where you can type things on the internet. This is not a life altering experience.”

It’s one thing if you’re a medic on the front lines of some really horrible situation where people genuinely need their lives saved, but there is no job where you’re moving stock money or you’re moving code that is worth that in my view.

There’s a lot of delusional statements and behavior around that, and I would love to see the of weird facade of workaholism just start to break down. And those folks who are in that weird world, either are exposed for just BSing the people around them, or maybe they choose a different and healthier lifestyle. I think that’d be better for everybody.

So that’s more of a lifestyle change and a culture change than it is a change to the physical world, but obviously those things all interrelate with one another.

Topher DeRosia:All right. One last question, pull out the crystal ball. It looks like COVID launched remote work ahead a big step. We were forced into it. Can you think of anything else, societal, financial, business that would give it another shove? Can we advance without thousands of people dying?

Rob Howard:Hopefully, we’ll never have anything like that happen again.

And I will also say that as you were saying that, it also strikes me that, while I think it worked really well for office work, I also think it worked really poorly for school, for kids, for example.

A lot of kids just weren’t into it, didn’t get what they could have gotten had there’d been no pandemic and they’d been in normal school situations. I think that’s also an inherent flaw in the whole idea of move the world to Zoom.

That being said, I think where we’ve ended up is there’s a bunch of companies now, Zoom being one of them and many others, Slack being another that we talked about earlier, but there’s dozens of these companies now that really are incentivized to make remote work better.

I forget what the exact numbers were, but pre-pandemic, it was in the low single digit percentages, so maybe 2% of people worked from home pre pandemic, and now it’s like 20 to 30 or something like that. Still not anywhere close to everybody, but it’s a lot.

And certainly, if you’re in a social circle where most people are office workers, most of your friends probably work from home.

So I think that we are past the inflection point in growth where it probably will continue to spread and grow, and I think for the reason that we talked about. If you’re applying for jobs and one is remote and the other forces you to come into a building in Chicago every day, which one are you going to choose?

People have even said that they’re willing to pay cuts to work remotely. Most people don’t explicitly want to take a pay cut, but if for example, you’re choosing between two options, the premium value of a remote situation is significant. The Chicago office workplace will have to pay you a lot more to make that worth your while.

So I think that just competitive nature of different firms. Trying different things, getting better at different techniques will ultimately show that, at least for some industries and some types of jobs, and some types of work, you can do remote and be equally as good if not better. And it generally is going to be cheaper for the company in a lot of ways, less real estate costs. And those are clearly not offset by the cost of Zoom, which is much less than the cost of a nice office building. And just more access to high quality workers who are going to be happier at the company because of the remote nature.

That being said, there’s also a ceiling because there really are a bunch of jobs that require a physical presence, so you’re never going to get to a place where you have 75% of people working from home because that would just be essentially a physical impossibility for a big percentage of jobs.

Everything from doctors to people who work at restaurants and stores. It’s all across the income spectrum, all across the education spectrum. There are always going to be physical, in-person jobs, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

I think I enjoy interacting with people in person, but also because we do web development, we are fortunate to be able to have a team that is spread around North America as opposed to just being in Denver, for example. And I think that that gives us more opportunities. It gives us the ability to improve the lives of more employees, and their families and their loved ones. I think it’s great for us.

Obviously, if you’re in a position where you’re thinking about, “Should my staff be remote or not,” I would say, “Try it and get good at it, but also recognize that there are a lot of different skill sets at play that you might not have needed to get good at in a physical office space.”

Topher DeRosia:I agree with you about all that stuff. None of that sounds quite to me like the lunge that COVID was. It’s more reasonable growth through experience.

Rob Howard:I agree, and I think what’s going to change is that because we are now growing from a higher starting point…

Growing 1% per year if you’re starting at 20% is a big difference than growing 1% per year if you’re starting from 1%.

So I think because we have critical mass now, it will seem like there is more growth even if the rate doesn’t really change. But we’re also going to bump into that ceiling of there’s just only so many jobs that can be converted.

That being said, I think a good example of one that has changed a lot is real estate.

So when I bought my first house 12 years ago, we had to go to a physical place and sign a bunch of paper, and it took three hours, and it was boring and weird.

But now it’s all online. We refinanced our mortgage during COVID and we did it all online. Somebody came to our house wearing a mask and notarized two documents and left. And it was like, “This no longer needs to be an in-person thing.”

And there are people who are buying houses site unseen and filling out all the paperwork on the internet now. And obviously, I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t have to. I’d rather go kick the tires of the house physically.

But all of that administrative stuff that really was done with reams of paper in offices even a few years ago, clearly doesn’t require that anymore.

That’s a good example of one of those jobs where it was convertible, even though nobody was really doing it online before the pandemic, they rapidly figured it out.

I think there is space for that kind of stuff, and online ordering from stores is a similar idea, but at the same time there’s a lot of jobs where people need or want to be physically in a place, so that’s not going to go away.

And ultimately, you can’t remotify every single job. And I don’t think that’ll good for us to do that. But we are really lucky to be in an industry where a lot of people are remote and it’s widely accepted.

And I would even say that being remote already when the pandemic started was a big benefit for us because there was way less learning curve. And since everyone was suddenly remote, there was nobody competing with me who had the fancy downtown office because that was irrelevant.

So weirdly, it actually made the companies that were already remote seem more prestigious, whereas in the past there was definitely this vibe of like, “Well, where’s your office? Oh, you don’t have one? That’s weird.”

I would definitely get that from clients from time to time, and now we never get that because everybody thinks it’s cool that we’re remote and wants to know how we do it.

So that that’s been a big change, but ultimately, we just got lucky that we were positioned for something that suddenly happened. And it wasn’t anything that we predicted. It was just like, Hey, this is how we like to do it, and then suddenly everyone was doing it that way.

Topher DeRosia:I thought through that question myself and reflected back on that the thing we talked about with there’s less gas burned the more people were from home. And it occurred to me that the government could offer tax incentives to companies to say, “Hey, have more people stay at home in order to reduce carbon burn.” And I don’t know if that’ll ever happen. I’m not enough of an economist to know if it’s even a good idea sort of thing abruptly change it, I think.

Rob Howard:And where that stuff gets tricky is the city wants people to buy lunch in the city. So they actually, in some ways, benefit from the presence of office workers, because now you’ve got sales tax, now you’ve got property taxes on those cafes and stuff like that. So it’s a tricky balance between, and this is true of all environmental and transportation and housing stuff. There’s this tricky balance between, “We make money off of action taking place in the city through taxes, but we also want less congestion and want less pollution.”

But I agree with you. There’s definitely something there. And I think remote work definitely has… I actually don’t know if it’s actually changed driving a traffic patterns in a positive direction, but there’s certainly an opportunity there to think about what are those side effects that seem not directly related, but actually the number of people going to an office every day makes a big difference towards those different numbers.

Topher DeRosia:Yeah. Well, that’s all the questions I had you.

Rob Howard:Excellent.

Topher DeRosia:You have any [inaudible 00:30:12] out there?

Rob Howard:We’ll keep working remotely for now until we find a better way to do things. And it is always a pleasure to talk to you, and I look forward to the next time.

Topher DeRosia:Yeah, me too. See you.

The post What is the Future of Remote Work? appeared first on MasterWP.

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Top Takeaways* There are pros and cons for companies having an unlimited PTO policy; this kind of a system can provide a sense of balance but also create confusion and paranoia. * Consistent surveillance – managers consistently keeping tabs on employee time – can reduce employee morale. * Unlimited PTO makes employers lives easier as well due to minimizing friction and decision making.

Rob Howard:Hey Monet, I’m great. How about you?

Monet Davenport:I’m doing great today. Glad to be here. We’re here today to talk about a topic that can be on the edge of controversy depending on who you talk to, and that is the matter of unlimited PTO or unlimited paid time off. And as many of you know, Rob is the owner and CEO of Howard Development and Consulting, kind of the parent company of MasterWP and Press the Issue. And he has some very interesting views on creating an ideal work environment for his remote employees, centering around work life balance and allowing that flexibility that everyone loves. Today we’re going to be discussing his thoughts and philosophies of whether companies should be using unlimited PTO, if it is used, how should it work in a company and some of the benefits of having that flexible PTO policy. My first question for you is, what are your thoughts in regards to companies having an unlimited PTO policy? Because there’s so many different opinions among business owners of how flexible they should be and how available they should make this paid time off available to their employees. What are your thoughts?

Rob Howard:Sure, absolutely. Well, I thought obviously a lot about this and how it kind of fits into our overall work life balance. And I would say that where we’ve landed, we don’t technically offer unlimited paid time off, but we have a very flexible policy that is really focused on equal treatment of everybody. And I think before I dive into the reasons that I don’t love the idea of unlimited paid time off, I’ll talk about some of the good things. I think the best part of it is that it really maps the idea of a results only work environment. Which is of a slightly different concept, but I think basically lands you at the same place, which is that it’s not about how much time your butt is in a chair staring at a computer screen, it’s about what you’re accomplishing. So I think that establishing that level of trust and focus on results is a very good thing.

And if you can do that well and you have a manager and an HR team and everybody else who’s involved in that decision making is on board with that than the unlimited PTO concept can work really nicely. I think it’s also great in that it leans the company more towards longer paid maternity and paternity leaves, more flexibility around caring for family members who may be older, or maybe it’s childcare, or they may need extra help somewhere in your sort of family circle or close relationships. So those are the really good things about it. I think the drawbacks are mostly around situations where there isn’t enough trust between the manager and the employee and there isn’t enough clarity and consistency in how the rules are enforced around unlimited PTO. Right? So the big thing about unlimited PTO is that what it really means is unlimited paid time off with manager approval, right? So right there you instantly have sort of a subjective decision that’s always being made.

And I think what you hear when people talk about this from a negative standpoint is like, “Well, okay, it says here I have unlimited PTO, but if I wanted to take the next six months off, obviously my boss would say no to that,” right?

Monet Davenport:Right.

Rob Howard:So then you’re in this kind of weird dynamic where it’s like, well, the word unlimited means something, but in practice there are a number of veto points that could prevent you from taking paid time off when you want to take it, right? And then the other negative, which is more of a HR and legal detail, is that unlimited PTO, generally speaking, does not accrue to the employee as a financial thing that they’re earning. So if you contrast that with, at our company, we actually have employees who are accruing PTO and it goes into their account within our HR system, and if they leave the company that is money that they can then be paid. So if you have 10 hours of PTO, you can cash out those 10 hours. Whereas if you have unlimited PTO, because there is no balance there, in most cases, is no legal requirement for the company to pay you anything in terms of that PTO that you have been given.

So in some ways I think that … I’ve seen some companies explicitly say like, “Hey, isn’t this a great idea? Because now we don’t have to pay people out their PTO at the end,” and it sort of looks nice, but in practice it is not that nice. But I think from my standpoint, we can dive into issues around the equality and fairness of the application of the unlimited PTO concept. But one of the big things is just that I think that people should be earning things that are equivalent to money. Like PTO is money at our company and you’re getting paid for something different than your work time, but you’re still getting paid for it. So unlimited PTO kind of turns into almost like a phantom benefit that it’s great if it works out and your manager is on board with exactly what you want, but of course, the moment that manager starts to diverge from what you want as an employee, you start to run into trouble.

Monet Davenport:Yeah. That’s so true. So what I’m hearing from you is that the word unlimited in the context of paid time off can kind of be a relative term because when you look in the dictionary, the word unlimited kind of gives you the idea that there’s no limit or there’s no restriction in terms of a number, and that can actually harm a business owner in the long run if someone chooses to abuse that benefit. But at the same time, from the standpoint, at least of an employee, I’ve worked at a number of different companies where … Ranging from huge corporate giants to some of the smaller agencies, where they offer some of these benefits, but like you said, there’s like this unspoken hesitance where you want to take some time off for vacation and you don’t want your manager to look at you a certain way, so you kind of hesitate to do that.

Rob Howard:Yeah, exactly. And I think what you’re getting at is that there’s this subjective nature to the decision, right?

Monet Davenport:Right.

Rob Howard:So I think as with many parts of hiring and management and human resources, the subjectivity is where, I think … There’s a couple things that pretty much always come out of subjective decision making. One is that you typically see that company augmenting existing socioeconomic disparities. So that could be race, that could be income, that could be gender, that could be how much economic power this person, the employee has just be like, I have better things to do than deal with your crap at this company. You’re always going to basically sort put a magnifying glass on any existing disparities whenever you have a subjective decision. One of the things that we’ve tried to do is really eliminate as much subjective decision making on the HR policies as possible.

So to me, it’s a red flag, if the rule is ask your manager and that’s it. What I really want to see is a setup where you can talk to your manager about it, but your manager is then going to follow a codified set of quantifiable decision points to figure out what to do. Obviously there’s always going to be gray area, but you really want to minimize that gray area. So when we think about our employee handbook and our PTO and HR policies, minimizing gray area and minimizing subjectivity is a really important goal for us because that also minimizes the chance of an unfair or disproportionately negative impact happening to one person or one group. And I think this is something like, you see this in salary negotiations too. Who negotiates the highest salaries? Well, it’s the person who is coming from the most typical tech dude background most of the time.

And then there’s a lot of people who don’t have the knowledge that this is even an option, or the comfort with being pushy and who frankly would probably get penalized psychologically by the hiring manager for being pushy. Whereas I can go into negotiation and be pushy and people are like, “Oh, look at this guy, he’s really skilled, we should give him more.” We want to really eliminate that dynamic everywhere that we can. And I think on the worst case scenario for unlimited PTO is it a really amplifies those existing bad dynamics in the company, and it amplifies inequalities that already exist, and the company’s job should really be to reduce those rather than amplifying them whenever possible. With unlimited PTO, you think about, okay, well I have to first have the courage to ask my manager, then actually ask my manager, then they have to approve it.

Then there might be the sort of side eye that you described a few minutes ago, or there might be negative feedback from other team members or somebody else who is not really technically involved in the decision. But that vibe is part of the decision. Again, if everybody’s on board with the same plan, then it works really well. But I think that it is pretty unlikely that every single person at your company has the exact same internal assumptions about exactly how much and when you should take time off from work. From our standpoint, what we’ve done is implemented what I would describe as a flexible and non-subjective policy that I think still gives people a lot of control over their paid time off and also tries to get rid of these, in my opinion, just landmines of subjective decision making. The other thing that that actually is good for is, as a manager, I have fewer decisions to make because I’m not being asked to make as many subjective decisions.

And in fact, other team members often will approve PTO before I even see it because they’ve been authorized to say, “Well, are these three criteria met? Then this PTO gets approved.” So the way we do it is our employees accrue PTO on the basis of how many hours they work. So it’s something like one hour of PTO per 11 hours worked, which adds up to about 21 or 22 days over the course of a full-time year if you’re working 40 hours per week. Basically more than four weeks of paid time off is going to get accrued. And we also have 15 paid holidays on top of that so you’re in the 35 or 36 day zone. And then we also have family and medical leave, which is separate from PTO, so that would be a hospitalization or a new child or something like that.

So if you think about the paid time off policy, basically, rather than making it unlimited, we just make it generous and accrued in a way that is applied equally to everyone. And that way that we have employees who don’t work 40 hours a week, they might work 20 or 25 or 37, they’re going to accrue PTO at the same rate based on their hours worked as everybody else. So you always have of a properly proportional amount of paid time off and it is yours and it is your money. The way I look at it is that once you have earned it, you can use it whenever you want. I think one area that we differ significantly is that if you as an employee have accrued a PTO balance, there is no opportunity for your manager to veto your use of that PTO, right?

And I think that is really the kind of key change that we’ve made that doesn’t exist at many other companies as far as I know. In other words, let’s say you have eight hours of PTO on your balance and you say, “Hey Rob, I want to take off the rest of the day at half day tomorrow,” you’re telling me you’re not asking me. And that is how it’s supposed to … how it’s intended within the company because it’s like, “Hey, this is my time and my money.” Obviously you don’t want to abandon a client, like if you just suddenly closed out Zoom mid meeting and told the client you were taking the rest of the day off. That might be a little weird, but we want you to be able to be flexible. So as long as you have that balance, you can use it, and you can submit an automated … They call it a request, but really it’s more like a notification, and then it goes through our systems and it deducts from your balance and that’s yours.

So I think there’s pros and cons to every system. And again, certainly there are scenarios where somebody could get more total time off in the unlimited PTO regime if it all worked out. But what we provide is essentially … What’s the word? Unstoppable PTO or unvetoable PTO, right? Where basically you can say, “Hey, I’ve got a balance, I’m going to take tomorrow off,” or whatever, and it’s yours and it’s your choice to do that, right? And no, nobody’s giving you the side eye because everybody has that same deal. I think that’s really helped everybody with work life balance. And as I mentioned, it’s really made life easier as a manager too, because I don’t have to think about that stuff. I don’t have to subjectively say, “Well, is Monet doing this and Brian’s doing that, and is that an indication that one person is more dedicated than the other?” It’s like, no, this is the deal and we’re just all following through with the deal that already exists.

Monet Davenport:Thank you for listening up to this point. Press The Issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do, now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash, visit LearnDash.com. Our mission at MasterWP is to bring new voices into WordPress and tech every day. The new MasterWP Workshop series does just that. Our new live and recorded workshops on everything from code to design to business, turn WordPress fans into WordPress experts, find the workshop for you @workshops.masterwp.com. Use the code podcast10 for a 10% discount. Now back to the podcast.

Monet Davenport:

I wanted to touch on a couple of things that you mentioned from an employee standpoint once again, and having that balance there is super important. A better way to phrase that term, unlimited PTO might be, like you said, inevitable PTO. Because there are limits at the end of the day, but the time you earn off is sort of proportionate to how hard you work as an employee. So that could be a great incentive for an employee where they talk to themselves and they say, “Okay, if I power through this week, I get this project done, I get these tasks done and knocked out, that’s going to benefit me in the long run because I’m accruing PTO that I can use for vacation or an emergency,” or like you said in the end, we can cash it out if we would like to. Those are some pretty great benefits from my perspective. And also having things set up where you mentioned applying for time off is more like a notification than waiting for an approval.

It kind of creates this unspoken sense of trust between an employee and an employer because on the flip side, when you have a finite amount of PTO, like say two weeks a year, like a lot of these companies offer, even in that situation, there can be this unspoken dynamic where your boss can say, “Well, I have to approve it if you want to use it,” even though it’s your time to use. And it kind of reminds me of a meme I saw where it said like, “Me waiting for my boss to approve my PTO request,” and it shows them already sitting in the plane looking out the window. Basically saying whether you approve it or not, I’m still going. Anyway, all jokes aside, it’s unfortunate that that dynamic has to exist with an employee and employer. But I can honestly say from my perspective, since I’ve been working here, having that flexibility has really done wonders for my productivity because once you come back from your time off, you’re refreshed and you’re ready to tackle the next thing on your plate.

Rob Howard:And I think looking back before I was an employer, this was one of the most miserable experiences of knowing … I worked at a newspaper once and newspapers publish every day. So they were like, “Well, you’re the lowest ranking person, so you have to work on Thanksgiving and Christmas,” and all these other things. And I’m just like, I’m not really into this structure of not having control over my own time. I want to make sure that everything that we’re doing, I think holistically gives employees a lot of feeling of ownership over how the company operates, over the ability to transparently see the inner workings of things. And I think this is part of that, it plays into equal pay, it plays into profit sharing. And when you have a team who is clearly incentivized and empowered to do good things for the company, then these questions of like, Well, am I going to abuse my two weeks of PTO,” kind of becomes moot points because …

It’s not impossible to have somebody who would try to abuse a system. But I think we have so many incentives and have built a company culture around everybody being here for everybody else, and understanding how the company operates and how to move the company forward, that I see that as a very low risk thing. Whereas I think a lot of managers are constantly paranoid that their employees are somehow cheating them. And you even hear that from some company owners, especially with the whole hybrid work versus returning to the office stuff. You can see these owners and managers who are just in a extreme state of paranoia, in my opinion, where they’re like, “Are people doing work? Can you have a camera up on your computer all day, every day?” And I think all these things are touching on the same dynamic. And again, to take it back to the unlimited pay time off idea, if you are in a good place with your team, it can be great, but the moment you have that paranoid manager, the whole promise of unlimited PTO falls apart pretty quickly, right?

Monet Davenport:Yeah, you’re right. And just the whole dynamic of working in a team environment, it just makes it so much more stressful when you feel like you have somebody watching over your shoulder, whether you’re working in a physical office or working from home. It’s just not a good feeling. And you could be one of the most productive employees in your job, whether you’re a designer or developer on the team. But just having that feeling of being watched, it really can affect the work that you do.

Rob Howard:And the other thing I would add is that in addition to that surveillance problem, surveillance clearly reduces employee morale. But the other thing that clearly reduces morale is an awareness of vague inequities between employees. And I think that the unlimited PTO thing, the Achilles heel is that you’re always going to end up treating one employee significantly differently than another in an unlimited PTO system because there’s always going to be somebody who asks for more or needs more. And because you’re not metering it or measuring it in any way, I think it inevitably creates weird vibes between people, right? Whereas if we have a measurable, transparent system, there may be somebody who would actually really have loved to have a little bit more time, or didn’t need all their time and it rolled over to the next year.

But what we can say is that despite people having different lifestyle needs or different lifestyle goals outside of work, everyone is being treated equally from a pay standpoint, including their PTO. I think that that gives everybody at the company, not just between the employees and managers, but really the whole team holistically … We kind of all have the same vision for how we operate, and what the rules are and what the expectations are. And I barely need to do anything with PTO because it just is a system that everybody is aware of and it works. It takes me out as the veto point in 99% of situations unless there’s some weird, very strange edge case. And then it gives everybody the comfort that the system is set up in a way that treats everybody equally and fairly. And again, I think that really does wonders for everybody’s comfort and morale with not just time off, but really every interaction that we have as a team.

Monet Davenport:Absolutely. And I feel like this discussion we’re having is just scratching the surface of some of your thoughts because we do have some other episodes that go a little deeper into some of these related topics like equal pay, and I believe we have one on pay transparency where a couple of our HDC employees talk about their experiences and thoughts on that. But I feel like we could talk another 30 minutes to an hour about these things.

Rob Howard:Absolutely. It seems simple, but there’s so much to unpack and there’s just so many old fashioned or old school approaches that seem normal, but in fact, in my view at least, should probably go by the wayside. Not just because they’re not good for employees, but because sort of selfishly as a manager, it makes my life easier too. The fewer decisions I have to make, the less friction I have, the better everything is going to be, and the more we can just put our heads down and do great creative and technical work. I think that the future hopefully, will be more along the lines of this team empowerment and employee empowerment angle, and I think hopefully we will prove that this is a winning formula, and everybody else will adopt these ideas and bring them over to their own companies.

Monet Davenport:I totally agree. Well, I think that’s a great point where we can kind of wrap up and tie everything together. Overall, we talked about Rob’s philosophy on using what he calls unvetoable paid time off, how it’s benefited employees, including myself. It really creates an environment where you not only feel trusted as an employee, but where you can successfully work toward a goal with a team without feeling like you’re under surveillance. And especially now that we’re living in times where it’s post pandemic technically, but sometimes these emergencies and things can come up that needs to be taken care of. And working in a job where you have that flexibility and can feel trusted is really a wonderful thing. I really appreciate you taking time to chat, Rob, and we’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts as well. What do you think of this matter of unlimited PTO? Go ahead and tweet us at _MasterWP and let us know. We’re looking forward to discussing this further with you guys. You all have a wonderful rest of your day. And Rob, thank you again.

Rob Howard:My pleasure. Always great talking to you and looking forward to next time.

Monet Davenport:Thank you for listening to this episode Press the Issue is a production of MasterWP, produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted, edited, and musically supervised by Monet Davenport and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit MasterWP.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news @masterwp.com.

The post Unlimited Paid Time Off appeared first on MasterWP.

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Top Takeaways* Nyasha attended the All Things Open conference recently, which focuses on the tools, processes and people making open source possible. * Highlights for her included the sense of community, the prioritized diversity, and the unique programming – like the Shark Tank-esque competition * Allie and Nyasha discuss the results of a conference like this: learning about buying power, connecting with sponsors, and feeling seen at a tech conference.

Press These Links* All Things Open 2022 * Nyasha’s tweet about Colby Fayock’s session * Nyasha’s tweet about Nithya Ruff’s session

Allie Nimmons: Hey, Nyasha.

Nyasha Green: Hey, Allie. How are you?

Allie Nimmons: I’m great. I’m so excited to be talking with you. We haven’t had time to catch up in a minute so I’m super glad that we’re on the podcast together today.

Nyasha Green: Yes, I’ve been excited all week. So yes, me too.

Allie Nimmons: Nice. Well, I wanted to ask you about something that you just did that is super big and fun and exciting. You went to All Things Open, which is an event I’ve never been to and I’m so curious to hear all about it. You did write an article for it for the MasterWP blog, which I’ll definitely link in the show notes of this episode, but I wanted to hear even more about your experiences. Can you tell me and everybody listening just a little bit about what All Things Open is and just describe the event a little bit?

Nyasha Green: Yeah. So All Things Open is a tech conference and it is dedicated to all things open-source. So they are the biggest one on the East Coast and we have companies that come from all over, smaller companies, but also the big names as well. So Google sponsors the event, IBM, which has a campus in Raleigh, North Carolina as well. Oh yeah, it takes place in Raleigh, North Carolina every year.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, we should say it was a in-person event, you actually got to go, it wasn’t an online thing.

Nyasha Green: Yeah. And you could watch it online too if you couldn’t attend. But yeah, it definitely was in-person and this conference means a lot to me because it was the first ever tech conference I ever went to years ago.

Allie Nimmons: Wow.

Nyasha Green: The company I was working for at the time who taught me WordPress, they were actually there, we got to hang out as well. They sent me there and they were like, “You need to get used to tech conferences.” And I was a newbie and I was like, “Well, I guess.” It’s like a networking event and I’m an extrovert so I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll go.” And I was just in love with it, All Things Open is diverse, there are so many people that look like me there, which you don’t see a lot at a lot of tech events. It’s something that just blew my mind the first time I saw it, just the different people, people are so friendly. And that’s subjective and people are friendly or not friendly everywhere, but I don’t know if it’s the North Carolina spirit or just how awesome the conference is, the people are friendly, it’s large, it’s a lot to do, but it’s also extremely organized. So it is just an amazing, diverse ode to open-source type of conference.

Allie Nimmons: Nice. That’s so cool. Yeah, I remember hearing about it in previous years and being really interested in it and I’m always fascinated because my introduction to tech conferences were WordCamps for sure. And I feel like I’ve only been to one in-person, non-WordPress event, that was the Grace Hopper celebration in Texas a few years ago. And I’m always so curious about what other tech conferences do that are different from WordPress events. If you could bring your experience back from ATO and sit down with a bunch of WordCamp organizers, what would you bring to that table to say, “Hey look, WordPress events are great, but here’s what ATO is really blowing out of the park that we should also be adopting as an open-source community.”

Nyasha Green: Yeah. So the biggest thing I saw that I would love to see at more WordCamps is the way they networked. And we do a lot of networking at WordCamps, a tech conference or a get together is at its heart a networking event. But the way they do it at All Things Open, it was like I felt like I was living in the future even though it’s the now because one of the things they did was we had QR codes on our badges and you could opt-out of it if you did not want to participate, but of course I did and you could scan it and a lot of tables that you went to talk to different companies, they would scan your badge, ask you if you want to keep in touch or get more information about them and as soon as they scanned it, the information just instantly transferred.

So that cut back on a lot of carrying around business cards and trash because tech conferences, they have a lot of trash afterwards, people don’t keep all the business cards, they don’t keep all the paper. So that was very environmentally friendly, I was like, “Yes, this is great.” But also in doing that, you have but five, 10 minutes, maybe max at a conference to talk to these companies and you can’t get all of the information from them in that little bit of time. So having this fast and easy exchange of information so you can dive in a little deeper and maybe follow up with them.

And this was last week, this week Monday, I got four or five emails from companies and tables I talked to and they were like, “Hey, we wanted to give you a few days to relax, de-stress from All Things Open and we just wanted to reach out and say, ‘We appreciate you talking to us and would you like to know more?'” That was perfect. My memory is pretty good, but I didn’t remember everybody I talked to but that was just reinforcing that they want a relationship with me, they want to network, they want to grow their company, they want to grow my knowledge of them and open-source and I thought it was incredible.

Allie Nimmons: That is really cool. That sounds like such a less stress way as well because I feel like if I’m talking to a company or if I get a marketing email like that from a company, there’s this feeling of transactionality and impersonal vibes and that just seems so much more personal, so much more respectful too of your time and stuff like that. That’s such a cool way to go about it. I’m curious about the actual subject matter of the talks and the programming and stuff like that, can you tell me about a couple? I know that you talked about some of those in your article I believe, but can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the talks or the speakers that stood out to you?

Nyasha Green: So I had two talks in particular that I really liked. The first one, I’m willing to admit I’m biased because it was the only talk about WordPress at the conference, which it did surprise me. Yeah, it surprised me, WordPress did not have a large presence at the conference and that blew my mind because it’s WordPress, open-source.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, I wonder why that is.

Nyasha Green: Yeah. But we did have Colby, I think his name is Colby Fayock, he did a talk about scaling WordPress with Next.js, which is an extremely technical talk, unless it’s something I’m specifically doing at a conference, I don’t super-duper, specific technical talks or if it’s something I’m interested in, a side project. But I wanted to check it out again because it was the only thing that talked about WordPress, but his talk was actually really amazing and he talked about how there are many content management systems out there, but you have to know, even though WordPress is I guess older in tech years now, it’s still king. That was what he said. And it was awesome because he was doing things with WordPress that I had never done and he was coding, integrating more JavaScript into WordPress and I thought it was great and we fight with people on Twitter about that because we’re loyal to PHP.

But the way he sat down, there was no arguing, there was no saying this is better, it was just like, “Hey, you should try this out.” And that was pretty much the attitude of the conference. I go to some conferences and there’s this attitude that if you’re not doing this then you’re old fashioned, you’re old, you’re not doing the best, you’re not using the best technology. And it was nothing like that because I never would’ve tried to try gelling WordPress with Next.js. But listening to him, it was something I said, once I make time in my busy life that I actually really want to try. So that was a really awesome talk. My second, which was my most favorite, was going beyond code, why all contributions matter in open-source. And this is by, I think her name is Nithya Ruff, I’m so sorry if I get your name wrong.

But she did an awesome talk, basically it was a pitch to get people or how you pitch people into getting more involved in open-source contribution. And it stuck out a lot to me because in WordPress recently we’ve been arguing about Five for the Future and just overall, how do we get more people to contribute to the WordPress project? And although this was about open-source in general, so many things she said can apply to how we talk to people when we want them to contribute to the WordPress project more. She talked about, you get to work with people all over the world. If you’re, again, a people person like me, I love meeting people, especially from different places, from different cultures who speak different languages, who do different things. That’s something you can work on and collaborate and know that you’re not just doing something in a bubble, you’re working on a project with people all over the world.

She also talked about how it helped imposter syndrome. Everybody goes through it sometimes, I go through it sometimes, my mentees, they tell me all the time they go through it. She talked about how contributions helped with imposter syndrome because you could take that contribution and look at it like this, “Hey, I’m in the midst of hundreds or thousands of people all over the world who are contributing to this big thing. It’s important, I’m important and I belong here.” And I thought that was amazing, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to the WordPress core right now to start [inaudible 00:10:43].”

Allie Nimmons: Yes. I love that.

Nyasha Green: And it wasn’t even about WordPress. So her talk was so motivating and I had one of my mentees actually got to drive up too and go to the conference and she sat in the talk with me and imposter syndrome was something she was dealing with very badly. And even coming to the conference, she was like, “I think I’m going to be overwhelmed, I’m not going to belong.” And she got up and was clapping at the end of the talk because she was like, “Yeah, I know what I want to do, I’m motivated, I can do this.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’ve been telling you that. But it’s okay.”

Allie Nimmons: That’s the best part of going to any event is that sense of motivation that you get.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening up to this point. Press the Issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do, now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash, visit Learndash.com. Press the Issue is also sponsored by Gravity Forms. For a limited time from November 21st to 30th, get 50% off all new Gravity Forms licenses during Black Friday. Capture leads, create surveys, accept payments or design complex custom solutions with Gravity Forms, the number one form builder for WordPress. The sale runs from November 21st to 30th, don’t miss out. Our mission at MasterWP is to bring new voices into WordPress and tech every day. The new MasterWP Workshop series does just that. Our new live and recorded workshops on everything from code to design, to business, turn WordPress fans into WordPress experts. Find the workshop for you at Workshops.masterwp.com. Use the code Podcast 10 for a 10% discount. Now back to the podcast.

Allie Nimmons: Not to go too off topic, but I just feel like when people come in to these events and they talk about… It’s like they point at you and they say, “I know what your fear is or I know what your reservation is and here’s why you should just do it.” It feels like they’re talking directly to you. And I remember at WordCamp US a couple months ago, going to see our friend Ebony talk about streaming as a developer. And it was like a lightning talk, it was 15 minutes. By the end of it, I’m looking, how do you start a Twitch channel? I want to start streaming.

I don’t even know what I would talk about on a Twitch stream, but I was like, “I want to do what she’s doing” I was so inspired and I think that I was going to ask you how it felt. I mean, you went to WordCamp US, we were both there together, in this glorious post-pandemic world that we’re in right now, how did it feel just being around all of these other people in person and hearing and seeing all of this content in person as opposed to a Twitter thread or a blog post or online workshop or something like that?

Nyasha Green: You could feel the energy being around the people. The motivation, the passion, you can tell people really cared about what they were doing and also that they cared about getting you to care about what they’re doing. Sometimes we see speakers that get up, they talk just to talk because they love to hear their own their voices or they’re just, “I’m important.” These people were like, “Yeah, this is rad, but what if you thought it was rad?” You’re like, “Me?” And they’re like, “Yeah, you.” And I’m like, “I don’t know. Yeah, let’s do this.” So the energy just being in person was unreal. And again, just culminating with seeing so many diverse groups of people, like brown and black people and women.

And another thing about All Things Open, they have a large commitment to diversity. The first day of the conference, the entire day is dedicated to diversity, to inclusion, to why it matters. Not just saying, “Diversity, let’s do it, yeah.” No, there are talks on why they matter, why you should attend DEI talks, why diversity and inclusion makes your company better, why it makes the world better. They get people to talk, they sponsor an underrepresented tech scholarship, which my mentee actually got, where they’ll pay for your ticket. They put their money where their mouths are, which is big here at MasterWP, we really feel for that and they do it. I never felt like I was not wanted at this tech conference or that I was a number or that I was a figure. Every person I met, every booth I went to, every person I talked to, they were like, “You know what? We’re so glad you here, we want you to keep coming back and this is why.” And it blew my mind, I felt so loved.

Allie Nimmons: It really amplifies the vibes when there’s people around you, that look like you and talk like you and sound like you and that you can find that. I mean, I definitely felt that with WordCamp US this year, having our Black Press group there. It was unlike anything I’d experienced at a camp because of that level of diversity and that feeling of belonging. And that’s just so cool to know that the whole event was like that, it wasn’t just one group, the whole event was that welcoming. That’s so beautiful.

I also wanted to ask you, you mentioned there was some special programming or there was a special kind of way that they did a panel that you started telling me about and I wanted to hear more about that because I always get really excited when conference organizers are able to think outside the box and think, “Okay. Well, the bread and butter of the event is people sitting in a room watching a person speak about XYZ for 30 minutes to an hour.” But I love when they’re able to come up with other ways to either deliver that information or allow people to connect. So what is some of the special programming that you hadn’t seen before that they did at ATO?

Nyasha Green: Yes. So this was probably my favorite thing about ATO. One of the nights of the conference, they had part of a hallway blocked off and it was for people who had startups and they wanted to get funding for. So the purpose of it was to help them learn how to market and sell their startups. They actually went through a program and it was sponsored by a company called RIoT Labs based out of Raleigh, North Carolina. But we went through and there was a hallway with booths on both sides, they had refreshments as well. And they gave us fake money, they gave us bucks to give to those startups. So we would go to the table, they would pitch their ideas to us, if we liked it, we would give them some of the fake money as a way of financing their startup.

Allie Nimmons: So pretend Shark Tank sort of?

Nyasha Green: Yes, it was like Shark Tank. And they actually had a Shark Tank too, honestly.

Allie Nimmons: What?

Nyasha Green: Yeah, they had a Shark Tank type of thing too.

Allie Nimmons: With real money?

Nyasha Green: I don’t know, I think it was. I missed that one, I think it was the second day, I came in the third day, but they had a Shark Tank too. But yeah, that was a group Shark Tank where people walked around and it was so cool because it helped them, but it also helped us as well as people in tech going around to see that and to see how maybe we have ideas of our own that we want to get started. And it was just so creative and the three that I gave my money to were incredible. There was one who developed a program to help doctors gauge the pain of patients so that they can cut back on people who are getting addicted to opiates.

And it came from them being first responders, these guys were first responders and also in tech and they used that to come up with a program or technology that they want to use to do a startup now. And I was blown away, I was like, “This is freaking amazing.” And even if they didn’t win the contest and have the most fake bucks, they were exposed to all of these tech professionals from all over, major companies like Google, Amazon, IBM, even if they didn’t win the contest, I’m pretty sure that these little startups still will get some type of funding and attention and it’s amazing to put on something like that. And again, it goes into their networking and community feel like, “Hey, you’re important. Let’s be a part of this, let’s work together, let’s get your ideas out there.”

Allie Nimmons: That’s what I was thinking too, as an attendee, I feel like there’s such empowerment in that in terms of reminding you that as a user of open-source software or any software or any technology, you’re buying power is important, right?

Nyasha Green: Yes.

Allie Nimmons: Your money is important, where you decide to spend your money and investments is super important. And there are other real people on the other side of that investment that you should be considering. And I feel like that’s such a cool almost social experiment because it would totally make me think about, “Oh man, I just be throwing my money all over the place.” I need to be thinking more about how I’m investing in myself and in other people and stuff like that. So cool.

Nyasha Green: It definitely did and it gave me the chance to pretend to be a venture capitalist and that was pretty cool.

Allie Nimmons: To see your future ahead of you, right?

Nyasha Green: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Allie Nimmons: All right. Well, Nyasha, thank you so much for telling me about this conference. I mean, you’ve passed on the vibes, you’ve passed on the inspiration. After we hit stop on the recording, I’m about to go and try and figure out how I’m going to get to see the event next year because I’ve always wanted to go and I’ve always been like, “I’ll go eventually.” But 2023, I’ll be there.

Nyasha Green: Awesome. And so we will link up, it’ll be great.

Allie Nimmons: Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you everyone so much for listening, I hope everyone has found it helpful. If you went to All Things Open and you’re listening, tweet at us at MasterWP or me and Nyasha and let us know what you think.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press the Issue is a production of MasterWP. Produced by Allie Nimmons. Hosted, edited and musically supervised by Monet Davenport. And mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit MasterWP.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at Masterwp.com.

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Top Takeaways* Brian and Teron recall their impressions of 6.1 from the WCUS Q&A with Matt Mullenweg * They discuss stand out features, accessibility, and what’s going on under the hood. * Also determined – to what extent does this release move WordPress forward?

Press These Links* Download WordPress 6.1 now * Version 6.1 details * Matt Mullenweg’s 6.1 announcement from WCUS

With every new version of WordPress comes an array of changes, updates, and adjustments. Understanding each and every change and how they affect your sites can be daunting. So join Brian and Teron as they discuss the most exciting things coming to WordPress in 6.1.

Teron Bullock: How you doing today, Brian?

Brian Coords: I’m doing good. How are you doing today?

Teron Bullock: I’m well. I’m excited. I know we have a great conversation today. We’re going to talk about WordPress 6.1, and I’m excited to jump into it.

Brian Coords: Yeah, I’m excited too. This is kind of a pretty cool release, and I feel like there’s a lot to talk about coming out with WordPress 6.1.

Teron Bullock: All right, so let’s get right into it. So, I want to paint the picture for everyone. We were both at WordCamp US in San Diego, and we were sitting outside the conference doors, and we were all waiting for Matt Mullenweg to come in and give us this announcement, as he normally does to end the WordCamps. Do you know what they call it, his address? I can’t remember the exact name, but I know-

Brian Coords: Yeah, so it used to be that he would give a speech called the State of the Word, where he would talk about the full year, but in the last few years they’ve separated that. So the State of the Word usually happens now in December, and so he’ll probably do a small presentation then, and this one was really mostly a Q and A with just a short presentation at the beginning. And I think they just called it Q and A with Matt Mullenweg.

Teron Bullock: Right. So we’re waiting on this Q and A from Matt, and it seemed like the anticipation in the room was surreal. It’s weird because on one hand, you had … It was like almost had a fever pitch, you had so many people who were just chomping at the bits trying to figure out, can we get in the room? What is he going to say? What’s going to happen? But then you had other people who were kind of like, “All right, here’s another conversation, here’s another address,” yada, yada, yada, like, “What can we expect?” So you had the people who were super excited, but then you had other people who were almost waiting to be disappointed.

And I found it, because this is my first WordCamp US, and so I found it to be really intriguing. I was one of the people that was on the side of like, okay, I’m expecting to see Elvis, Tupac, and Michael Jackson on stage or something, because it just was like really motivating to see as many people who were waiting to hear what people had to say about WordPress. And so I’m wondering, what was your experience before we even got into that room?

Brian Coords: Yeah, well it comes at the end of the conference, so you’ve been there for a couple of days, and like every conference, it’s very exciting, but it’s also very exhausting. So you’re, a lot of socializing, a lot of talking to people, a lot of walking around, a lot of late nights, those sorts of things. So I’m sure I came into it a little bit exhausted and worn down, but also, it’s your one chance to see the defacto leader of WordPress sort of engage with the community. He’s a very busy person, so he has a lot of other companies and social platform to run, so I think people just like to see where his head’s at, what he’s thinking about, what he’s focusing on, because it’s kind of your one opportunity, apart from the State of the Word and apart from sometimes he does another Q and A at the WordCamp Europe, but that’s really in the US that one opportunity to see, what is he going to talk about? What are people going to ask him about? What is the topic of conversation in WordPress?

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. So we get into the room, we all sit down, and then it’s like a quiet comes over the room, and he’s addressed or announced. And then like you said, this presentation shows up on the screen, and it’s WordPress 6.1. And when that presentation first rolled out, what was your initial thoughts?

Brian Coords: Yeah, well the first thing I remember seeing, and I have a pretty terrible memory, but what I remember was a sort of animated video I think that showed a lot of the new features, and it ended with one of those slides that’s sort of like you see in Apple commercials or an Apple presentations where it’s one image and it shows maybe 10 or 12 features with kind of bright colors and icons and things like that to kind of highlight them.

So I remember seeing that, and my initial response was just seeing that it was all features for the block editor. It was really all features that were very Gutenberg-centric, and there are a lot of really great Gutenberg features in this release, but there’s actually a ton of other features that people should really get excited about that maybe weren’t featured in there, which a lot of them maybe aren’t as visual and exciting to look at as these Gutenberg features, but I just remember thinking, “Oh, this is very, very much centered on one part of WordPress,” which is the visual design tools that are coming out in WordPress, the spacing and the layouts and the templates and stuff.

And so those things made a really good image and are really cool looking, but it also didn’t have … Sometimes Apple will show another slide with just a giant list of like, “Oh, and we did about 300 performance fixes,” or whatever, and I think I would’ve loved to see that too, because I think people would’ve been pretty surprised that there’s a lot of under the hood developer-centric stuff coming out as well.

Teron Bullock: I agree. I think that it definitely leaned heavy on the block editor, and I think I got the initial impression that, like you said you had, which was, is there anything else? Not that the block editor is a good or a bad thing, that’s obviously personal preference. I just, I felt kind of like since we’re a agency that obviously … I shouldn’t say obviously, but we’re an agency that uses the classic editor a lot. And so I found myself saying, “Where do we fit in, in this update?”

Brian Coords: Yeah, and I was just going to say, and even, I don’t even know if I’d say that we use the classic editor a lot, but we use ways around the block editor a lot. You know? Sometimes we use the block editor and sometimes we use a lot of custom fields and things like that, where you’re not seeing the block editor or the classic editor, but you’re seeing custom fields and sort of like deeper developer integrations too.

Teron Bullock: That’s actually a good point. So I guess moving a little bit further into the conversation of this update, and it looks like the direction that clearly WordPress is moving into, which is using this block editor, when we look at the methodology like we use, using the ACF fields, and like you said, we’re kind of negating either the classic editor or the block editor, do you see a future in this particular approach or do you think that we may have to adjust a little bit and move more towards the block editor?

Brian Coords: I think that eventually the block editor will be the only way to build a WordPress website. I do think that. I think that that’s, it’s going to get there. And when I look at this release, 6.1, what it feels like to me is … It’s kind of a cleanup release where there’s not one or two big cool new features particularly. There’s definitely a lot of cool new stuff, but there’s nothing groundbreakingly new, but instead there’s a ton of just necessary improvements to everything in the block editor. So, all the settings for all the different blocks are so much more consistent with 6.1 than they were before. Things like spacing, margins, padding, typography, things that people have been pretty vocal that are important, those are more consistently applied to blocks, and there’s some really cool ways that you can control and change things like spacing, things like fluid typography.

So I think what’s going to happen is the block editor will get to a place where it will actually be a better experience to develop for than using ACF fields, and most people will move to a place where you’re using the block editor and you’re using ACF fields for your blocks, and really getting the best of both worlds. And it’s releases like this with all the little like, just getting things into a better shape that was really needed, and so I think that that’s what we’re seeing here.

Teron Bullock: Okay. So for anyone who envisions a future where they’re afraid that ACF fields may be taken away, the way that you at least see it right now is that that’s not something they should have to worry about.

Brian Coords: No. I mean, the funny thing about the classic editor is it’s a plugin that you can turn on, but all the plugin does is just turn off the block editor and bring back what’s already still in WordPress, which is seeing a WordPress post without the block editor. So that feature’s still in WordPress core, and WordPress will never take away something that it already gave you because they’re very committed to backwards compatibility, so I don’t think you … I would be surprised if anyone ever couldn’t possibly use Advanced Custom Fields with no block editing at all. I think that feature will always still be there.

But I think that as technology improves, as people who grew up using smartphones and apps and things like that become the dominant people in the economy, I think what’s going to happen is people are just going to look at a website built with a bunch of custom fields and feel like it’s not good enough for them. It’s not modern enough. Why do I have to fill out something here and then go to another page and edit it there?

And so I can see that the block editor is trying to solve that and trying to make editing your website feel very fast and modern and visual, and I think the only issue is that it’s just not there yet. It’s just, I wouldn’t say go use it for every website right now, but I could see if they do more releases like this that really do a lot of things under the hood and a lot of things across all of the block editor, I could see us getting to that place.

Teron Bullock: Yeah, I like it. I honestly think that with releases like this, which we’ll get more into in probably further releases, I think that the road map that they have ahead is a good one where you can have the no code approach, but you also going to have developers use the same tool and still create beautiful websites in the process.

So I want to just move forward just a little bit and go into the different categories that they’ve improved upon with this release. So, we came up with four different areas, one being the block editor, the other being the default theme, three being the performance, and four being other developer stuff. So let’s start with one, since we have been talking with the block editor, which is what would be the, I guess the number one feature that stands out to you in that category?

Brian Coords: Well, I think for me, I think that one of the things that’s made the block editor hard from a developer point of view is that in WordPress we’re very used to being able to control everything as a developer, so I can use filters and I can use actions to really change anything in WordPress. I can change what happens when someone logs in. I can change what happens when you save a post. I can do all of that because WordPress is extremely extensible and that’s like the power of it.

And so I think a lot of developers feel like they’re not really sure they can do a lot of that with the block editor. But in this release, we’re starting to see some of that stuff come out. So there’s, just like WordPress has hooks, there’s stuff coming out with React hooks, which are just ways where you can kind of mess with blocks and sort of customize them using hooks and filters in React the same way you do in PHP.

There’s options getting a lot better for locking blocks or controlling what parts of blocks can be edited, controlling templates so that your end user could edit the content or swap out an image, but they can’t move things around or change the layout or that sort of thing.

So, a lot of those things that developers really were used to controlling with ACF fields and writing your own code, we’re starting to see the progress of that come out in the block editor. And then along with that, a lot of the backend tools that you can use to create blocks or things like that are getting really good too, and so a lot of that stuff is happening and that’s that kind of developer stuff that’s going to eventually become so good and powerful and easy to use that it’ll feel just like WordPress usually feels.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. I want to expand on one of those updates that you said, which was the ability to lock the blocks and allow certain content to be editable. This is a tricky conversation, but I guess my point of view is that I like this idea because there are certain clients that you will pass a site to and you want them to just be able to edit the content and nothing else. You don’t want the visuals to change. But then there are other clients who want to be able to change those blocks around and do different things, so I like the idea of being able to lock down certain content or certain structure, but then also allowing it to be available for other users.

Brian Coords: Yeah. One of the things that we do is we build a site for somebody who doesn’t know a lot about websites, and they want to know that what we built them is going to be fast, it’s going to be powerful, it’s going to show up in search results and have all of the correct SEO, it’s going to be accessible and use the correct tags in the correct place and that sort of thing.

So in that sense, a client of an agency doesn’t really want to be able to break their SEO, they don’t want to move things around so much that they can’t do all of these things. So I think what we’re seeing with the block editor is they’re creating all of the power to do anything you want, to build anything you want, but now they’re trying to bring in what developers want, which is the controls, the ability to lock it, the ability to quickly say, “This is editable, this isn’t. This stays here. Here’s some templates, put them in whatever order you want, but don’t break them,” that sort of thing.

So I think there’s definitely room to have all of the freedom and let the user do whatever they want, but in a lot of cases, the user doesn’t want that freedom. They want to know that an expert put their website together in a way where it’s going to check all those boxes.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. I think another update that I like the idea of is the ability to add specific things like margins and padding across blocks. I guess we’ll call them like global styles or settings across the blocks. I know that I’ve helped a couple of people who wanted to get introduced into WordPress and they started with the block editor, and the first question they had was, “Why doesn’t all these blocks, the particular blocks I’m using, why don’t they have margin? Or why are certain features showing up but then in other blocks they’re not there?” And I think that was very confusing, and I think that the streamlining of that is something that is going to be beneficial.

Brian Coords: Yeah, I think that’s probably the key feature for this release is just putting all of those in one place, and then if I can change the font here, why can’t I change it here? Those sorts of things. And it kind of goes both ways too because like we were saying before, I don’t build a site at an agency wanting somebody to be able to change the font. When I build a site at an agency, I want the font size, or I want to have limits to these things. I want to have a little bit of constraints around it. So that’s what we’re kind of seeing here is a lot of that freedom by making sure everything is consistent across all the blocks, but also the ability to control those.

And what’s cool is now when you build blocks with ACF and stuff like that, it’s pretty easy to say give me the same typography settings that the other blocks have, or give me the same alignment settings or padding settings, so you can just build your ACF blocks and say, I’m going to want typography, I’m going to want these things, and then it kind of just builds it in for you and it just kind of spits out a lot of the code that you would’ve had to write yourself anyway. So not only do those settings exist, but if you’re getting to the place of building your own blocks, you can also just use them, and they should hopefully just work right out of the box.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. If all goes well, I think that, like you said, that is definitely going to be a key feature. You had spoke a little bit earlier about the new addition to fonts. Could you expand on that a little bit more?

Brian Coords: So this is the fluid typography feature. This one, I put this, sometimes there’s categories of changes that are very cool, but I’m not … They don’t personally appeal to me because I’m not sure when I would use them. So another one was they added these kind of color filters to images a few releases back, these duotone filters. It’s a thing that looks really cool, but I’m not sure when I would use it, but I understand other people would use it. That’s how fluid typography is for me. I can’t wrap my head fully around why I would want it, but it’s a very cool feature.

But essentially, instead of font sizes that change at different view ports, so like I have a mobile font size and a tablet font size and a desktop font size, instead it’s almost like a very fluid scale where as the browser slowly shrinks in size, the font kind of slowly shrinks in size as well. So if people are loading in those, you know those weird angles, like somebody loads a website on their phone but then they turn their phone sideways and you didn’t really design for that size and it looks a little funky, so fluid typography helps in those situations because the font size will be a little bit bigger, but it won’t be tablet size bigger where it’s suddenly too big. And so it’s definitely a cool kind of modern CSS feature that it’s there if you want to use it.

Teron Bullock: I think that also helps for the non-developer to kind of deal with the issue of responsive design. So you know, you could still switch those font sizes, but you don’t have to know a lot of code in order to make this happen.

Brian Coords: Yeah. And there’s been a few popular full site editing themes that I’ve tested out where I go down on mobile and then the title of an article is just so big it’s like one word per line. And that looked super cool on a big desktop screen to have this giant title font, you know? But on the mobile screen it’s like, it’s just a little ridiculous. So I can see something like fluid typography being super helpful there where when I’m on a mobile phone, I don’t need a 72 point font for my post title.

Teron Bullock: Exactly.

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Teron Bullock: All right, so let’s move onto our second area, which is the new default theme. What stood out to you about this new default?

Brian Coords: Yeah, so there’s probably two, I think, killer parts of the default theme. The first one is that when you submit a theme to the repository, you can tag your theme to be accessibility ready, which means that it meets a very strict set of standards for accessibility. When we took over the Understrap theme, that was one of the first things we did was go through and do a ton of changes just so we could earn that accessibility ready tag, which just means kind of going above and beyond everywhere in the theme to make sure it’s going to be accessible if somebody uses it just by default.

So the new theme that’s coming out with this new release is going to have accessibility ready as its tag, which is, I think, the first time this has happened for a WordPress core theme, and including the fact that they went back and applied it to the previous theme as well. So, last year’s theme will also be accessibility ready, but this is the first year that we’re seeing that on the default themes. So it’s just really cool because it’s … There’s no reason the default theme should not be accessibility ready, honestly, so it’s pretty cool that they just finally sat down and said, “Let’s just make sure this is going to happen.”

Teron Bullock: I agree. According to their notes, they said that they took care of 28 different tickets that expanded over 13 different components, so it looks like they really took the time to put the focus on accessibility, as they should.

Brian Coords: Yeah. And I think a lot of people are getting very vocal about accessibility, which is good because it’s just applying a lot of pressure to prioritize it because WordPress is made by contributors and, for the most part, companies sponsor a lot of those contributors, and so the more that people are vocal saying, “Hey, this is really important to us,” then the more we can hopefully pressure a lot of the big wealthier companies in the area to start putting people into those accessibility teams and making it more a part of the process.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. So with this default theme, what is it going to be, 2023 probably, if we’re going with the naming scheme convention that they’ve normally used, I’m sure that’s what they’re going to … Yeah, looking in the notes.

Brian Coords: Yeah.

Teron Bullock: 2023. So with the 2023 theme, do you think that this will be an answer to another theme like Hello theme or any other theme that one would use with a normal full site editing suite like Elementor?

Brian Coords: So yeah, that’s kind of the other big exciting thing about 2023 is that it comes with what they call these style variations where, instead of … It’s one theme, but it’s actually not very opinionated. The 2022 theme from last year was a really beautiful theme, but it was very opinionated in its design. Actually, I wouldn’t even say very, but it was opinionated in its design.

2023 kind of has almost no strong opinions about design, but then it comes with these dozen or so style variations where basically a bunch of settings in the block editor are set to different colors, different fonts, and they’re very curated by some really talented designers in the WordPress ecosystem. So you can install 2023, you can have a sort of blank canvas, or you can pick these sort of presets that will make your site look very cool, very different, very surprising that it’s all in one theme. And so I think long term, what that means is that 2023 could be that sort of starter theme for anybody who’s doing a new full site editing project, so in the same way that Astra or Hello work for Elementor and other page builders, you kind of want a theme sometimes that doesn’t have a lot of opinions and it just lets you kind of design the site the way you want. And so it’s really cool that it does that, but it also comes with these sort of preset style variations that can get you started.

Teron Bullock: And the importance to something like that for anybody who may be new to WordPress is that the way WordPress is designed is that you can’t use WordPress unless you have a theme. So, having a theme that doesn’t restrict you in many ways, or like you said, it’s not very opinionated, allows you to be able to start building sites in the way you want without having to fight against the theme in order to do the things you would like to do.

Brian Coords: Yeah. And anybody who’s ever modified a site where they kind of picked an off-the-shelf theme and you’re trying to get it to do what you want, but it’s not really doing exactly what you want, and that’s kind of always been the struggle. Obviously in an agency, we want our themes to be extremely opinionated because our clients don’t want to change the design, they don’t want to break the brand guidelines, they don’t want to break the accessibility, but it’s nice to see that we can also have in this full site editing world something that you can start from scratch and then you could build something and potentially have those controls and locking mechanisms we talked about earlier, get more mature, then you can get it exactly how you want and then kind of freeze it there.

Teron Bullock: I like the idea of a theme that’s kind of like a Swiss Army knife of themes, you know, you can kind of use it in the way that you want to use it, a theme that can mature with you as you grow in your skills as a developer, or even if you’re a designer who builds sites. As you grow with WordPress, this theme should be able to grow with you.

Brian Coords: Yeah, and I think some of us get afraid of getting locked into, if you build a site with Elementor, you’re kind of locked into Elementor and you have to do things their way and make changes their way, and you don’t really have a lot of control about what comes out of the front end. So as long as the block editor keeps rendering very lean, clean code, which we didn’t talk about the Style Engine, but that’s another piece of this where the code that’s coming out of the front end in a block editor theme is for the most part really lean and clean and performant, then you’re not feeling like you’re trapped in, in somebody else’s tools that you … one of these themes that tries to do everything but ends up loading a ton of extra stuff you don’t need.

Teron Bullock: Let’s expand on that because is that something that is new to this update? Because I know that that is a problem with a lot of page builders is that they add a lot of bloat to code. So, you’re saying with this new Style Engine, or with the Style Engine, that a lot of the bloat has been taken away. So is that something that’s been added this go round or has it been there?

Brian Coords: So, the HTML that comes out of Gutenberg, the block editor, is generally very clean. So let’s say you wanted to make a heading tag, like an H1 on a page. If you’re using something like an Elementor or a Beaver Builder, you’ll have an H1, but then there’ll probably be like five or so divs that it’s nested inside because they need a div for the container and the row and the column and the controls and all these things, and so you end up with a lot of extra HTML on the page. Right?

So Gutenberg is very performant in that when you add a heading tag to a page, you’re getting your H1 tag, and usually like a little HTML comment that shows some of the settings but is hidden, and that’s it. And so it’s, in that sense, it’s a lot less code on the page.

So that’s kind of always been there from the beginning, I think because they have that goal in mind. That’s why some of the stuff takes a little longer than we would like. The Style Engine is a similar mindset, but for CSS. And so the idea here is normally WordPress would add a layer of CSS, and then if you want to overwrite it, you would add your themes CSS file, and you would just use more specific selectors, and you would write a selector that’s more specific and you would overwrite the CSS that was for the previous that was loaded from the core. And then a plugin might come in and say, actually, we’re going to add some extra even more specific CSS for how your buttons should look, how your forms should look. So, you’re just adding CSS on top of CSS.

The idea behind the Style Engine is, and this is very new in 6.1 and it still has a long way to go, but the idea here is if I know what blocks you have on the page and I know all of your style choices, I know what your padding and your margins and your font and your font sizes, and I know your colors and I know all of this, the Style Engine can just spit out the final necessary CSS for the blocks that are on that page and nothing else, and it can just generate that CSS on the fly, and you can add all of your opinions and your choices, but you’re not doing it by just layering extra files of CSS on top of each other. You’re doing it under the hood, doing all the work, and then only giving the end user the CSS that’s needed. So that’s just one example of where a major performance gain can happen through these tools as they get a little more mature.

Teron Bullock: That sounds very interesting. From a nerd’s perspective, I’m super curious to how they were able to accomplish this. Are they using JavaScript under the hood? What are they doing to be able to determine what blocks and what styles are on the page before they render out that CSS? Because if done incorrectly, then that could also work against you as far as performance.

Brian Coords: Yeah. So I’m not an expert. That’s a good question. I should look into how the Style Engine actually creates it and processes it, because that is interesting. What I know is that they’re, instead of writing CSS, you have to end up writing everything in these JSON files. So your theme has a theme.json file, your block has a block.json file, and you’ll basically, when you look at it, it’s actually like some of the ugliest code you’ve ever seen and it’s kind of like, oh, so like it’s a big JSON file and you’re adding all these settings deep down into it, and it’s not as fun as writing CSS and it’s not as intuitive.

But then in JavaScript, a machine can take all of that, do all of the work, spit out a style sheet that only has what’s necessary, and in the end of the day, the end user gets a better experience. So, it’s a completely different way to do things, but you can see the benefits if it’s powerful enough.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. So let’s move on to our third phase, which is performance, since we’re speaking about performance. They said that they took care of 45 different tickets and the most significant improvements happen to the WP_Query and also to the REST API. Would you care to speak on either one of those two?

Brian Coords: Yeah, so for performance, there’s kind of two interesting things to talk about. One is this WP_Query improvement, that essentially WordPress is always making gains in caching. And so one of the nice things about WordPress is you can jump in anywhere, you can figure out what the post is and get some extra data, and you can do all these kind of cool things with hooks and filters, but sometimes it ends up that you’re getting the same data from the database a ton of times.

So, one of the things they’re doing is, in the last few releases, just going through a lot of these places and just caching as much as possible so that if you run the same query more than once, the data is already sitting there. It doesn’t have to go to the database and do that whole process. And so that’s been happening. This release has it for WP_Query, which is sort of the central most important query happening in WordPress. So, it’s going to make probably a lot of peoples’ installations move a little bit faster, depending on, assuming everything was written the right way for your plugins, for your theme, that sort of stuff. But that should be a big performance improvement, just getting that query to be a little faster.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. Like you said, this is the most important query in WordPress, so if you can speed that up, then you’re speeding up the performance on the site overall.

Brian Coords: Yeah. And the improvements to the REST API, there’s a bunch of them, but they’re kind of similar in that thing of just let’s only load the data that we need and let’s cash it where we can, and they’re just improving a lot of that because if you use the block editor, you know that that’s constant usage of the REST API. So as much performance as they can put in there is going to make a lot of our lives a lot easier.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. And so closing out, moving to our last category, which is other developer things, other things developers may be interested in, if you could think about all of the updates that are in this new release for developers, what would you say is the one that sticks out to you the most?

Brian Coords: So I’m going to pick sort of a weird one. It’s not even that … It honestly doesn’t change anything but it’s … So for context, when you go into WordPress and you look at the list of all the posts on your site, that is called a List Table where it’s just literally an HTML table and it has all the posts on your site, and you can kind of page through them and you can filter them down and reorder them, and these List Tables exist all throughout the backend of WordPress, when you look at all your comments, when you look at all your pages, when you look at all your categories and stuff.

So this is not even really a change, but the WP List Table has always been considered private and you’re not supposed to use it and only core WordPress is supposed to use it, and so one very, very minor change is that they basically removed the comment saying that it was a private class and you’re not supposed to use it, because they’re aware that we all use it all the time. I’ve built a bunch of custom WP List Tables.

And when they say that it’s private, it means that they can make some breaking changes to it, but it’s been so heavily used, they know that they just can’t do that. So it’s kind of just admitting the obvious, but I just, I find that to be just a funny kind of nice little thing that just says, okay, we get it. You’re using the List Tables. We’re not going to pretend that you’re not. So I kind of like that one.

Teron Bullock: I mean, it also makes sense because now you have some comfort in knowing that they can’t just make a breaking change, like you said, and then crash the site or something. So, that’s always a good thing.

Brian Coords: Yeah. And what I’ve been kind of playing around with is the … Listing a bunch of posts in the WP List Table is actually not super easy, but it’s a nice … We use it. It’s a nice little feature. But coming out with this WordPress 6.1, there’s a lot of improvement on the JavaScript side of WordPress and a lot of cool tools for developers where you could skip over this whole WP List Table PHP for making your own lists, and there’s now tools where you can do it in JavaScript and make these really cool interactive lists of posts and pages that you can edit right on the screen without leaving, and you can do all of this in some of the new WordPress JavaScript, and it’s honestly easier and it’s less code and it’s kind of a nicer experience because it’s a lot faster and snappier because it’s all in JavaScript.

And so those are developer tools that are also coming out. I don’t know if I would say they’re coming out in WordPress 6.1, but they’re being developed alongside WordPress, and I could just see a day where we don’t even look at those old lists of posts and those old tables and you could just turn on a fancy new JavaScript one that’s just a lot faster and a lot cleaner and a lot more modern.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. That actually brings me to an adjacent topic. WordPress is fairly known as a PHP vehicle, and it seems like the more updates that we get, especially now that they’ve introduced Gutenberg and the block editor, et cetera, it seems like they’re moving more towards a JavaScript, becoming more of a JavaScript vehicle. One, would you say that that’s so, and two, do you think that there would ever be a point where we would have WordPress without PHP?

Brian Coords: I would say that yes, that’s true, and I would say that no, because we will always have PHP. The way that your WordPress website puts information in the database and pulls it out is PHP. And I think no matter what happens, that will always exist. Basically everything goes through the REST API now and that’s PHP, and I think that that’s always going to be there, and you’re always going to be able to write PHP to modify the way WordPress works and to build new post types and new data types and settings, and I think a lot of that will always be in PHP.

I think the JavaScript part is anything that an end user, whether they’re logged in or on the front end, interacts with, that will be a lot more JavaScript based in the future I think, especially logged in backend of WordPress will eventually be built in JavaScript, but the actual functionality will still happen at that PHP level. And I think, for better or worse, it’ll be pretty cool because there’s very few websites you are logging into on a daily basis that are not using a ton of JavaScript to feel like an app, to feel snappy, to see changes happen instantly, that sort of thing.

So, if you are building something that’s going to live on the backend of WordPress, like a plugin or something like that, then yeah, I mean, you’re going to probably set up a nice layer of data in PHP and then you’re going to build all of the visual stuff with JavaScript, and a lot of what WordPress is coming out with now is tools to make that process very easy, easier than it ever was in PHP actually. You could make a settings page now in JavaScript and it almost is easier and better looking than the ones you can build with the built in PHP stuff. So, I hope that answers, but I think it’s just the expectation that we’re all going to have to learn more JavaScript than we would’ve liked to before. You know?

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. I think it’s interesting because normally when you think about React, you normally find that the backend is kind of paired with Node because if you learned JavaScript in order to build a React app, then if you’re dealing with your backend, it’s just a natural progression to work with Node and just use that kind of same JavaScript in order to run the backend.

But now we have a situation where we’re going from the backend, like you said, being PHP and the presentational level being more React-ish. I’m not sure how deep the blocks are in the React, because I haven’t dove deep enough into the blocks yet, but I know there’s some level of React that’s being used there. And so it’s just interesting to see the progression, but still they haven’t moved away from PHP, which with the time that I’ve spent in WordPress, I’ve become more of a fan of PHP. Because I’ll admit, the first language that I’ve learnt was JavaScript, but like I said, moving and spending more time into PHP, I found a fondness for it, so I’m glad to see that they’re not moving completely away from it.

Brian Coords: Yeah. And I mean, if you think about when you load WordPress and you load the block editor, a ton of PHP has to happen before the page loads, and then the JavaScript kicks in and starts loading everything more visually. So you’re looking at a ton of stuff made in JavaScript, but that page still didn’t exist until a bunch of PHP ran and generated the kind of bones of the page and got all the data out of the database and picked which JavaScript to load and that sort of thing.

So, it might just be a case where some people on your team might get more involved on the PHP side and they’re going to make sure that everything loads the data exactly how you want it in a nice REST API endpoint, and then people who are really in the JavaScript and other side, they’re going to build the interactive user interface, just taking what you provided in that PHP REST API endpoint, and it’s just going to require more skills and maybe different skills.

But if you’re asking about React, the way WordPress works is when you learn PHP through WordPress like I did and like you probably did, you’re learning a very specific type of PHP where people who are not in WordPress might scoff and say, “That’s not real PHP, that’s the WordPress version of PHP,” just because we have so many custom little functions and things that help us make our job easier and that are really just unique to how WordPress does things, and maybe we don’t have all the cool modern PHP features like namespaces and stuff that the true PHP people learn.

The same thing’s happening with JavaScript, and WordPress is very heavily using React and it’s built on React, but it’s also adding an extra layer of just things that only will exist in WordPress’s special version of React. And it’s probably going to make it easier for us to learn React by doing it the WordPress way, and then all the non-WordPress people in the React world will say, “Oh, that’s not real React because you’re just doing the WordPress version of it.” But you know what? It turns non-developers into developers and it is fun and it feeds your family, so I don’t worry about listening to them, but I think that’s what we’re going to start seeing happen.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. And more inclusion, more inclusion. We’re always for that, so.

Brian Coords: Yeah.

Teron Bullock: It’s a good thing. So to leave it on this note here, I guess I’ll ask, do you think that this release, 6.1, does it help move WordPress further or is it more like a meh release?

Brian Coords: I think if you were expecting full site editing to be a completed feature that we could say, “All right, it’s good, it’s ready, use it on any site you want,” you would probably not be super excited. If instead you’ve been working in WordPress and you’ve been using a lot of the new block editor features, just even on classic themes, which we didn’t talk about, but there’s a lot of block editor stuff coming that classic theme developers can still take advantage of, I think you would maybe look at this as a release where you go, “Okay, they’re cleaning up the bugs, they’re getting things situated the way it needs to be. There’s maybe some light at the end of the tunnel. There’s clearly going to be some improvements that I’m going to noticeably feel when I update WordPress. They won’t be big killer features, but everything should just feel a lot nicer and a lot more mature.”

And so in that sense, I think I like a release like that because it might not seem like it, but after a few weeks you’ll be like, “Oh, man, I’m so glad these typography settings are finally everywhere,” those sorts of things.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. And I think that this release is definitely moving it further, at least for me. I’m excited for it. So I would like to leave it to you, the listener, chime in. Interact with us on Twitter, let us know, do you feel like this release is moving WordPress further or is it just an okay release?

So on that note, Brian, it was a pleasure talking to you as always. I think that this is a great conversation and I can’t wait for us to pick it back up on social media.

Brian Coords: Thank you. Thank you for talking all things WordPress with me today.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press The Issue is a production of MasterWP, produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted, edited, and musically supervised by Monet Davenport, and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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Press These Links* Download WordPress 6.1 now * Version 6.1 details * Matt Mullenweg’s 6.1 announcement from WCUS

Teron Bullock: How you doing today, Brian?

Brian Coords: I’m doing good. How are you doing today?

Teron Bullock: I’m well. I’m excited. I know we have a great conversation today. We’re going to talk about WordPress 6.1, and I’m excited to jump into it.

Brian Coords: Yeah, I’m excited too. This is kind of a pretty cool release, and I feel like there’s a lot to talk about coming out with WordPress 6.1.

Teron Bullock: Exactly.

Teron Bullock: All right, so let’s move onto our second area, which is the new default theme. What stood out to you about this new default?

Brian Coords: Yeah.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. Like you said, this is the most important query in WordPress, so if you can speed that up, then you’re speeding up the performance on the site overall.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. And more inclusion, more inclusion. We’re always for that, so.

Brian Coords: Yeah.

Teron Bullock: It’s a good thing. So to leave it on this note here, I guess I’ll ask, do you think that this release, 6.1, does it help move WordPress further or is it more like a meh release?

So on that note, Brian, it was a pleasure talking to you as always. I think that this is a great conversation and I can’t wait for us to pick it back up on social media.

Brian Coords: Thank you. Thank you for talking all things WordPress with me today.

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Top Takeaways* Allie and Topher swap stories about times talking about pay was awkward – it’s something ingrained in both of their workplace histories. * They discuss the history of limiting this information, particularly for woman and people of color. * Together they unpack why sharing pay information is helpful and fair.

When the conversation around pay is obscure and taboo, everyone loses. But when the lines of communication around pay are open and honest, employers and employees benefit. In this episode of Press The Issue, Topher and Allie talk about their experience with pay transparency and how they think changing this narrative benefits us all.

Allie Nimmons: Hey, Topher, how are you?

Topher DeRosia: Super awesome today.

Allie Nimmons: Awesome. Super glad to hear it. Well, I’m really excited to chat with you today on the podcast, and we’re going to talk a little bit about pay transparency, which is a kind of a spicy topic, but one that I’m really eager to dive into with you.

Topher DeRosia: Excellent. Let’s do it.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. Awesome.

Topher DeRosia: So I have some questions for you.

Allie Nimmons: Cool. Awesome.

Topher DeRosia: I remember the first time I learned that you’re not supposed to talk about what you make. I was at a job where when we got a raise, it happened about April, but they back-filled it to the beginning of the year. But they didn’t tell me I got a raise. I just had a really fat check and I thought, oh, that must be a mistake. So I went to accounting and I said, “Something’s wrong with my check.” And the lady looked at me really funny, and she’s like, “You need to talk to him.” So I went into a guy’s office and he said, “You don’t ever talk about your pay to anyone but me ever.” I was blown away.

Allie Nimmons: Wow.

Topher DeRosia: I’m like, “What? What is this all about?” And that was my first experience knowing that you just don’t talk about pay. But nobody ever told me, even then. He didn’t say why. I just said, “Oh, yes sir.” And went back to my desk and hid. So why is it important? Why do people care? Why don’t people want to talk about this?

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, so I don’t really know. That is a crazy story. I’ve never had an experience like that. I don’t really ever remember anyone telling me. It was just kind of always that unspoken thing, it’s like, you know, you don’t talk about, I don’t know, your private life at work. Or there’s certain things that are private. And I think maybe a lot of it too was just watching my mom. And she and I never talked about money as I got older. To this day, I don’t know how much money my mom earns or has earned in any job that she’s had. She never talked about it with me. She never talked about it around me. It just was this sort of taboo thing.

And I think people care, I mean, I say I don’t know because I don’t actually know, but I have some suspicions as to why people care so much about it not being talked about. If you want to go the tin foil hat route, I do think that it’s a method for men to, or I should say, I think it was in the past when women started to enter the workforce, a method for men to control that narrative. If you had a man that ran a company that employed women and men during a time where women were seen as less or even more less than they are seen now in society, paying the women less and encouraging them not to speak about it meant that you could get away with paying them less.

Topher DeRosia: Sure.

Allie Nimmons: I mean, I genuinely believe that that’s true. I feel like there’s some people who might think that’s a little conspiratorial, but we live in America. I think that there’s an element of judgment that we want to avoid in society. We want to avoid making anyone feeling uncomfortable.

Topher DeRosia: Sure.

Allie Nimmons: So if we each make a different amount, but we do the same job and we talk about how much we make, there might be an issue of judgment of, “Oh, well why do they make more than me? I’ve been here longer,” you know?

Topher DeRosia: Right.

Allie Nimmons: And there are so many different… We don’t have a universal system of pay. Every company gets to decide how much they pay their employees and why. I mean, we have minimum wage to keep things above that amount, but every owner of any company can say, “I decide that I give raises based off performance.” Or, “I decide I give raises based off of how long you’ve been here.”

Topher DeRosia: Sure.

Allie Nimmons: And so in order to eliminate that conversation of, “Well, why does that person make more than me?” And then having to go into that and potentially make people feel uncomfortable, I think it’s just comfortable for people to just keep it to themselves. But in all honesty, I just think it’s one of those things that it’s the way it’s always been. And so we don’t see a need to change it unless there’s a problem associated with it, which we get into the problems associated with it as well.

But I think it’s just one of those taboo “normal things” that people are comfortable not talking about, especially with people who know that they make a lot more than other people. They’re comfortable not talking about it because they don’t need to talk about it.

Topher DeRosia: Right. Yeah. And in addition, I think it’s also partly because employers want to pay as little as possible across the board. I had a second experience similar to the first one where a friend and I worked together. He was in a completely different department at a university. And I told him what I made and it was substantially more than him. And we did very similar work, but for different departments. And we didn’t talk about it after that. But a couple weeks later, his boss took me into a room and read me the Riot Act.

And by this time, I was a much more mature employee and not nearly as hurt, like intimidated. I wasn’t as intimidated. But it was interesting to me that this was with another man. And I think it’s really because the company, whatever company, wants to pay as little as possible. And if I can pay you less than the other person, well then I’m saving money. And it’s a philosophy of working and employment. If your goal is to save as much money as possible and to put as much cash in the coffers, then that’s what you’re going to do.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. It prevents that element of not necessarily to say competition, but for you to say, “Okay, well this person makes this amount, I’m making a lot less. For it to be fair, you need to pay me more, right?

Topher DeRosia: Right.

Allie Nimmons: That’s just true.

Topher DeRosia: Yeah.

Allie Nimmons: And so by limiting the conversation around pay, the employer can get away with, yeah, saving having to pay you that additional amount. That makes total sense.

Topher DeRosia: So I have two questions here. And one I think I might want to skip a little bit or even just answer myself. What problems happen when transparency’s not there? And the biggest problem I’ve seen is with my friend, he went and asked for a raise, and it wasn’t an ongoing consistent problem. It’s not like there was a buzz of unhappiness in the office. It was a sudden spike of unhappiness where he said, “Hey, I want this money.” And it got all awkward. But I think we could get a lot more productive out of this talk if we talked about the benefits that come from transparency. So what do you see as the benefits of pay transparency?

Allie Nimmons: People get more money, right? That’s the super simplified version, which I think that branches out into all these other things. So I’m not an economist, I don’t even know how to say it, I’m so much, I’m not an economist. I don’t fully understand and I never will claim to fully understand the concept of if people get paid more, then that money goes back into the economy and it stimulates this and that. I think there’s truth to that. I’d love for other people listening to let us know exactly how people getting paid more does stimulate a country’s economy. Because that’s super interesting to me. But in the long and short of it’s like, okay, if… I’m going to speak for personal experience. If I get paid more for the work that I do, which over the course of my career, every job I’ve gone to, I get paid a little bit more. That’s hopefully how it works, right?

Topher DeRosia: Mm-hmm.

Allie Nimmons: And by getting paid the proper amount, I can afford to live my life in a way that’s healthy. I can get things like healthcare or I can eat better because in this country, healthy food is more expensive food. I can afford to invest that money. So I can choose to invest in the stock market. I can choose to invest in property. I can build generational wealth with that money. I can put that money in an account for my children, all of these sorts of things. And I think that we don’t always think about, given the fact that pay disparities in these countries disfavor women and people of color, that then just means that their lives are more impoverished than people who don’t fall into those categories. And that has-

Topher DeRosia: It perpetuates problems.

Allie Nimmons: … perpetuates all of those problems. It has infinite amounts of effects, negative effects. And so by paying people the same amount, we’re leveling that playing field and saying, “Allie gets paid the same as Topher. And so Allie and Topher have the same now privileges when it comes to their economic, financial decision making capabilities. And I think that when you really start to understand the history of socioeconomic decisions and then effects within this country, a lot of it comes down to pay. And it’s a large reason why in the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s women couldn’t decide to leave a marriage if it was an abusive one, because either they didn’t make any money, or they didn’t make the same amount of money as their husband would have. And the husband could leave, The husband could support another family if he wanted to because he made so much money. But the woman in this situation either didn’t make any money, didn’t make enough money to be able to have agency over her own life.

So pay transparency really comes down to the more transparent our conversations around pay are, the more likely it is that people are paid equally and equitably. And the more likely it is that any given individual can have financial agency over their life. And that just affects everyone in a positive… Who can sit here and say, “Well, I don’t want the population of my country to be healthy and not live in domestic abuse situations.” Who wants to say that? Nobody. If people making more money means they can afford to send their kids to better schools, which means we have a more educated populous, which who doesn’t want that, right?

Topher DeRosia: Yep.

Allie Nimmons: There are so many benefits, and I think in some ways, it’s a short term thing. In some ways it’s a long term thing. Of course, not everybody’s going to use that money, if you want to say properly. Maybe you have people… The argument is always like, well, some people might gamble the money away or some people might waste it and buy TVs and stuff. It’s their money to do with what they want.

Topher DeRosia: Right.

Allie Nimmons: But if everybody is paid in a more equitable way, that means a higher percentage of people can afford to live in a way that is healthy and safe.

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Topher DeRosia: I also believe that it’s really good for business. I’ve, most of the time, always gotten cost of living races, a few dollars a year or more, but I have never ever been given a raise by any company. So in order to make more money, I’ve had to change jobs. And a lot of it was because I didn’t know what I could be making. Could I be making more somewhere else? And so my inclination is to look around, see what’s going on.

Whereas when there’s pay transparency, I can look at my neighbors and say, “Well, I see what they’re making and I’m doing just fine. I don’t need to look around. Either I wouldn’t do significantly better unless I changed my role or something.” And so I think it helps companies retain employees because they know they’re making a fair wage here. They don’t need to go hunting to get something.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, that’s a huge benefit. You’re totally right. I mean even just, and I’ll be transparent about this, since we have a theme of transparency going where we both work right now for Howard Development & Consulting/MasterWP. I don’t know about you, but when I started, Rob, who hired me, basically showed me what everyone made based off of their role. So it wasn’t down to names, it was down to people in this role make this much. You are going to go into this. Because my role was created for me. He said, “You are going to go into this kind of bucket of this. These people in these roles get paid this much. In one year if you’re still here, if you’d still like to be here, this is what your raise would look like in a year. This is what you will get.”

And that’s not the only reason I like working here. I like working here for a lot of reasons, but that is a huge incentive to… Because I’ve been like you. My whole professional life, I’ve either worked for myself or when I’ve worked in places, I’ve not really worked anywhere for longer than a year. Because it’s sort of like, “Okay, well I want to see what else is out there and there’s not a lot keeping me here.”

Topher DeRosia: Right.

Allie Nimmons: And just the incentive to say, “Here’s how much more you can be making at this.” This is essentially a promise to you barring circumstances, is a huge incentive to at least try to stick it out. If something were to go wrong here, if I were to decide, “Ah, maybe I want to look somewhere else,” I have that in Rob’s favor, essentially. I have that in the pro column of why should I stay here? So you’re totally right. It definitely can help with retention. And isn’t there some kind of statistic about it’s more expensive to hire new people than it is to retain existing people, right?

Topher DeRosia: Oh, yes. Yeah. Onboarding is very expensive.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. So why would you not be transparent if it helps people feel confident about sticking with you? That makes so much sense to me.

Topher DeRosia: Because you can get away with paying some people less.

Allie Nimmons: So skeezy. And I’m curious as well, if there’s anyone listening. So we’re speaking from our experience as to lifelong United States of America residents. I’d be really curious to see if pay transparency is different in other countries. Because I don’t know if it is. I don’t know if it’s different in Europe or South America or any of the African countries. I wonder if there are other countries that are doing the pay transparency thing really well and how that affects their turnover rates and their economies and things like that. I just don’t know.

Topher DeRosia: I have never known another company to do pay transparency. I mean, I’ve heard about it, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a company do it. And I think that’s interesting.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, I like it. There’s been no downsides as far as I’m concerned.

Topher DeRosia: Yeah.

Allie Nimmons: Because it takes… And especially one of the things that is challenging about walking through life as a underrepresented person, is consistently having the thought or the suspicion or the worry that something is happening to you or not happening to you because of your gender, your race, your disability, your sexual orientation. And so I don’t ever have to wonder, well, am I getting paid this much because of an unconscious bias, right?

Topher DeRosia: Right.

Allie Nimmons: Is somebody else on the team making less than me because of an unconscious bias? And that’s something that I can–

Topher DeRosia: That’s something’s that’s bothered me.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. And so knowing exactly not only what you make, but what other people make in a way that also kind of like… I like the way that Rob does it because it’s like, “It’s these people in these roles start at this much.” It’s not, “Well, this person makes this much and this person makes that much,” which then starts to feel very personal. But knowing all of that allows me to feel very equal to everyone else and not have to worry about how my race or gender plays in or how other people’s race or gender plays into those decisions.

Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Another thing that I’m not quite sure how this is connected, but I’m pretty sure it is somehow. I really like how Rob lets us know on a monthly basis how the company is doing. I have been at companies where things have looked really solid and then suddenly, oh, we just laid off five people. Why? Are we running out of money? Am I next? That kind of thing. And it’s related to money being secret, you know what I mean?

Allie Nimmons: Yeah.

Topher DeRosia: I don’t know how the company’s doing and I don’t know if I’m going to get fired. But we do. And I think it’s tangentially related to the pay transparency. Because you could do the company transparency without revealing pay, but I think it’s just the culture of being able to talk about money and be fair.

Allie Nimmons: I think it’s all related because, you’re right, it’s a culture of not only just pay, but money in general. How much money does somebody have? How much money is somebody spending? All of that kind of stuff. And yeah, I’ve worked in a couple companies at this point that will share information about how much the company is making. But I’ve never worked somewhere where both are shared. So the companies I’ve worked at before that will share information about sales and so on, we don’t also get to see how much people are making.

So the company can have made a million dollars in that quarter and the CEO gets-

Topher DeRosia: But not me!

Allie Nimmons: … Yeah, the CEO is maybe taking home a quarter of that. And so you’re like, “Well wait a minute.” But if we wanted to here at Howard Development & Consulting, we could look at those numbers, look at how much everyone’s getting paid and figure out where all that money’s going if we want. I don’t think anybody’s spending their time doing that, but it feels good to have access to that information.

And it allows us to trust Rob. I trust Rob more because he’s so forth with that information. Because you’re right, the more that’s being hidden in terms of money, the more fear and suspicion and confusion that will pervade.

Topher DeRosia: FUD. Fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. Wow. So yeah, I’m not sure. I would be really curious as well to hear about are there other WordPress companies that practice pay transparency and how do they do that? We talk sometimes about companies posting job listings of like, “Oh hey, we’re hiring a senior developer.” Posting how much that pay is on the page where somebody might go apply. That’s another form of pay transparency.And so somebody who’s looking around can feel like there’s a competitive element to that of, “Okay, I want to find the job that is going to pay me the best, pay me the most fairly.”

Topher DeRosia: Yeah. And not waste my time.

Allie Nimmons: And not waste my time. Because, yeah, sometimes you have to go through a whole interview process just to find out that they’re not paying what you need or what you deserve.

Topher DeRosia: Exactly. Yeah.

Allie Nimmons: Such a waste of time. And what happens with that a lot of times is underrepresented people who don’t have that time or that luxury to spend all that time-

Topher DeRosia: Are losing it.

Allie Nimmons: … are just going to look at that page and look away, right? Close it out and say, “Okay, I’m going to find something that’s more direct.” And so I always advocate for putting transparent pay information right up front in the hiring process. And that is a way to diversify your pool of people.

Topher DeRosia: I think the State of Colorado is the only state that requires that. And so somebody did a Twitter feed, a Twitter thread about companies that will not list jobs in Colorado because they don’t want to say how much they pay.

Allie Nimmons: Wow.

Topher DeRosia: And it’s a long list. And there are some companies that we both know and love that are on that list.

Allie Nimmons: That’s wild. That is so wild.

Topher DeRosia: Yeah.

Allie Nimmons: And I wonder if it’s going to be something that dies out. Because I do feel like it is almost a generational thing. Going back to what I said before about how people thought about it in the middle of the 20th century, I associate this hush, hushness about money very much with that period of time.

Topher DeRosia: Oh yeah.

Allie Nimmons: Where you’re kind of focused on keeping up appearances almost. And so it’s like if you’re not making a lot of money, you don’t want people to know, right?

Topher DeRosia: Yip.

Allie Nimmons: And so I kind of wonder as we move away from that period of time, if this kind of next generation of young people coming into tech, I mean a lot of them, if you’ve ever been on tech TikTok, there’s a lot of younger people who are like, “I do not play around with this kind of stuff. I need to know. You need to tell me or I’m going somewhere else.” And I wonder if 20 years from now, if this whole episode is just going to be totally a moot point because things will have changed. I wonder.

Topher DeRosia: Yeah. A bunch of years ago I was in college. I went to a friend’s house for the weekend with her and her dad was at work. And they sat me down at the dining room table and I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. And her mom said to me, “Do you know how much money your parents make?” I was like, “This is a weird question.” I said, “Not at the moment, but I have.” I mean, whenever my dad got a new job, I was like, “Hey, cool. How much you making now?” And he would tell me.

And as it turned out in their family, the father did not tell anyone in the family how much he made. And they didn’t do anything with money. He paid all the bills, they had enough money to do what they needed to do, and he made sure that happened.

And that was a stretch for me. I imagine that happening in the ’40s where the man just takes care of it. I never expected to hear it in the ’90s. And right then in that conversation I said, “Well, let’s find out.” So I called my dad, I said, “Hey, how much you making right now?” He’s like, “Why do you want to know?” And I told him. And he’s like, “Oh.” And he told me how much he was making. And they were floored that he would just volunteer that information to his son. And I think it is very much a generational cultural thing that will have to go away.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. Well I think we should leave it off there. I mean, you and I could sit and talk about anything for a super long time including this. But yeah, I think we should top it off there. Thanks so much for sitting down and talking with me about this. I hope that other people listening have found it helpful.

Topher DeRosia: Oh yeah. Yeah. This was really fun. We should do it more.

Allie Nimmons: All righty. Cool. Thanks for listening.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press The Issue is a production of MasterWP. Produced by Allie Nimmons. Hosted, edited, and musically supervised by Monet Davenport, and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit MasterWP.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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Flexibility and scalability are major considerations when it comes to web development and a decoupled architecture has long been heralded as the solution. In this episode, Teron and Matt discuss benefits and pitfalls of the headless CMS model and its usage in WordPress.

Top Takeaways* Going headless include pros like being typically faster, the ability to use multiple sources of content, and the use of components to build your user interface very quickly and efficiently. * Cons include SEO and accessibility drawbacks. * An average WordPress site still serves the needs of most users, whereas headless CMS rose to popularity with the rise of front end frameworks to achieve interesting things with front end development and single page applications.

Teron Bullock: How you doing today, Matt?

Matt Adewole: Hi, Teron. I’m doing good. How are you?

Teron Bullock: I’m well. Today, we have an interesting topic. Today, we’re going to talk about headless CMS and how does it pertain to WordPress and is it something that a developer should use or if they shouldn’t use. Let’s just jump right into it. Matt, could you tell us just a little bit about what a headless CMS is?

Matt Adewole: Yeah, sure. Headless CMS is just really a way to decouple your contents management system. When it’s headless, it just means you can query your system and retrieve your content, kind of like you query an API and get your results. That’s basically the short gist of it.

Teron Bullock: Got you. If I am a user or a client who maybe interested in having someone use this approach, I guess what I’ll be looking at is using WordPress as the database and maybe the back end for me to generate my content and the front end would be decoupled from that. Instead of using WordPress to do both the back end and the front end, I have WordPress just doing the back end and the front end can be something like a JavaScript React or Vue or something like that.

Matt Adewole: Precisely. Your front end can live independently of your WordPress website, so you can use Angular, React, Vue, whatever you want for your front end, and you don’t have to make that using WordPress.

Teron Bullock: Got you. What is some of the benefits that comes with this approach?

Matt Adewole: Some of the benefits that I can think of are you can use multiple sources of content. For example, if you had websites on React, for example, and you have multiple blogs you wanted to feed into that website, because it’s decoupled, you can query the different CMSs, the different WordPress blogs and get your contents right on your React site. This also helps with being flexible and scaling and a separate front end allows a developer to improve your speed and performance without having to wrangle your content management system.

Teron Bullock: That makes a lot of sense. I know one of the things that I’ve heard of with this approach is in the case of React, where you can use components and build your user interface very quickly and efficiently. It will speed up the approach, opposed to having to use the traditional WordPress route where you’re using a lot of functions and you’re relying heavily on WordPress. That’s one benefit that I heard of as well. The other may be using something like Gatsby, where you can create these static websites.

Teron Bullock: Anytime you’re using a static website, that also will speed up the performance. I could see the angle from a developer’s standpoint, but how about from the client’s standpoint? How would that be beneficial to let’s say a client?

Matt Adewole: Well, for a client, for example, they can read your websites. Gatsby is a very great example. As a client, loading a Gatsby site because it’s static and it’s served statically, it’s really simple. It loads quickly. It’s snappy, like you said. It doesn’t come with all the overhead of WordPress already on it. As a client, I’ll be able to read your websites, load it up quickly. Then there’s another use case I like with decoupled CMSs, the progressive web apps. For example, I go to your website and you’re using a decoupled site and you serve it on Gatsby or React or some other front end system. Progressive web apps allow me to download that.

Matt Adewole: All the information will be on my app and I can read that information even though I’m not connected to the internet at a particular time. And then the next time I connect, I can just go update the app and download all of your new blogs, for example.

Teron Bullock: Yeah, that’s very interesting. I haven’t really delve into progressive web apps like that, but that does sound like a very interesting point. I think on the client side, for me, one thing that could be beneficial is not having to worry about the front end at all. I can develop all of my content and stay in the ecosystem that I’m mostly comfortable with as far as the blog posts that I choose to write, and then I can give this off to a developer team and allow them to, like you said, use Gatsby or whatever approach they would like to use and they’ll be able to bring those pieces of information in through JSON or something like that.

Teron Bullock: It just allows me to not worry so much about the front end side. I can just stay focused on content management. I can stay focused on developing quality information, and I can allow the developer to focus on what they’re good at.

Matt Adewole: Yeah, this is so true. From the content creation perspective, all you would have to do is create quality content. You don’t have to worry about how it’s presented because you know that content is going to be pulled into a well developed front end that will present it perfectly to your users. That’s a wonderful point.

Teron Bullock: Are you familiar with how this affects, let’s say, SEO?

Matt Adewole: Yes, I have looked into that a bit. Regarding SEO, this will be one of the cons, right? Because as we know, JavaScript and SEO don’t work well together. When you decouple your WordPress site and you’re serving everything on a JavaScript based front end, you are going to have to do a lot of manual work to make sure it reads properly.

Teron Bullock: Wow. That leads us right into the cons then. What this approach is saying that it doesn’t work well with SEO, so that means that you would have to probably spend a lot more time strategizing on how to get the website to work best as possible for SEO. I think another con that I would bring up would be since you’re decoupling things, you’re not able to rely on a lot of the things that are in the WordPress ecosystem, so things like plugins or the WYSIWYG editor, also may not work the way that you used to them working.

Matt Adewole: This is one of the things you lose when you decouple your WordPress site is that WordPress has done a lot of work for things like authentication, navigation, accessibility. You lose all of those when you create a separate front end and you’re just pulling specifically just the content from WordPress. You lose access to everything WordPress has created to make it easy for users to use your website. Any of those functions you want, you’re going to have to create them again on the front end part.

Teron Bullock: Right. I guess it doesn’t have to be said, but I’ll say it any way since a lot of people are liking… Well, I guess there’s mixed opinions on the Gutenberg editor. But for those who are interested in using blocks, those would be one of the features that you absolutely couldn’t use with this approach.

Matt Adewole: Exactly. Not being able to use Gutenberg could be a con to some and a pro to others depending on who you ask. Some of the cons I can think of are the fact that now when you’ve decoupled your size, you are maintaining two different environments. You’re maintaining your WordPress environment, which serves your content, and whatever your front end environment is. That just requires more technical know-how and you can accrue more technical debt in situations like that.

Teron Bullock: That’s a good point. This sounds like it definitely wouldn’t be an approach that you would use for, let’s say, somebody that’s possibly creating like a mom and pop bakery shop or something like that, because now instead of just focusing on baking your goods and maybe putting out quality content to lead people to your site and also to your business, now you got to focus on, like you said, the two different parts. Now I got to focus on what the design part, what does the front end look like, and then I got to focus on how my data is being stored.

Matt Adewole: Yeah, correct. That would be way too much for a mom and pop bakery. I will suggest in that case, you just go with one solution and work your way from there. This will be ideal for someone who already has a website in a different ecosystem and is thinking of doing a lot more content creation, but doesn’t want to change what their website looks like now or doesn’t want to move everything to WordPress, then I would suggest, all right, we just created decoupled WordPress, easy for you to create your content, and just pull it into your existing website or application.

Teron Bullock: Ideally, who would be the customer or the client for the approach that we’re speaking of where we will take our website from one platform and want to move it over to WordPress or to another platform, maybe you’re moving off from WordPress to somewhere else? Who would be that ideal client?

Matt Adewole: An ideal client will be someone who wants an application that performs complex functions or that has an application that performs complex functions like maybe location specific functions, a single page application, but wants to move into content creation and content publishing. This would be a great way for them to do that without changing whatever system they have in place.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening up to this point. Press the Issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do, now Let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash, visit LearnDash.com. Our mission at MasterWP is to bring new voices into WordPress and tech every day. The new MasterWP Workshop series does just that. Our new live and recorded workshops on everything from code to design to business turn WordPress fans into WordPress experts. Find the workshop for you at workshops.masterwp.com. Use the code podcast10 for a 10% discount. Now, back to the podcast.

Teron Bullock: Let’s say hypothetically we had a client who was using let’s say Shopify and they reached out and they figured out a way to make, like you said, a single page application using the Shopify platform. They said that now they really don’t want to use the Shopify platform. They want to move over to WordPress, but they want to keep the design that they currently had and keep the application the way that they currently had it. Would that be an ideal client?

Matt Adewole: In a case like that, that client would be losing all of their Shopify functionality, all of the e-commerce that comes to Shopify. If they want to move something like that, they would have to transfer all their data, all their products to WordPress, and then use an e-commerce plugin like WooCommerce. But say all of that is too much. Let’s say they have 150 products and they have a good Shopify ranking and what have you, and they have good Shopify plugins in place, but they just want content around those products. I know Shopify does some content, but let’s face it, WordPress makes creating content really easy.

Matt Adewole: Something they could do is create a WordPress sites, query their WordPress content from Shopify and pull that content into their existing Shopify. That way they wouldn’t have to move all their data. Because they’re starting contents creation fresh, in that case, they will require less technical know-how to do that because they’re just starting contents creation from scratch, right? They don’t have to move all their product data from Shopify to WordPress.

Teron Bullock: A lot of the questions that I’m asking would be things that I would think about if a client came to me and said, “Hey, this is the new thing. I hear everybody want it, and I want you to develop something for me.” It’s like, wait a minute, first, we should figure out if you are even the right client for this, right?

Matt Adewole: Right.

Teron Bullock: I guess the question I would ask… Well, first, I would lead into, one, we want to make sure that you’re the right client for it, like I just said. But then the approach that I was thinking listening to what you were saying was if I was a person who had the technical know-how, was interested in making something a little more complicated, would the approach work if I used WordPress back end for my content, Shopify just for my products, and I got this third piece, which I’m thinking would be the front end and I could use a React or a Vue or Angular to just serve my front end.

Matt Adewole: Yeah, that will be an approach that will work. Say you have a WordPress content site and a Shopify product site and you want one location for all your visitors, all your users to go to. You create a React site and then you pull your content from WordPress and your Shopify products. That would be a good use case. Say a client comes to you and wants to create a decoupled site.

Matt Adewole: Some questions that are important to ask them is if they’re serving their content on a different site or multiple different sites, if they need to separate their front end from their WordPress or from their content management system, if they already have something going and they don’t want to interrupt that, they just want to bring in content, those would be good reasons for them to create a decoupled WordPress site, right? One scenario I thought of that would really illustrates this is, say five years ago, I created a web application.

Matt Adewole: Now, this web application was just to collate information about businesses around me and then updates that information based on the status of the businesses, on the branches, their locations, their prices. Now, five years in, I have this wonderful website built on React. It’s also an application that people can download, a mobile application that people can download. In a case like that, when I want to start creating content, I want to start talking about the businesses in our areas and giving people insights that they didn’t already have, then I can create a WordPress site strictly for content and just pull that into my mobile application or my web application and serve it on mobile as well.

Matt Adewole: What’s happening there is I’m not moving everything on my data to WordPress. I’m instead bringing all of my content from WordPress into my existing web application. That’s an ideal scenario for people to use a decoupled CMS.

Teron Bullock: Wow, that makes a lot of sense. I already have an application and I’m just adding this layer to it, and that layer would be the content portion of it.

Matt Adewole: Yup.

Teron Bullock: Yeah, I like that. This sounds to me like the market or the target audience for headless CMS would probably be like 10%, just throwing out a number, but maybe 10% of the people would actually benefit from this, the average client would benefit from traditional WordPress.

Matt Adewole: Oh, yes, very much so. This is why I still recommend WordPress today is because most of your solutions can be done on WordPress as is. It’s great. It keeps on improving, and there’s already so much built into it to help the average user. Headless CMS rose to popularity with the rise of front end frameworks. Remember the React and Angular season? Sometime around 2016 there was a real hype. This is when people started doing a lot of acrobatics basically with front end. People loved single page applications then.

Matt Adewole: People were thinking, “How can I do this with my WordPress site?” That’s when WordPress decoupled. Headless WordPress came into the forefront. But like you said, not very many people need to go that route. A normal average working WordPress site will do the job for most of our needs, at least today.

Teron Bullock: I will admit that I’m one of those people that I guess fell into that front end framework mindset because that’s what led me down a rabbit hole of headless CMS, to be honest with you. I was studying React. Just I guess the way that my brain works, I love when I can use a component, especially if I could find and build let’s say like a button component would be very simple component. But if I could find and make this really Swiss Army knife button component that I can use everywhere, I love things like that because I don’t have to now reinvent the wheel. I just take that button component and I use it over multiple projects.

Teron Bullock: Because I’ve written certain things into the CSS or even into the JavaScript, I can just pull out what I need from it without really having to touch the structure. That mindset of, like I said, this React kind of way of thinking about things made me think about how could I do that in WordPress and leverage both systems. I really like WordPress and the back end is phenomenal to me. I think anytime that a client comes to me and says, “I want to make a website,” and the first thing I ask is, “What do you want to do?” If they say, “Well, I do want to generate content,” I automatically say, “Let’s go to WordPress because this will be simpler for you.”

Teron Bullock: Obviously with the tools that are in the back end, it’s just usually native to most people who have been around any computer or a word pressing document or processing application or something like that. Like I said, I fell down that rabbit hole of I really like React and I want my WordPress to be React, but it’s definitely two different things.

Matt Adewole: No, I will be right next to you standing and admitting I fell into that rabbit hole too. The idea of a super component to rule them all, it really captivated me for a while there. But yes, WordPress, like you mentioned, has such a great interface. Someone just coming in will be able to use it and navigate it, right? But then there’s some fancy things we, developers, always dream of doing. Multi-step forms, for example. React makes that look so easy, but that’s really difficult to pull off in WordPress, right?

Teron Bullock: Indeed.

Matt Adewole: There are sometimes when you want to do things really fancy that you might need to decouple. But like we mentioned, you’re going to be losing a lot of the inbuilt functionality that’s already in WordPress.

Teron Bullock: Just to kind of wrap things up, I guess what we are saying is know your use case first before taking this approach because the benefits that you gain from traditional WordPress, you basically lose with this approach. Does it make sense if you are a WordPress user to move away from traditional WordPress in order to go to this route? That’s something that you have to weigh for yourself. For the most part, it looks like maybe 90% of what you’re trying to do can be accomplished with WordPress and it doesn’t make sense to add on this layer of complexity just to decouple your site to say, “I have the use of a framework and my WordPress.”

Matt Adewole: Yeah, that would be accurate. The know your use case and most of the use cases that will require you to decouple are fringe cases anyway.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. We would like to continue this conversation. If you agree with us or disagree with us or have something to add, feel free to join us on Twitter @_MasterWP. Matt, it’s been great talking to you.

Matt Adewole: It’s been great talking to you too.

Teron Bullock: All right. See you guys later.

Matt Adewole: Take care.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press the Issue is a production of MasterWP. Produced by Allie Nimmons. Hosted, edited, and musically supervised by Monét Davenport, and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit MasterWP.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at MasterWP.com.

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As more and more employees work from home post pandemic, we realize more how varied and complicated this change is. For some, it's a welcome relief and means more freedom, time, and flexibility. But for some, often women, it can mean the exact opposite. In this episode of Press The Issue, Sammi and Nyasha tried to understand how and why working from home ends up a trap for some women.

Top Takeaways* Culture and upbringing already play a huge role in enforcing home-based women’s gender roles. * Working from home helps push the expectation that women can and should do both; climb the corporate ladder and attend to a family. * The pandemic has shown that women tend to be relied upon most for home and child care, rather than men, even if the woman is the sole-breadwinner.

Press These Links* The Work From Home Revolution is Also a Trap for Women * With no child care or summer camps, women are being edged out of the workforce

Episode TranscriptMonet Davenport: Welcome to Press The Issue, a podcast for MasterWP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show at masterwp.com/presstheissue. As more and more employees work from home post pandemic, we realize more how varied and complicated this change is. For some, it’s a welcome relief and means more freedom, time, and flexibility. But for some, often women, it can mean the exact opposite. In this episode of Press The Issue, Sammi and Nyasha tried to understand how and why working from home ends up a trap for some women.

Nyasha Green: Hey, Sammy, how are you doing today?

Sammi Sim: I’m good. How are you?

Nyasha Green: Doing well. Doing well. I’m so excited to talk with you today. We’re doing something a little different today. Usually we talk about articles that one of the team or guest contributor has written on MasterWP, but this article we were talking about, it’s outside of MasterWP, but it was something most of the employees really identified with or had something to say about, so we wanted to talk about it. This article is from Bloomberg and the name of it is The Work-From-Home Revolution Is Also a Trap for Women.

Nyasha Green: It’s by Anne Helen Petersen, and we’re going to link it as well in the podcast info. We just really, really wanted to talk about it and just talk about what we identify, what we like, what we don’t. I just want to start off by asking you a few questions, Sammi. I know you really identified with this story a lot. Can you tell me in what ways it really spoke to you?

Sammi Sim: It spoke to me in a few different ways, one being the flexibility of working from home and its benefits, being able to prepare for dinners and not being so concerned about what I’m wearing to work that morning, which also could be a pro and con, already being home if one of the kids were out sick, which makes it easier because you don’t have the guilt of leaving work or calling out. That’s just to name a few.

Nyasha Green: Got you. Got you. I definitely relate with that as well, not having to buy all this business clothes and spending the money on gas and commuting. I just feel like overall you’re saving money, you’re getting more rest, and you feel better because you can kind of control your own space.

Sammi Sim: Definitely.

Nyasha Green: With this article, we just talked about the pros, it talks about working from home being a trap. Do you think your upbringing played any part in how you feel about the article and what you do now as for work?

Sammi Sim: Yes. I think a lot of how I feel and what I do is because of my upbringing. Some people may relate, but for me culturally, the expectations kind of started at an early age. I think we were always just taught that we always needed to tend to household chores, cooking, cleaning, while still always taking care of everyone around us. It becomes overwhelming because it just seems like it’s out of habit. You can’t help but to naturally feel this way. I can’t help myself to still take care of my partner, my kids, the house, but still have the expectation from everyone around me to have a source of income.

Nyasha Green: Ever since I was a child, it really did seem like a trap for me. Watching my mother work 12 hour shifts at a factory instead having to cook, bathe us, do our hair, watching my grandmother or listening to stories of her be a full-time housekeeper while raising nine children, especially when my grandfather passed away, it just always seemed like, no, I don’t think I can do that to me. How much of your culture do you think played into that?

Sammi Sim: I think a lot of it, even now as an adult, I think those expectations still sit very high, especially from the male, the men in my family. I still get up and make sure I get my kids ready, bring them to school. I come home and I do a little bit of chores. I log into work. I’m working and then I still have to make sure I have dinner. It’s almost like it’s expected of me. If I wasn’t doing it, I’m not doing what I need to do as a mother, as a wife.

Sammi Sim: It was a lot. My mom worked the… When I was growing up, she worked second shift so we didn’t get to see much of her, but she got us ready in the morning and she made us food before she left to work, and then she would go work eight hours and come home and have a little time to herself, and then wake up and do it again.

Nyasha Green: That’s a lot. It’s a lot to put on women. You would think working from home would make it overall easier, because again we talked about pros, but there’s just so much that happens at home, especially when you have children and you have to have them at home, especially when you get out of school and things like that. What do you think would make things easier on you and work from home when it comes to the issue of work falling back on women? What are some of those cons and what do you think would make them easier?

Sammi Sim: Expectations. I think society just portrays women as someone who can do it all, and we do. But just because we do doesn’t mean we should. I personally think that it makes us think that we need to do that. When there’s doctor’s appointments, it kind of falls on mom. What’s for dinner? Go ask mom. Mentally, I think we become trained that this is what we should be doing and then somehow still be able to excel in our careers.

Sammi Sim: We still have our expectations in our workload to make sure our tasks are getting done, projects are going out, and we’re still doing what we have to do to provide a paycheck and to keep a stable mental load on ourselves, because we don’t want to identify as just moms and wives. We want to be our own people, and we want to do well and still be able to climb that corporate ladder. I think the expectation of this is what I need you to do or this is what we should be doing, it’s a lot and it becomes a lot.

Nyasha Green: You’re totally right. I want to just personally say, you are awesome for being able to juggle work and your children and everything else, because I really feel like with what I do now, if someone were to throw a baby into the woodwork on me, I think everything would fall apart. It’s funny because I’ve accomplished a lot and I’ll tell my family or different friends or family friends like, “I got into tech. I’m doing software work, development work. Oh yeah, I’m editorial director of a tech magazine newsletter,” and they’re like, “Okay, yeah, all that stuff is awesome, but when are you having children?” I’m like, “What? I’ve accomplished so much, but I guess I’m not 100% because I don’t have children.”

Nyasha Green: It’s always funny for me to hear that. I’m like, “Oh, okay. I guess nothing else matters that I’ve done,” but it’s society. I can’t really get mad at them because that’s how we were raised. I always say, “How can I do that, do this and do everything I do and raise children?” “Well, your mom did it. Your grandmother did it. Your aunts did it. Your sister did it.” I’m not them. It’s just always so much, and I always admire women that do do it because I think I would collapse under the work.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening up to this point. Press The Issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash, visit LearnDash.com. Our mission at MasterWP is to bring new voices into WordPress and tech every day. The new MasterWP Workshop Series does just that. Our new live and recorded workshops on everything from code to design to business turn WordPress fans into WordPress experts. Find the workshop for you at workshops.masterwp.com. Use the code podcast 10 for a 10% discount. Now, back to the podcast.

Sammi Sim: I think it’s just a lot of pressure. How our parents were raised and how they grew up, I think a lot of it was just brought onto us as first generations and we don’t want to bring that onto our children now, but it’s a lot. I think that we are more than just that. I want to excel in my career. I want to be more than just mommy. I think it goes back so far that we are still trying to break those barriers now, and I think we are going to continue to be doing that.

Nyasha Green: Got you. Got you. Another thing in the article I wanted to bring up I thought was funny, because I don’t do this, but how do you feel about the women who lie about how much they make when they’re the breadwinner?

Sammi Sim: I think it’s a little sad. We should be able to speak about that with confidence. It doesn’t make your partner any less than a person. It doesn’t make you any less if you were making less than your partner. I also think that it has a lot to do with where you are in your career as far as what your partner does and what you do. And then not every job is the same. Not every company holds the same purpose. Everyone is in different career paths. Sometimes it depends on that as well.

Sammi Sim: I don’t think that we should look at men funny because they’re not the breadwinner. I think it should be an honor like, “Yeah, my wife makes more money than me,” or whatever. It shouldn’t be looked upon. Two incomes are better than one. When did that not become a thing?

Nyasha Green: Totally. I agree with you 100%. Like I said, it’s something I do not do and, luckily, my partner does not care about stuff like that. I feel like he’s actually bragging to people like, “Yeah, my wife’s big shot.” It sounds like something he would do. There was another thing I wanted to touch on. We talked a little bit about another article. There was a woman, a mother during the COVID Pandemic. She was actually a head at a tech company in San Francisco and she was in charge of hiring. She tried to hire women and minorities, which was really, really important for that Silicon Valley lifestyle. We don’t see a lot of people take the initiative to go out and hire minorities and try to diversify tech out there.

Nyasha Green: She was doing that. During the pandemic, her husband wasn’t working and they couldn’t get daycare, nanny, anything like that. She asked her husband to watch the child and he lasted three days. After that, she had to quit her job and she started to watch her child full-time. And that article blew my mind because this was a woman… She actually waited a little bit in her career to have children. She was married. She made good money. She was a powerful voice in the community. For the simple fact her husband just didn’t want to take on that role, she had to stop her career.

Nyasha Green: Because she was such a light in that area, we don’t know how many people that could have benefited from her being there who could have got a spot at the table. They just couldn’t get it anymore. It all came down to gender roles. I told you, to me, it was such a heartbreak for me to see that. How did you feel about that?

Sammi Sim: If you can see me, I am definitely shaking my head right now. I think that’s very disappointing. It’s almost embarrassing because he should be able to sacrifice yourself a little bit and help your wife and her career path. Not only her, but the opportunity to give it to someone else. With being a woman, you are able to bring other women into your world and teach them, guide them, be a mentor. It’s not easy for a woman to look at a man who is her superior and feel the confidence in wanting to be there or reaching out for the help.

Sammi Sim: Sometimes it’s a little bit easier when you have a woman in that role. Again, this goes back to my saying of expectations. The expectations seems like it’s on a woman. Maybe he felt like, “I can’t do this. Why should I have to do this? She should do this.” But it does close a lot of doors and it pushes a lot of seats in. It takes away from a lot of people, especially if she’s helping minorities, women in general. It’s unfortunate for sure.

Nyasha Green: Yeah, that was just a very sad story to see, especially as a woman who was trying to get higher in a company and open the doors for more people. I’m still doing that and I just couldn’t imagine shutting the door on all those people in my career. But also, I will admit, I do not have children, so I probably would feel different if I did have one. It’s just an unfortunate side effect of having to work from home as a woman.

Nyasha Green: You’re just, as we talked about, still just expected to take on all of these roles. We need to fight to have this change as soon as possible. What if another pandemic comes through? Are we going to be ready? Are we going to have to forgo our careers? We need people to step up. We need more allies. We need more help from companies. We need more help. We need to make all of this more equal.

Sammi Sim: Mom guilt is very real and it is very hard to deal with and it’s overwhelming. I couldn’t imagine how she felt. But also to be able to take away an income for your family is very upsetting to me. Nyasha Green: Yeah, it definitely is. We’re just going to try to work for a better, more equal work from home experience and communities and partnerships. And that’s easier said than done, because again, a lot of us come from different cultural backgrounds, no matter what the year is and maybe certain traditions and roles you want to uphold, but I’m just hoping there’s a better way to do those in the future where everybody can benefit and everybody can share the work.

Sammi Sim: Absolutely. With work from home, that doesn’t automatically mean that you have a flexible schedule to be able to work for a company that offers flexibility while you are working from home is you’re very lucky, but not a lot of work from home jobs are able to provide that as well. Sometimes when you’re working from home, you have to sit in front of the computer all day answering phones. I’ve seen posts where you’re kind of like on a timer thing or there’s a camera watching you. Work from home doesn’t always mean that there’s flexibility. It’s nice that you’re a physical presence inside your home with your children, but it might just be a trap.

Nyasha Green: Yeah, definitely. Well, it was so good speaking with you today, Sammy. I can’t wait until we do this again.

Sammi Sim: Me too. It was good as always.

Nyasha Green: Well, I hope you have a wonderful day.

Sammi Sim: Thank you. You too.

Nyasha Green: All right. Until next time.

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Episode Transcript:

Balancing work life and personal life has always been a challenge up until and continuing into the pandemic. There are actionable and adaptable ways to achieve this balance. In this episode, Lauren Ward talks to Nyasha Green about her six main tips for work life balance, including one bonus seventh tip.

Nyasha Green: Hey Lauren, how are you doing today?

Lauren Ward: I'm doing great Ny. How are you?

Nyasha Green: I'm doing well, doing well. I'm really excited to speak with you today. We're going to talk about an article that you did for MasterWP. The title was Boundaries, Zoom Calls, and Potty-talk:Keeping a sane work/life balance in tech. And I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions about your article and just talk about a few things that I thought were really interesting that you wrote. And I just want to start off by asking you what inspired you to write this article?

Lauren Ward: Wow. So my kids and my personal journey were definitely a big inspiration for me, but also knowing that there are others out there in tech looking for a better work, life balance, whether it's newbies, who might just be starting off in WordPress and wondering how in the world are going to juggle all the things and still enjoy life. Or if it's the seasoned WordPress developer, who's realizing that there are just some things in life they want to switch up for a better balance. That's kind of where my inspiration came from. And honestly, I'm just hoping that my ideas help others in some way.

Nyasha Green: Nice. Nice. And you start off the article by talking about just the routine that you have for not only your family, but yourself. Do you think it's easier now to do all the things that you are able to do now because you have a routine set?

Lauren Ward: Oh, absolutely. Having a routine in place and setting expectations, not only for my family, but also within myself has proven to help me achieve both day to day work goals, like getting a project completed as well as long term personal goals, like taking a trip or vacation every now and then. And as a side note, I've found that having a trip to look forward to even a small one helps so much with being consistent in routines, kind of like a little reward.

Nyasha Green: Yeah, definitely. And with your routine, were you the main one to set this routine up or was it you and your partner? How did you guys go about it?

Lauren Ward: My husband and I definitely worked together to set up our routines and create structure for a productive week. We rely, heavily rely on good communication between us and our shared Google Calendar really helps us along. But setting our routine has not only allowed us to accomplish work goals, but also having more quality time as a family, as well as being intentional and parenting our kids together. And that's not to say that every day is a win, but having our routines in place has really helped us along.

Nyasha Green: That is so awesome. And it's funny you say that. I've tried to share my Google Calendar with my husband, like a million times. And he finally told me he was like, there's no way I'm looking at that. I don't know what you have going on, but the technology you can use to support these routines are definitely, really awesome.

Lauren Ward: Absolutely.

Nyasha Green: How long did it take you all to get into a good routine? I know we've talked in the past about how been pretty organized and you are organized. You're like my role model when it comes to organization. I need help. But how long did it take for you all to get on a good routine together?

Lauren Ward: Well, it's definitely been a work in progress. Starting off, we tested different strategies and found things that worked for us as well as things that didn't, and when something didn't work, we just simply adjusted our strategy and moved forward from there. I think it's all about testing to see what works and what doesn't and just having a positive attitude in general about it, but also staying flexible. And when it comes to working while having kids at home, things come up and you sometimes just have to roll with it.

Nyasha Green: Yeah. And speaking of, so you do have two boys. You do have children. I just know you have to have a good story. Do you have any good or funny stories about having them at home while you're working?

Lauren Ward: Yes. Oh my goodness. Yes. One in particular, I was on a business call with about 15 other professionals and it was my turn to talk. And my little one came in, running into the room, wrapped his arms around me while I was on video, wrapped his arms around my head and gave me the biggest hug and a kiss on the cheek and announced to everyone that he needed to use the restroom, that he was a toddler. So he said, I need to go potty. And he ran off and fortunately everyone on the call or most people were also parents. So they kind of got a chuckle out of it. I've course turned 20 shades of red and kind of stumbled through my portion of the discussion, but it was definitely a good story to tell later.

Nyasha Green: So that first of all, that's awesome. I just love how free and carefree kids are.

Lauren Ward: Yeah. Exactly.

Nyasha Green: And that's also a really good example of, we have a set routine of what the children do and they know that you're working, but sometimes you can't account for a free spirited child to come in and throw a wrench into that routine. That's really, really funny. Thank you for sharing that with us.

Lauren Ward: Of course. Yeah.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening up to this point. Press The Issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash visit learndash.com. Press The issue is also sponsored by WP Wallet. WP Wallet is a new way to organize client plug-in license keys and invoices with one simple and intelligent tool. Never miss a license renewal, never lose a license key and never struggle with invoicing again with WP wallet. Visit us at wpwallet.com. Now back to the podcast.

Nyasha Green: And speaking of children too, I know we talk about screen time and you talk about it in your article. I really thought this was really cool because when you hear people talking about screen time these days, they're just talking about how it's so bad and how, especially for children, we shouldn't have them on screens. They should be outside running around and things like that. But you have ideas of positive ways to incorporate it in your routine. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Lauren Ward: Oh, absolutely. So the pediatricians say to keep screen time to a minimum and I completely agree with that, but I think that using it intentionally to get through meetings or short work sprints is also extremely beneficial in getting your project milestone complete and making it to that next point in your project. So I think that you should minimize it. And I'm not saying that kids should be on their screens for long periods of time, but just getting through a meeting or a work sprint, I think it can be very, very beneficial.

Nyasha Green: Yeah. And then there are also kids. They're learning and growing. You put the idea in my head that they can definitely get in some educational moments. Screen time doesn't have to be social media or YouTube or movies and shows. It can also be some time for the kids to maybe learn something and it contributes to their growth and health and gives you a break and gives you time to get things together for them.

Lauren Ward: Absolutely. Absolutely. My kids are usually on educational apps or learning games specifically when they're on screen time.

Nyasha Green: So Lauren, you talk a little bit about creating a structure in your house. Just going back to your son coming in when you were on a meeting. The structure you create by making sure you have a dedicated workspace and things like that when you have your kids home, was that difficult or easy to create?

Lauren Ward: That's a great question. Personally I thrive on structure as it helps with setting expectations for my work day and keeping me focused on the task at hand. So instead of waking up and just sitting at my desk, I wake up, change clothes, eat breakfast, brush my teeth, get the kids situated, and then sit down at my desk. So it kind of helps to have that routine structure, to get to my desk and have a clear mind about what I'm doing.

Nyasha Green: So Lauren, we all work from home. And I know that you talk about in your article having an office area and space dedicated to work. Do you have any advice or tips for parents for creating one, especially parents who have kids at home while they work, or even people who might not be parents like me, who I just need help with having a dedicated space at home?

Lauren Ward: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, personally, I would suggest setting up a dedicated workspace if you're able to, whether it's at the dining table or a nook somewhere in your house, or if you have space that has walls and a door, that's even better. But having this set workspace is really going to show your kids and your spouse that you're working. And this might help with not having as many interruptions during your work day.

Nyasha Green: You're right. Because me, I am unorganized, chaos magnified I feel,

Lauren Ward: No.

Nyasha Green: I am, but it's like I get the question a lot, like people are like, I don't see how people can work from home. And I love it. I love working from home and it's like, I do have my dedicated area, but I can only imagine if I wasn't as unorganized, like I had this just this little carved out space for me, which I kind of have, but it's not like what I want. I had this carved out space for me, how much more focused and attentive I probably would be. Because I can see the kitchen from here. And so I'm definitely around noon-ish, like maybe it's snack time.

Lauren Ward: I think a lot of people would feel that so hard.

Nyasha Green: Oh yeah. So this is really, really good advice. Thank you. Thank you. And I have another question for you. So what advice would you give to newbies entering the field? You may find yourself talking to someone who just got into not even just tech, but they're working from home and in a similar situation as you. So what advice would you give to those people just starting up and just trying to balance and do some of the things that you've advised in the article?

Lauren Ward: Yeah, so I mean, I would suggest just take one day at a time, roll with the punches. It's a good starting place. I think everyone comes in at different starting places with their journey with WordPress, but we should walk into it with an open mind and with excitement because the WordPress community, it's an exciting community to be a part of.

Nyasha Green: Yeah, totally. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Lauren, for taking the time to sit down with me. Your article is awesome. I can't wait until your next one and I can't wait until we can do this again. And you're so awesome. And this article was really helping a lot of people. I get a lot of feedback on Twitter about it, so thank you. Thank you. Thank you again.

Lauren Ward: Oh, absolutely. And thank you so much for having me. It was an absolute pleasure talking with you Ny.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press The Issue is a production of MasterWP produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted, edited, and musically supervised by Monet Davenport and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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Here at Press The Issue we live for examining the most complicated questions and problems that face the WordPress community, and that includes how money flows or sometimes does not flow through it. In this episode, Brian and Rob go deep into discussing funding the future of open source.

Rob Howard: Hey Brian, how's it going?

Brian Coords: Good, how are you doing today?

Rob Howard: Very good. So we've been talking a lot about funding, the future of WordPress, there's a ton of different ideas that are swirling around that central concept. But today we really want to focus on actually just looking at some examples of how open source projects are funded outside of WordPress. There's a ton of well known interesting ones, and we've picked out a few and we're going to basically just dive into different funding models, how they contrast with WordPress, how they could be used by WordPress and hopefully just spur some ideas and brainstorm a bit about different and additional ways to fund our favorite open source projects.

Brian Coords: And you've brought forward a few really good examples of some projects, they're pretty much household names, they all have ways in which they're similar to WordPress, ways in which they're different, so we're just going to go through a few of those. And the first example, which I think is probably the biggest name, is Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is very similar in that there's a nonprofit, there's some for-profit stuff in there, and there's a very passionate contributor base to Wikipedia, which is very similar to WordPress. So for you, can you give us an overview? How does Wikipedia generate money and then how do they use that money to push the project forward?

Rob Howard: Yeah, so Wikipedia, as we know it, is a nonprofit, it's run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and that is just a simple charitable 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which essentially any charity you donate to has that nonprofit status. In addition to the Wikimedia Foundation, the owner of Wikipedia also owns Fandom, which actually used to be called Wikia. So anytime you Google a deep cut about a movie or a video game or something, you often will end up on a Fandom site, and that's actually a paid for profit thing, they run ads, there may be a premium option at some point for the users. So they're making money off of Fandom, it is a parallel idea to Wikipedia, so that's one source of revenue that basically keeps the lights on at the very least. And then Wikipedia also runs pledge drives and basically says, "Hey, we're a nonprofit, please donate to us".

Rob Howard: This is very analogous to PBS running telethons or pledge drives to say, "Hey, we're public, we're funded by you, we need your support, you're going to get a tote bag if you support us", whatever that is. So the parallels, as you mentioned, are number one, they have a big contributor base that essentially is producing open source information. The way Wikipedia is licensed, it's all basically free for the world to use and redistribute under very basic terms. You maybe have to reference that you found it on Wikipedia or something, but effectively it's open source knowledge. So where we do open source code or open source publishing in WordPress, they do open source information and obviously they've rapidly overshadowed every other encyclopedia or information source in the world, because they do a nice job with it. So in parallel to WordPress, they are directly asking for help, and we see that with Fight For the Future.

Rob Howard: And I think the contrast is they accept money, so that is a thing that WordPress really doesn't do very well right now, that I think would be a pretty low hanging fruit for them to do better or for us as a community to help WordPress do better. So Wikipedia is basically asking for donations, and then they're taking those donations, they're using it to fund their servers, they're using it to fund their employees. They have a lot of contributors, the contributor environment is quite passionate and there can be drama in it but I also think that there seems to be much more coherent mission among the Wikipedia contributors. And I don't think people are saying, "I'm going to go fork Wikipedia, because I'm mad about it", but we are seeing that a little bit in the WordPress world.

Rob Howard: So Wikipedia probably is the most straightforward example of an open source project that is getting funded by money from donors, and then they also, similar to wordpress.com, have a for profit twist on the same idea where they're making money directly, effectively as a software, as a service or ad sales type of thing. So the next example, which I think again, is another household name and takes a different twist on it is Mozilla, which runs Firefox. So why don't you talk a bit about how Mozilla makes money and we can talk about how that maybe parallels with the world of WordPress. And again, Mozilla... Open source, nonprofit, but they make money in a very different way.

Brian Coords: So Mozilla is mostly known for the browser Firefox, which at one point I think was a quarter of the market share of browsers and is not anywhere near that now. But the way that Mozilla generally makes money is when you use their browser, you have an option to have a default search engine, and that default search engine in the United States is Google. In Russia, China, they have other companies, but basically those companies cut a big check, I think the estimates are somewhere near 400, 500 million dollars a year from each of them to be that first search engine. Because obviously the minute you type a search into your Firefox browser, Google has the rest of the relationship to monetize off of you. So for them, they're basically taking direct contributions from large companies, and so instead of that one-to-one contributor... Make those individual donations, they're just going after the big chunk of money from Google, the big chunk of money from having Baidu or whatever these other search engines are.

Brian Coords: And so in some ways we could say that Mozilla is similar to WordPress because they do have some for profit products, I think they own Pocket, which I think is still around. They have some other stuff, but at the end of the day, they're not in that same boat of hitting up every individual user for contributions, they're not really doing that. They take this big chunk of money, they have a staff of dedicated developers, they have people who work for them, developer advocates that are all just paid by Mozilla, and they push it forward. So in some ways there's some similarities, but I see maybe Mozilla as almost the furthest from the WordPress model. Does that make sense to you or does that resonate with you?

Rob Howard: Yeah, and I mean really what they're doing is they're selling product placement, and you could even see this as something that Netflix does to make money. But I think that a lot of people in the WordPress community probably would cringe a little bit at doing as direct of a product placement as Mozilla does in that search and location bar. However, I think that there probably is an opportunity there. Because if you think about, for example, when I download WordPress I'm getting presented with several different web hosts where I could go set up my account and run WordPress.

Rob Howard: We are not totally aware of how the decision is made on who to put there, it seems like companies that have Goodwill and make contributions from their employees seem to get priority there, but it's not as far as I know ever been really publicly stated, if it has we'll put it in the notes somewhere. But that seems like an opportunity to do product placement, and as much as there's drawbacks to that in some ways... Also, if somebody's going to pay WordPress a hundred billion dollars a year to be their number one recommended web host, and we can then go use that to pay contributors or to fund the project in other ways, that seems like a win or at least a win that we should think about pursuing.

Rob Howard: But then you come back with this question of like, "Well, where does the money go?", and that's one of the challenges in that with Mozilla, they are employing people under their nonprofit, those people are then tasked with doing web development. That is really not happening with the WordPress nonprofit, what's happening is the WordPress nonprofit holds a trademark, it participates in funding of some events and stuff like that. But really all the developers either are working for free or are working for separate for profit companies, Automatic being the most prominent, but also our company, Yoast, Bluehost, GoDaddy, et cetera, Google. So really there is no way currently for someone to pay wordpress.org and have that money go directly to a developer as far as I know. If it's possible, then it's certainly not easy or publicly stated, so there's this weird almost labyrinth that the money has to go through.

Rob Howard: And I think the contrast we see is that when you pay Mozilla, the employees of Mozilla are going to go build something with that money. When you pay Wikipedia, they're going to go fund Wikipedia's operations directly with that money. And you can debate the virtues of nonprofits and the tax position of nonprofits, some people don't think that that's fair that some companies get different tax treatment than others, but when it comes down to it, they're running transparent nonprofits that pay developers, and that's really not happening yet in the WordPress community. What we're seeing is the nonprofit is almost like a holding company in some ways, and then we present open source software, which it is, but then we pay developers via for profit companies, so there's a weird labyrinth there.

Brian Coords: And I wanted to pick up on that idea of paying to be the sponsored name, because I can definitely understand any hesitation for that, that makes sense. Allowing some company to pay to be on the list of hosts sounds a little rough, especially like you said, because we don't really have a place to put that money in a way that we would all feel really good about. On the other hand, we do see that a company like Google does do this by just paying contributors, so they're contributing financially to the project, they're just doing it with their own employees. So we are seeing large companies putting money into WordPress, so that's already happening. And then the other piece is when somebody goes to spin up a new WordPress website, they can go to wordpress.org, that's definitely one option, but due to the way the trademark's been shared, the other place they might land is wordpress.com.

Brian Coords: And so they're already... It's not happening physically on wordpress.org, it's happening one layer back when you type in WordPress into your search engine, but because there's only one company that's allowed to use the trademark WordPress, they really do get that same benefit of being the default hosting company for WordPress. If you want WordPress hosting, there's one default because they're the only ones, literally called wordpress.com. And so these are things where you go, "Well, they are already happening, they're not happening in the same way, but they're already there". Automatic is already getting that benefit, and to be fair they're also hosting wordpress.org and keeping those servers running. So it's not like they're just taking advantage of it, for sure. They're contributing back to the.org site, but those things do definitely exist, so that's where these conversations get a little bit tricky.

Rob Howard: And I think when you're balancing this, it's like, "Well, which conflict of interest do I prefer? Do I want a conflict of interest where Google pays us to be the premiere web host, or do I want a conflict of interest where Google sends employees into the contributor ecosystem who then behave as theoretically dispassionate participants, but in fact they're being paid by Google". And it's not that there's this evil emperor telling people to do the wrong thing, but it's like, "Well ultimately you do what the company paying you instructs you to do", and I don't think that there's anything directly shady happening, but also there's a saying of, "It's hard to see the truth if your paycheck relies on you not seeing the truth". And there's all these things about... There's a reason that you're not supposed to be getting paid in a secret way when you're a government official, when you're in a position of power, that's why conflict of interest exists as a concept.

Rob Howard: So again, I don't want to make that seem like people are doing things in a way that is shady, but at the same time, all of these things are a conflict of interest if you really think about it. So the question is, "Why is it better to have a big company paying an employee than to just have a big company providing money, and then have a transparent company delineating or divvying up that money in a way that is the most efficient". And I think this comes back to something I've said in a couple of articles and the idea that you can only contribute via your personal time is just an extremely inefficient way to receive help. So some people might be able to give time, some people might be able to give money, some people might be able to do other things. So I think part of this conversation is let's broaden the options for contributing.

Rob Howard: If you're only saying, "Hey, you can contribute to these nine areas and that counts, but then everything else doesn't count", then that's not really going to help people, that doesn't help people help WordPress. That seems to me like an unnecessary constraint and possibly causes an incorrect accounting of who's contributing what, because some things just aren't included in that list of things you can contribute. Whereas money solves that problem because if you give money that money can just be rooted to the most efficient place, and instead of saying, "Okay, so Google has X number of employees on the performance team, so now the performance team is basically going to do what Google thinks is best". That's just a different type of conflict of interest than putting them on the homepage for money.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening up to this point, Press The Issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do, now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash, visit learndash.com. Press The Issue is also sponsored by WP Wallet. WP Wallet is a new way to organize client plug-in license keys and invoices with one simple and intelligent tool. Never miss a license renewal, never lose a license key and never struggle with invoicing again with WP Wallet. Visit us at wpwallet.com. Now, back to the podcast.

Brian Coords: There's a few other examples that I think are all very similar, where they get around this by basically being very upfront when things are sponsored. I think one good example we could talk about is Vue, but I know Laravel does a similar thing, where if you go to WordPress and then you want to learn, there's a lot of free open source content from the documentation to the learn team that's creating these video courses. If you go to Vue's homepage, the first thing you'll see is a nice video that gets you used to Vue, and then it's a link to, "Here's just a private company that sponsored this, and they make courses and you can pay them for Vue courses, and they're very high quality because they're a private company".

Brian Coords: And it's very clear that there's private companies that are running these things and sponsoring these things in a way that exists in WordPress, but is pretended as if it doesn't exist. And so when you look at Vue, how do you see their ability to be very popular in the open source world, but also very clearly an opinionated... A lot of private interests in that group. Do you see the similarities or differences between Vue and WordPress?

Rob Howard: Yeah, I mean, I think from a code standpoint, they largely are similar in their philosophies and what they're building. And I think, again, there's this acceptance within the Vue.js world that, "Hey, we have sponsors paying for stuff, here they are, we want you to be a sponsor, here's where you can type in your credit card number to be a sponsor". So they make it just very easy, I could go on the Vue.js site and be a sponsor in the next hour if I wanted to. And they have a couple thousand dollars a month, you could individually send $10 to one individual contributor who's listed on their homepage. So, that is just a very different approach, and I think again, the approach of accepting money, it just makes everything more efficient. But of course the flip side of that is then once you accept that money, you have to have a mechanism for accounting for it in a way that the community can accept as fair.

Rob Howard: So I think that probably is maybe the hardest part psychologically is saying, "Okay, if somebody gives me a million dollars to help with WordPress, now I have to show that I'm using it in a way that is legit and fair", and actually there's quite a bit of work associated with that, but that's what Vue is doing. To some degree, all the companies we've talked about at least can accept donations at some level, Mozilla doesn't get most of their revenue from that, but I think it's possible to donate to them. So then there's this question of, "Okay, once I get that money in hand, how do I show people that I'm doing the right thing with it?". And part of that is literally showing the IRS that you're doing the right thing with that, but the other part is just the community trusting you and building a transparent system.

Rob Howard: And I think that's really one of the hardest parts as well, but I like what Vue does, I think we could essentially copy what Vue does almost directly for WordPress and you wouldn't even have to change anything about how people are contributing their time, but it would be an additive thing where, "Hey, we're adding in this other option where you can just contribute money, and then we'll distribute that money to people who are already contributing". And I think the other thing you mentioned is just a level of comfort with being sponsored, so right now what we're doing is we're almost keeping the sponsors at an arms length by saying, "Oh, well you're not sponsoring WordPress, you're sponsoring a person who volunteers to work on WordPress". But I think that there's just so many very obvious problems with the way that language is being used, and we've seen this talked about by many people other than us.

Rob Howard: "Are you a volunteer, are you not a volunteer? Are you a volunteer today, but you were an employee yesterday and you're going to be a volunteer again tomorrow", and there's a lot of weird stuff around that. And to me, if you're being paid to do something, you are not a volunteer, a volunteer is somebody who shows up for free to help out for a non-profit for a good cause. But I think the desire to make it feel like a volunteer organization has just clouded what's really happening, which is that companies are paying for work to be done. So if we got more comfortable with just saying, "Hey"... Like you said, "This video is sponsored by whoever makes the videos and then you should go buy their products because they support us". Everyone else does that, I don't really think that there's anything inherently wrong or nasty about doing that, I don't think that would pollute the product. I think it would actually create a somewhat more clear understanding of what's happening in the ecosystem, if that makes sense.

Brian Coords: Yeah, and I think it's especially useful the way Vue does it with these pieces that aren't the core development of the software too. Does WordPress need to handle training videos... Vue just lets a private company do that and there's a nice visible sponsorship relationship. WordPress has this idea that we need to control it, we need to make the videos, we need to do all these things and everything trickles out from there, and it just makes so much more work that needs to be accomplished. But then the last quick example, I think are the ones we see the most in this, where I think MySQL is a good example, but I also think Ghost is a good example where it's basically, "We are a for profit company, we're giving you some open source stuff for free, but when you want it easy or you want it powerful, you're just going to pay us and we're not going to pretend that it's not that".

Brian Coords: So if I go to Ghost, I can get it for free, but if I want to pay them for an easier experience, I can, if I go to MySQL, I can get it for free, but if I want to use it in this enterprise scale, I can just pay them directly, and it's clear that that's how the open source is being sponsored. With WordPress, like I said, I think we sort of have that with wordpress.com, but we don't. And I would almost be more in favor if we just said, "This is it, it's wordpress.com", if maybe I felt better about the product. But do you think there's ever a thought where they're going to go further in that direction and just say, "Fine, we are the sponsorship company and we're not going to open this up as much as we used to because we think we could just run it better ourselves", like a Ghost, like a MySQL.

Rob Howard: I mean, honestly I don't think that I would have a strong objection to that, it's fun to contribute, but also I don't think that Ghost and MySQL are doing the wrong thing or a bad thing by being more... What's the word, I guess compartmentalized, in the sense that, "Hey, we have developers who are building this and we're licensing it as open source". And I think one of the big distinctions is I think these two ideas of open source licensing and volunteer contribution get mixed together in WordPress, but they're actually two separate things. You can have employees building a product that then gets licensed under the general public license and becomes open source. So that is what Ghost has done, they're not saying, "Hey, this is volunteer built", they're not saying, "This is a grassroots organization", but they are saying, "You can take it and it's under GPL and you can go use it as you want".

Rob Howard: So that is distinct from being a volunteer led or volunteer built organization. I think in theory, you could have a volunteer organization that's not distributing open source software, but usually those things go hand in hand, because the volunteers want it to be free for everybody. That being said, I think Oracle has acquired MySQL, so now that is open source software that is sold by a big for profit company, and Ghost obviously started that way. That doesn't seem like a situation that harms society to me, where I think there's an argument that lots of things being totally closed source is not great. I think that a company making open source software and then selling add-ons to, it seems reasonable to me as a business model. And it's really not that different from the business model that WordPress plug-in companies use, they're making a free plugin and then they're upselling you to a paid plugin.

Rob Howard: That's not really that much different than MySQL upselling you to the enterprise server after you have started using MySQL and enjoying it. So I think that one of the parallels that I think we've discovered here is that a lot of this stuff is already happening in WordPress, but it is either not clear that it's happening or it's almost being called something different because it may be unfashionable to be too commercialized. However, one of the challenges that has arisen is that we're asking for more contributors, we're asking companies to contribute more, but then there's no clear accounting of how much money is going into the project and where it's going, and how it's being spent. So I think that's a challenge that WordPress faces because of the way it's structured right now, that Mozilla doesn't face and Oracle doesn't face.

Rob Howard: And that's obviously a sticky situation and that's nothing you can solve in a couple hours of thinking about it, but certainly something that I think we could work more on and figure out a way to establish that level of trust, that then supports the people saying, "Okay, well yeah, WordPress is actually sponsored by Google, WordPress is actually sponsored by Blue host"... Or whatever, "That money then goes to developers and here's what we do with it". That just doesn't exist right now because there's no transparent path from A to B.

Brian Coords: Yeah, and I think of the bigger context of this conversation is mainly... How efficient are these processes and we could make them a thousand times more efficient if a private company took over WordPress. They could push out this stuff in a couple months if they really wanted to, I don't think anybody wants that to happen really, but that's the scale of complete efficiency of centralized proprietary systems to WordPress on the far end. And where on the scale do we want WordPress to be? Where are places where we could say, "We're already a little further down this way, let's just formalize it and make it more transparent".

Brian Coords: And the biggest threat really is people start to feel like, "Man, WordPress isn't efficient and it really is slowing down, and it's really not going to hit any meaningful goals in the next five years. Maybe I will take my contributions to a project that I think is going to be a more reliable bet in the future". And whether people stop contributing financially or in terms of manpower, at the end of the day, the goal here is we want the project to move forward faster and what's the most efficient way, but not so efficient that we give up what's central to the WordPress community.

Rob Howard: Yeah, keeping the openness, the democratization while also recognizing that customers are making a decision based on the feature set and the quality of the software. And as we talked about a couple weeks ago, just being open source isn't good enough. We're seeing the closed source competitors sneak up on certain WordPress features like E-commerce, full site editing, stuff like that. And we want to set up a system where we can empower our WordPress developers to do really great work in a way that is timely and fun, and is a win-win for everybody. And part of that means potentially expanding how people can contribute, whether people can contribute money or other things other than time, what contributing means and how wide of a net we want to cast around that, and just getting a more positive vibe around everything. And I think it is clear that other companies are doing that and it would be cool if we borrowed ideas from them and experimented with new things, and just see what works for the community and also for the big companies that are involved, because we want everybody to win.

Brian Coords: I think that's a good place to end this. We may not solve all of WordPress's problems in a short podcast, but I think it's worth getting these conversations moving and getting more people involved in these conversations.

Rob Howard: Absolutely. All right, well it's great talking to you as always, and I will see you next time.

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Monet Davenport: As the WordPress community grows and evolves, it's important that new people with new ideas join in on the fun. What WordPress lacks outside of its formal events is a system for mentorship. Allie Nimmons and prolific mentor Nyasha Green talk about mentorship in WordPress, what it looks like now, and where it could go.

Allie Nimmons: Hey, Nyasha, how are you doing today?

Nyasha Green: I'm doing well. How are you doing, Allie?

Allie Nimmons: I'm great. I am so excited to be talking to you. Anytime I get to get on a call and chat with you I think is a good time. So, on today's episode of the podcast, we are going to be chatting about an article that you wrote that's up on our site right now called 5 for the Now: Why WordPress Mentorship Contribution Should Extend Beyond WordCamps, and I think this is such an interesting topic and it's such an important community topic specifically and something that you're really well-slated to talk about, being the prolific mentor that you are, so yeah, I had a couple of questions for you to get some more information about what you think about mentorship.

Nyasha Green: Yeah, let's do it. I love that title, "prolific mentor." I'm going to put that on my Twitter.

Allie Nimmons: You are. You're extremely prolific. You have, what, 50-plus mentees right now? That's what I'd call "prolific."

Nyasha Green: Yes.

Allie Nimmons: Cool. So, my first thing that I wanted to talk about, in this article you talk about we don't really have a lot of mentors or mentorship within the width of the community. Why do you think that is? Do you think that this community in particular struggles with this particular topic?

Nyasha Green: I think it's a few reasons why. I think the major reason is people don't really know how to mentor. What I mean by that is people think mentoring is, I guess, driving to a person's house, or signing up for a specific program, or spending a bunch of money to set up a fancy meeting place to talk to people, and a lot of people don't know that a mentor is simply someone that can speak into this person, guide them, and help them, and there's really not a financial aspect to that, or it doesn't have to be. You can be that mentor that's spending this money or doing these fancy things. But what I've discovered mostly about people trying to get into tech in general, and then in our community specifically, they just need knowledge, and they need resources. If we can give that to them, that's way more valuable than just giving them money, or anything fancy, because those resources are going to elevate them professionally.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. That makes so much sense to me. I definitely feel that. I struggled finding mentors at the beginning, and I've only just started turning around and trying to mentor other people, and I feel like there's a lot of misconceptions about, yeah, what a mentor is and what that means as well as just how to find one, how to connect with somebody, so I feel like there might be a misconception as well out there that maybe somebody thinks, "Oh, I could be a good mentor. I could talk to people. I could help somebody, but maybe there's not people out there who need that. Maybe there's there isn't anyone who needs me."

Allie Nimmons: How can you imagine that? I mean, based off of your personal experience and other things you've seen, what are good methods and ways for mentees and mentors to be able to find each other? Is it really just asking people, is it better to have a formalized structure or organization or form or something like that? What do you feel is the way to actually encourage people to connect with each other?

Nyasha Green: So, it depends on what type of person you are. Both actually work. I do both. Mostly most of mine is loose space mentoring where I meet people online, so social media is especially in the age of COVID the best way to meet people online that have this need, and with the technology we have like Zoom and Skype and things like that, we have so many ways of connecting where you really don't have to meet in person, so that takes a lot of accessibility challenges out of it, too. You might be a great mentor to someone who needs you, you might be in you're in Texas, and they might be in Boston or Massachusetts, but can still connect because we have all of these tools.

Nyasha Green: But also, if you are just one of those people that it's hard to connect online, and that's perfectly okay, I meet people like that all the time, there are formalized programs to go through like we talked about. I'm doing one for a coding program in South Carolina, and they give me mentor new mentees every six months, and they are actually working with a program called Persevere Now. Persevere Now actually helps women in prison that have recently been released learn how to code, and then they get computers, things like that, and they get on-the-work help, and that's who I'm actually helping to mentor as well. Both sides of that, loose mentoring and going to talk to people and this formalized signing up for a program, both have been exceptional. I would recommend both just depending on what you're more comfortable with.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I feel like people get really intimidated by the idea of having to operate outside of a system, right?

Nyasha Green: Yes.

Allie Nimmons: Having to informally "mentor" somebody as opposed to having mentors for the mentors, having some kind of guidance for those people to be able to provide them with resources and motivation because there's also, I feel like the thing of mentors go through imposter syndrome, I would imagine.

Nyasha Green: Oh, yeah.

Allie Nimmons: I mean, I do with the one person I'm mentoring right now, I'm always like, "Am I giving her what she needs? Am I checking in with her enough? Am I checking in with her too much? Am I actually being helpful? Am I being distracting?" It's this huge learning process and I would love to be able to do that within a formalized structure, but like you talked about in your post, we don't really have that right now. If you could just snap your fingers and create something within WordPress specifically that gives support to people like you and me who would like to mentor people, what would that look like? All other things being equal, money is no object, what would that ideal kind of system or program look like?

Nyasha Green: Well, my ideal program would be first and foremost, people who are part of the program, it could be like a subsection of people, or it could be, sorry, the mentors themselves going out and actually getting these people. That's the hardest part, so anybody comfortable with it actually going to find these people because I've written about it a couple of times. In teacher/student relationships, which this is kind of one, a teacher/student, the onus is always on the student to find the person to guide them, to figure out what they want to have the resources, and just be ready to ask questions and to do all of this work, but we never ask, "Are we giving the students enough information and resources to even do that, to come to us, to find us to have the questions?"

Nyasha Green: Sometimes they don't even know who to turn to or where to turn to, so I think just going out ourselves, knowing that we were in their shoes one day, we were these people who didn't know what we were going to do professionally. We didn't know what questions to ask. We didn't know what track to take. I think going out and actually finding them, whether it be through programs that are training people to do code, or training people to do WordPress, or media relations, marketing, documentation, things like that, going out and finding these people and saying, "Hey, do you need help?", because the worst thing that can happen in that situation is they say no, and that's not a bad thing, we would just move on.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That is so much of, I feel like what Contributor Day is about at WordCamps. For those listening who might not know, Contributor Day is a session or workshop that a lot of WordCamps will have usually on the last day that's, yeah, it's just about bringing experienced contributors into a room and adding unexperienced contributors to that room and allowing people to learn how to contribute and what that means and all of those things. I mean, I've attended a few Contributor Days. I don't know how many you've attended. In my experience, they've always been very unorganized, and I've always been very confused and intimidated, and I've learned a lot, but it's usually a very, "Let's all just kind of figure it out," sort of a thing. Have you been to Contributor Days before?

Nyasha Green: I have not, not in WordPress. I've been to, it's not been called Contributor Day, but I've been to some similar things at other tech conferences, and I think they have also been pretty unorganized, so I think organization would also be a major thing we would have to focus on. I am not very organized. That's why I am so thankful for my former program that I go through because I do steal ideas from them, and they said it's okay, but I do steal ideas from them to use with my mentees. My mentors who actually got me into WordPress, if they had not found me, I cannot see any way that I would've been into the WordPress community, so I always take what I learn, and I pass it along, and I use it to help others, so definitely, definitely, definitely more organization would be perfect for having something like this in the WordPress community.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think that I would love to see something like that. I think we struggle sometimes with having things organized because we have this admirable, to a degree, thought process of, "Well, if it's too organized, or if people are being forced to do things in a very particular way, that might be unattractive to some people, or that might be complicated for some people, if they're going to give up, or we don't want to make it feel like work, or we don't want to make it feel like school." There's a reason why work feels work and school feels like school, right?

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Allie Nimmons: That's how people are productive and that's how people learn, so yeah, I'm a big fan of more organization in the WordPress community space overall, and I think that Contributor Days are a perfect place for that to come to light, and using that maybe as a template, right, of okay, if we can nail how we do Contributor Days, who's to say we can't have a larger structure of Community Days that exists throughout the year, that acts as a sort mentorship system or program for people? Maybe with the focus on how to contribute to WordPress, but contributing to WordPress gives you so many other skills that you can use so many other places as well,

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening up to this point. Press the Issue by Master WP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do now. Now, let it make you money. Teaching what you do to create a course with LearnDash, visit learndash.com. Press the Issue is also sponsored by WP Wallet. WP Wallet is a new way to organize client plug-in license keys and invoices with one simple and intelligent tool. Never miss a license renewal, never lose a license key, and never struggle with invoicing again with WP Wallet. Visit us at wpwallet.com. Now, back to the podcast.

Allie Nimmons: So, I'm curious. I mean, the title of the article is about mentoring extending beyond WordCamps, right? We've been talking about Contributor Day, but if we're looking beyond that, who do you see that falling on, right? We just talked about a lot of times the impetus for these things falls on the mentee, but who really should it fall on? Should it fall on just us as the mentors? Should it fall on community leaders? Should it fall on businesses and business owners who make their money off of WordPress? Who should be leading that charge? Should it be a community thing? Should it be from the WordPress foundation? Should it be automatic? Who should be at the head of that hierarchy, do you think?

Nyasha Green: Everyone. Everyone? I know it seems like an in general answer, but this is why I say everyone. I've been asked that before, and the first thought that comes to everyone's mind is these businesses, the big ones, the major ones. Sometimes people say automatic, "They should be doing this because they have the money." Totally understand money does make things easier. A lot of people, a rough thing about this is sometimes people don't see the value in this. They're like, "Okay, if I take time out of my day to do this for someone, how will I benefit?" Getting people to see the value in that, it's hard. Businesses, they see money, and if they see money to be made, hey, that's getting more people in, that's workers for us in the future. They have a bigger incentive to do it. Understandable. Very understandable to an extent to me.

Nyasha Green: The reason I say that is because I am not a hundred percent sure that if we put it in the hands of businesses, it will stay community-focused. I'm one of those people, most importantly, we should be serving these people who want to be in this community, we shouldn't be trying to just only do this because we know they're going to make a profit for us later, we should be doing this because they're going to improve our community. They're going to make things better for all of us because I'm on a Bernie Sanders WordPress kick, I guess.

Allie Nimmons: Socializing WordPress.

Nyasha Green: Yeah, yeah, so it's just businesses get a bad rap, but there are already so many businesses doing so great things as well, so they definitely shouldn't be left out. GoDaddy is paying for our food for one of our meetings for our WordPress meetup that we're starting in South Carolina. We didn't go and ask them, they volunteered. Things like that, I think if we could work with businesses to maybe help out a little financially, they'll still get the benefits that they're looking for if they're looking for that, I don't want to say that's what GoDaddy is looking for, or any of the other businesses, but if we all come together, we will all benefit, and then we all won't have to do as much hard work because it's definitely harder for me to mentor versus a major company. It's a one of me.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. For sure. I mean, it sounds like what you're talking about is balance, right?

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Allie Nimmons: If a company comes in and they say, "Okay, we're going to sponsor X amount," yeah, that is going to benefit them. It benefits their brand awareness, I would say, in largest part, at least the most immediate payoff is we could put our name on this, people see that we've done this, it builds a positive impression, people who are in it see that we've sponsored this thing that they like, that makes them happy. I mean, yeah, GoDaddy is a great example of a company that really turned their whole ship around based off of saying, "What's a worthwhile group or project or person to invest in? Let's invest our money in them thoughtfully," and now, GoDaddy is viewed very differently than they were viewed five, 10 years ago, and so I think that I'm never going to look at a company and be like, "No, I don't want your buddy for this thing. I'm trying to do." I love when companies do that.

Allie Nimmons: I understand as a company, you do have to be looking at, "Well, what's in it for us? We can't just throw money at things blindly, we have to be smart about it," but I definitely, definitely, definitely, anybody who knows me will agree, have your back in terms of too much company involvement is super scary to me because then you become beholden to that company and you feel like, well, we have to do what's in your interest because you gave us money, right? It's this kind of unofficial contract all of a sudden that you have with them.

Allie Nimmons: I think as a whole community personally, I think we're a little bit too afraid of that. We're a little bit too afraid to move more into that balance of letting companies and corporations and stuff be involved in things. I think we have this idea that everything has to be very grassroots, has to be very individual.

Nyasha Green: I'm with you. I agree.

Allie Nimmons: That's not my favorite thing in whole world sometimes, right?

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Allie Nimmons: I think it limits us in a lot of ways because we're afraid that somebody's going to feel a type of way, right?

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm.

Allie Nimmons: It's like, "Oh, well I don't like GoDaddy, so then I don't want to be part of this project GoDaddy's associated with." I don't know. I think that whole argument is a little silly and I think that when it comes to things like building a mentorship program or beefing up the organization of Contributor Day, I think we get a little bit too afraid to lean on people to do that. Do you know what I mean?

Nyasha Green: Yeah, and I definitely agree with you. Even though I'm scared of companies, I agree that we still don't let them do enough in the WordPress space. It's like you said, we want to be grassroots, we want to be transparent. You can still do that. We're not the only community that wants that. Other communities, they have that, and they still get that money, and they still get that help from those companies, so we definitely could take a page out of someone else's books by looking at how they did it and how they stayed true to themselves. Valid concerns, but I'm with you, it's like it's time for us to open up. One of the people, I quoted Kim. I think her name is Licari.

Allie Nimmons: Licari.

Nyasha Green: Licari? Yes, I got it.

Allie Nimmons: 'Kay, great.

Nyasha Green: Yeah, she is awesome, and I really loved her. I really loved her article on how WordPress isn't a small community anymore. We're bigger, but people don't want to grow with the community, and that's why so many things are not changing, but we have to. It's like we can either work with it. We can grow and we can change and we can do it on our own terms, or we can just be stagnant, and what will happen to the community then? That's such a major thing for me, so I definitely agree. We could definitely use more help. It works. It works. We can make it work. If we keep our checks and balances and we stay true to our mission, I definitely think it will work.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, I agree with that completely. I'm going to have to read what Kim wrote because I very much feel like WordPress is, we're like a teenager right now. We're in this very teenagery phase where we're becoming something different and we don't really know exactly what that is and we want to hold onto the childhood portion of our history. I think that that's hurting us in a lot of ways. But yeah, I think people like you who sit around and think about the specific ways that we can grow in terms of, wouldn't it be great if we had more mentorship and more systems for mentorship, those kinds of things can have all of these great ripple effects I think into helping us mature as a community, so I'm going to keep bothering you about when are you going to build out a mentorship program, Nyasha? When are you going to work on this? When are you going to make this happen? Because I think if there's anyone in this community right now who can do something like that, it is you. No pressure.

Nyasha Green: No pressure, I guess, as my voice goes higher. No, thank you, I really appreciate that. I definitely want to do it. Even before I got into tech, I was all about giving back, and not even that. I guess people call it "paying it forward," but it's like you look at your community, it could be the WordPress community, it could be the tech community, it can be your neighborhood that you live in, and you look around, and if you see something you don't like, what are you going to do to change it? Are you going to just talk about it? Are you going to ignore it? Or are you going to start change? But that's broad. How do you start change when you're thinking about things in your community? You have to sometimes be that person. You have to take that first step.

Nyasha Green: Then when you think about why you want to do it, what I like to think is if I see something I know it works and I want to see it in my community, that's enough for me to go out there and do it. I know it will work. The value I find in it, that thing that certain people struggle with is knowing that I'm going to make this community as great as things I've seen before. The stuff I see right in front of me, it's going to be community-wide. That's the value I see in things and a lot of people never really think about that and that's why I'm here to help them think about that as well. What do you want your community to look like? Do you know? You can have a direct hand in that? "But nah, I'm just one person." So am I. Let's do it.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, the ocean is made up of many drops of water. It all matters. What I'd love for people to walk away with, too, as well from what you just said is a lot of people I think believe that when you love something, you don't want it to change, right? You want it to stay the same. I completely disagree with that, right? We're not meant to just stay the same always. We're human beings and human beings are always pushed toward change and growth and evolution and the desire to constantly be better. You don't want something to be better if you don't care about it, right? I'm not out here pushing for a sport team to be better 'cause I don't care about sports. I'm not going to spend my time on that, right? This is the community I care about and this is the community that I would like to change for the better. I feel like recently I've been hearing a lot of thoughts around if you want to change this community so much, it means you don't care about it, or you don't love it, and I think that's a little nonsense.

Nyasha Green: I agree. Imagine if it changed and you loved it even more.

Allie Nimmons: Right?

Nyasha Green: You could sit back and think, "Wow, if I never took that chance, I would never know this love." Who wants to think like that?

Allie Nimmons: Imagine if it changed for the better and somebody else found out how much they loved it, right?

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Allie Nimmons: And more people joined us and it grew and became bigger and better, I do love this community very much, and I do want to change it very much.

Nyasha Green: Same.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, cool. Well, thank you so much for talking to me, Nyasha. This is super fun as always. I highly recommend if you're listening to head on over to our website, find Nyasha's article, give it a read. We will link it in the show notes as well so you can find it. Yeah, please go ahead and keep this conversation going, tag us on social media about how something we said today made you mad, and we'll talk to you about it.

Nyasha Green: We sure will.

Allie Nimmons: We sure will. All right, we'll see you next time, everyone.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press the Issue is a production of Master WP, produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted, edited, and musically supervised by Monet Davenport, and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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This podcast was sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. Create a course with LearnDash. Visit LearnDash.com.

Press the Issue is a production of MasterWP. It was produced by Allie Nimmons. It was hosted and edited by Monet Davenport and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com

Episode Transcript:

Monet Davenport: For years, WordCamps have been run by volunteers, and all the content has been produced by volunteer speakers. Lately, there have been more and more conversations around compensating speakers for their time and expertise. In this episode, Allie and Devin break down the details of what paying event speakers could look like.

Devin Egger: Today, we're here with Allie Nimmons talking about why speakers at WordCamps need to get paid. Hey Allie, how are you doing?

Allie Nimmons: Hey, Devin. I'm really good. How are you?

Devin Egger: I'm doing great. Thanks for taking the time to sit down with me.

Allie Nimmons: Of course.

Devin Egger: So this is definitely a topic that we've talked about a little bit here at Master WP, and I'm really glad you're coming to talk a little bit more about the idea of speakers getting paid at WordCamps, and that's definitely something that's been quite a hot button topic. So I guess just kind of starting out, just in general, what are your kind of thoughts on this whole issue and where do you stand on it? I mean, obviously we probably think that people need to get paid, but what do you think?

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. I definitely think that speakers should be paid. I think that anyone who is providing a service based off of their knowledge, their expertise, their experience, there needs to be adequate compensation for that. I understand the model that we have that exists right now, which is super community-based. It's very volunteer-oriented. It's very education for the sake of education and learning for the sake of learning.

Allie Nimmons: And I don't think that there's anything inherently wrong with people speaking for free. It's a choice. And I think that in a lot of ways, it destresses the situation in terms of, you can decide to speak at a WordCamp for free and not have kind of additional pressures of, okay, well they're paying me this much, so everything has to be super duper perfect. Right? I think as a speaker, if you're doing it for free, you can feel a little bit more comfortable, maybe making mistakes here or there, or maybe speaking for the first time. There's not as much pressure if you're doing it on a volunteer basis.

Allie Nimmons: But we start to get into issues where people can't speak as readily without being compensated, or people are trying or speaking a lot and they're not being compensated, or at a certain point, the payoff of having that exposure is not worthwhile anymore. And so people are, what's the word, de-encouraged. It's not the right word. I'll think of it later. But it's not as attractive to speak, especially because there are so many other tech conferences and other types of business conferences out there that do pay.

Allie Nimmons: So if you're approaching somebody from maybe the fringes or outside of the WordPress community and you're asking them to come in and to speak and to share their knowledge, a lot of people do expect some sort of compensation for that time because it's been a standard in other communities. Like I've spoken at tons of WordCamps for free, and I love doing that, but I've also been offered speaking engagements for other events. I've been paid up to $1,500 to just speak. Not anything crazy, not anything more than a WordCamp speaker would be expected to do, and it was just, "Hey, we'd like you to speak. Here's how much you get paid." No beating around the bush.

Allie Nimmons: So I think that there's value to paying people. I understand right now why we don't, but I understand also coming out of the pandemic, people are very precious with their time and their energy. And I think we're seeing this really interesting shift right now in companies really appreciating the fact that it's hard to just speak for free even virtually, and that we need to put our money where our mouths are when it comes to actually paying people to speak.

Devin Egger: Right. Yeah, totally. And that also brings about... You touched on it, but the idea that because we gain so much benefit from WordPress being free and open source, I think that's kind of the central idea behind it, right, is that we are giving back to that and we provide some additional benefit from our end for being able to use WordPress and benefiting from the open source community. But like you said, that makes it really difficult for someone that maybe is in the tech industry, but not in WordPress, or in the design industry, but not in the WordPress industry. They don't really have as much incentive to come and speak at a WordCamp as someone that's actively using WordPress every day.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, exactly. And I don't think that there is a one single amount that we need to start paying people. I think that that vastly depends on... So we're talking about WordCamps right now, but there's lots of other WordPress events that I kind of think of as indie events, like DE{CODE} that's put on by WP Engine and WordFest and WooSesh and all of these kind of independently run events that some of them pay, some of them don't.

Allie Nimmons: And for people listening, you may not know that WordCamp tickets have a cap. WordCamp can't charge more than a certain amount of money for a ticket, and that's designed to keep the event accessible to people. That also limits the amount of money that the event can make and thereby limits the amount that people could be paid. If you're charging for your indie WordPress event $50 ahead or $100 ahead, yes, you should be paying your speakers appropriately based on how much that event is pulling in. So it would vastly vary depending on how much that event would cost as far as how much that person is paid.

Devin Egger: Totally. I think that you're right there. We are kind of in the midst of a shift, and fortunately or unfortunately, fortunately, that shift is happening. Unfortunately, it does seem as though there are some rules there that need to change in order to get that shift to happen, those rules such as how much a WordCamp can charge, whether or not speakers can get paid for WordCamps and all of that. But I think that having these talks like this and opening that conversation and that dialogue up is definitely the way to start creating that change, and I'm glad we're talking about it.

Devin Egger: So I guess in light of that, so yeah, I mean, obviously figuring out how much speakers should get paid definitely depends on how much the WordCamp should bring in. And kind of along with that, do you think that if it's an in-person WordCamp, that we should be paying for the cost of travel and travel expenses like hotel and food and all that? Should it just be an honorarium for speaking? Or how do you think that should go?

Allie Nimmons: That's a really good question, and it's difficult because that's really expensive, all of that. It's one thing to pay a speaker, a stipend of 150, $200 or something like that. Once you get into the travel and the hotel, you might have somebody coming to a WordCamp in Florida and they're coming from France, right? Do you then say, "Okay, well we're not covering international trips." Maybe does that person need some sort of special accommodation in terms of a wheelchair? Does that cost extra? Do they need to bring a child? Is that going to cost extra? There's so many factors and details covered within that that I think would make it really difficult.

Allie Nimmons: Ideally, the answer is yes. Ideally, we would be able to cover all of those things. And a lot of times, it seems unfair because you do have people... And I've been one of these people, so I'm not knocking or criticizing this system, but you have people who go to a WordCamp on the dime of the company that they work for. Right? So I believe you and I are both going to WordCamp US on Master WP's dime. Our company that we work for is paying for the ticket, for the hotel and for the flight.

Allie Nimmons: And say, you, Devin had applied to speak and got accepted. That means that you, as a speaker, are getting an all-expenses-paid trip to be able to go and speak. And the only thing, the only difference between you as this hypothetical speaker and a freelancer who applied to speak is just where you work. Right? So I remember always feeling a little bit guilty when I would go to WordCamps and thinking there's so many people here who maybe saved and saved or spent so much money to be able to get here, and I have not spent a single dime, and it's just because I happen to be working with this company. And all of that is really complicated.

Allie Nimmons: So yes, I mean, ideally, I think it should include the cost of all of those things. Maybe that will be an incremental thing. Maybe that will be... As of right now, we have all of these companies, including Master WP, which I know you and I are both really proud of. We have all of these companies who are offering to help folks with those expenses. So maybe in the future, we have a sponsorship option where that company drops in $8,000 and that covers a chunk of travel and hotel accommodation or something like that. But yeah, I think that that might be an incremental thing that happens over time as we sort figure out how to handle those things, but I don't think that it's something that can just happen at the turn of a dime.

Devin Egger: We're definitely very lucky to be provided with the opportunity to basically get paid to go to this and have our travel paid for and all of that. And you're right. It's definitely a different situation for those people that have saved up and spent a whole bunch of their own money to go. And we've talked also before about how that being able to come to a WordCamp or speak at a WordCamp kind of creates a bit of a privilege issue, and I know that we've also talked about before how that being able to pay speakers would also help with creating more diversity in WordPress in general. So how does that work out? By doing a good thing of paying speakers, do we also increase the diversity of the WordPress community in general?

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. I see that as a very direct kind of thoroughfare. Statistically speaking, right, and we're getting into some generalizations, statistically speaking, in the United States of America, underrepresented people make less money. There's statistics to back that up. There's numbers to back that up. Women are paid less. Black people are paid less. People of Hispanic origin are paid less. Disabled people are typically paid less and/or have more expenses that need to be covered. So I've worked at WordPress companies with people who have had to use wheelchairs. I've worked with people who have chronic pain, and all of those things are money sucks, as well as time and energy sucks.

Allie Nimmons: And so when you're looking at all of these different obstacles and all of these different challenges, the idea of, "Okay, let me drop two grand to go to this event on the potentiality that it might be a good networking opportunity or that I might learn something," that's so unreasonable to ask people to do. And that's not to say that straight white men don't have challenges and economic struggles. That's always true, but statistically speaking, the straight white men in our society are more economically available to be able to go and do these sorts of things.

Devin Egger: Absolutely.

Allie Nimmons: And it's-

Devin Egger: It's hard.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, it's really hard. And that means that within our community, there is sort a bit of almost like an out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing, but in reverse. Right? So if you're that person who's at every single WordCamp and you're able to be tweeting about things and you're able to meet all of these other people, make all of these connections, learn all of these skills, it's going to help you. Right? You're going to be able to move forward with your career in WordPress. That's just how it happens. And I'm a perfect example of that. In 2019, I attended, I don't know, eight different WordCamps or something like that. Yeah. I was so lucky to have the opportunity to travel and to go to all of these things. And most people that I know in the community right now know me or have met me at an event. That's how my career in WordPress took off, was going to these events.

Allie Nimmons: But I would not have been able to do that if it was not for a company sponsoring me and paying for me to be able to do those things. And so because that was able to happen, I, as a queer, black woman, have been able to insert myself into the community. And without that, there would be one fewer diverse person active in the community right now. So I do think that there is a direct line between sending these people to camps and allowing them to build out whatever it is they want to build in terms of their professional goals and careers and so on and so forth.

Allie Nimmons: Not only that, but speaking at an event, learning to speak publicly and getting these experiences under your belt is such a huge confidence booster. And I feel like once you're able to start speaking at these events and establish yourself as a knowledgeable person within this community, mentally that opens up so many other doors. That erases so much of the imposter syndrome that is forced upon us. So it has so many different repercussions and amazing consequences that a lot of times just don't come to pass because people just literally can't afford the trip or can't afford to take the time off or can't afford to be away from their families or so on and so forth.

Devin Egger: Yeah. There's a lot of barriers there. And I guess I hadn't even really thought about that. It's just how much being in these arenas, especially putting yourself out there, can really impact your career. And again, that's why we have these talks so that we can start to realize just how much benefit people can get from coming to a WordCamp and from speaking at a WordCamp. And it's kind far-fetched to think that we're going to be able to change the rules of how the WordPress world works right away. So I guess at the start of it, it seems like kind of the burden is on companies, like ourselves at Master WP, that are sponsoring people to go. Does that seem fair to say to you?

Allie Nimmons: I think so. I think there's different things that can happen at different levels of the system. Right? So yeah, companies like ours can definitely do that legwork of reaching out and saying, "We have a budget for this. We will set up a system for people to be able to apply for this kind of assistance, and we're going to facilitate that to make it happen." Companies like ours and bigger companies as well, I think, should definitely take that on. I think smaller companies can figure out ways to approximate that as much as possible. Whether that's throughout the year, you're going to set aside a small fund so that maybe one event a year, you can send your employees to maybe that's WordCamp US, maybe it's something else, but it doesn't have to be... We have a WordCamp every weekend for the most part or we used to. So I think being able to approximate that at scale is really useful.

Allie Nimmons: And it also comes down to, we talked about the diversity thing, larger companies can do better always to hire more diverse people so that those people could have the opportunities to go to an event that company is sponsoring, and that's an individual thing. That's a manager or a hiring manager, whoever who's making that decision and being aware of the repercussions of that.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. I'm not sure who else that falls on. I mean, I would love to point at the WordPress Foundation and the systems that establish the way that WordCamps work and say, well, they can be doing more. That's not always true, or I can't really speak to how that could be true because I think, especially after the pandemic, the people who are organizing these events are doing their absolute darndest to just make sure the events happen in the first place. But the WordCamp US team, for example, has done a great job of connecting with all of these companies and making sure that people who want to get to that event can get the assistance they need to get there.

Allie Nimmons: So it sounds corny, but it's very much a team effort of kind realizing this dream of, yeah, we're very much a mom and pop shop, if you will, in terms of open source communities, but we can get to that level of being able to pay people to speak, which I think people think of as this almost unattainable thing that you need so much money to be able to do, and it's like, well, yeah, it costs money, but that money exists in this ecosystem, I believe. It's just not being routed in the proper ways.

Devin Egger: And I think we kind of touched on it just a tiny bit before, but the idea that there is a stigma against paying people, like it should be a volunteer, I think you're really just bringing about the idea that regardless of whatever stigma that there is about this, it's really just important to be able to support people because again, for a lot of people, it's not even feasible to make the time to take away from work, to pay for the travel, to do all that, to actually come and be a part of an event like this.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, exactly. But there's so many nuances to it that need to get figured out. I mean, are you going to pay somebody who's never spoken at an event before, who just started using WordPress last year? Are you going to pay them the same amount that you're going to pay Chris Lema if he decides to come speak at an event, right? Are we then going to start having arguments and discussions about, well, this person should get paid more for this reason and blah, blah, blah, blah. And so much of WordPress is decided by committee, and so this is just another one of those things that people are going to disagree about the minutiae of how it works, but I think at the end of the day, this is something that we all want and acknowledge that it's important. And so it's worth it to have these conversations to figure out where we all land on the details.

Devin Egger: And to just get it started too, to just start doing it. And it may not be perfect right away. We may not figure it out exactly right the first time, but kind of like how Master WP did it this year, it's just, hey, we're just going to try to do it. We're just going to start it, and we're going to throw some money out there and open up an application process for people to apply to do it. And if we find a better way, cool, but at least, we're making the step, and we're starting to do something. And there's a lot of other companies that have done that too. And again, like you said, just having the conversation and keeping that open, I think, is the best way to ensure that the ball keeps falling forward on it.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, absolutely. I'm trying to find it now, and I can't, but in the show notes for this show, we'll make sure to include... There's a page on the WordCamp US site that includes details about the companies who are supporting people that would like to go to events. So we'll make sure to include that so people can check that out.

Devin Egger: All right. Well, thanks for being on with me today, Allie. And again, we were talking about why WordCamp speakers should be getting paid, and this has been Allie Nimmons and Devin Egger at Master WP.

Allie Nimmons: Awesome. Bye.

Devin Egger: See you.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press The Issue is a production of Master WP, produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted, edited, and musically supervised by Monet Davenport, and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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Episode Transcript:

Monet Davenport: Work-life balance isn't a new topic, especially since 2020. But the traditional methods of focus, relation, and de-stressing don't work for everyone. Nyasha and Rob have their own approaches to burnout and breaks.

Nyasha Green: Hey, Rob, how are you doing today?

Rob Howard: Hey, Nyasha. Very good. How about you?

Nyasha Green: Doing well. Really excited to talk to you today about, well, these two articles that we did, breaking... Taking breaks and vacations are my favorite things in life. So just really excited to talk to you. I just wanted to ask you a few questions about the article that you wrote. It was titled Vacations Make a Business Stronger. And first, what inspired you to write this article?

Rob Howard: So this concept for me dates back probably 15 years, right? In the near term, what I've discovered both when I was running a very small agency with one or two people. And now all the way up, we have 18 or 19 people. What I've discovered is that by essentially forcing yourself to exit work for a significant amount of time, maybe a week or two where you're truly not checking email, not checking slack, it's not a working vacation. It is truly like you are out of the picture, right?

Rob Howard: It really forces me to run a more efficient business. Right? So what I joke around about with my family is my business is way more efficient when I'm on vacation than when I'm actually here. Right? And obviously that's intended to be a little bit of a joke, but it's really true because that compels me to train and systematize. Right? And I think the trap that a lot of people whether they're business owners or employees of a business gets stuck in, is they, for various reasons that we can talk about, perceive themselves to be indispensable to the business that they run or that they're part of. Right?

Rob Howard: And while you can be important to the business, being indispensable to the business can actually be a very unhealthy mindset because then you can never let go. Not only does that stress you out individually, but it also in a lot of ways prevents you from leveling up, right? Because part of leveling up your business is actually taking that owner or the initial founding team out of the equation for some of the important business operations. Right?

Rob Howard: So if you're never willing to do that, then you're stuck because you can only do so much as one individual human being. And eventually, if you do want that business to grow and get bigger, you got to be able to train, delegate, document. And in my experience, vacations are a really fun way to force you to do that. So that was kind of the near term inspiration. And going farther back, I've always been in that digital nomad, four-hour work week mindset.

Rob Howard: I don't work a four-hour work week and I don't necessarily endorse everything in that book and in that sort of worldview, but one thing that I do think is really smart and sensible is this idea that you shouldn't be waiting for retirement or for some distant point in the future to enjoy your life and do the things that you want to do.

Rob Howard: So I think what I take away from a lot of that four-hour work week perspective is not that you should literally be working one hour a day, but that you should also not be deferring your life until some point in the future. Right? So a lot of people say, "Well, I'm going to work really hard in my twenties or work really hard for the next five years or whatever that is. And then I'll go to this vacation destination. Then I'll do this thing or that thing that is on my bucket list.

Rob Howard: Of course, work has a tendency to be infinite if you allow it to be, right? And what a lot of people discover is that someday keeps getting pushed back. Right? So the philosophy that I try to take is you got to do stuff now. Right? I have a son who's eight years old and we've done a lot of fun things and fun vacations in eight years of his life that we could have easily pushed back and said, "Oh, well, now maybe we'll do that when he's older, when we have more money, when we have more time, whatever." Right?

Rob Howard: But you got to sometimes do the thing in life that you actually want to do. And I think that applies to vacations. It applies to other major life decisions. It applies to moving to the city you want to live in, right? All these things that they are really easy to put off. And you do that repeatedly. You end up being much older than you expected to be when you finally get around to these things.

Rob Howard: I think that's just a negative outcome for everybody. This philosophy basically is like you got to have a business and a job that allows you to actually live life too, and actually supports those other things you want to do as opposed to just being like work for work's sake, if that makes sense.

Nyasha Green: Yeah, it totally does. I want to just talk to you about two things you said that stood out to me the most just now. You brought up that people think that they're indisposable versus they should think they're important. And that really stood out to me because when I was in fresh out of college and working, so when I was in the insurance industry, they worked me like I was indispensable. They made sure I knew... How much do you think... And that was a really... That was a very, very toxic industry to be in. How much do you think like jobs play in people like working themselves like that to the point where they think they can't take a vacation?

Rob Howard: Yeah. I mean, I think it depends on the individual situation, how malicious the boss is actually being by doing that. But I think that there is clearly a... In multiple industries, there is an industrywide philosophy that basically you want to devote your life to this. I think Silicon Valley and Wall Street are both very typical in that way, but obviously, there's tons of other industries. You mentioned your previous job. I also see this in people who get jobs as management consultants or in some law firms, stuff like that.

Rob Howard: So pretty much any job could fall prey to this. I think it's good to enjoy your work and feel important. But when someone says that you are so indispensable, that you can't take vacation, I think that now has shifted over into a toxic situation, as you said. I think the way that I turn that around is like, "You're so indispensable that I don't want to lose you to burnout or to the next job that actually offers you a better work-life balance." Right?

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm.

Rob Howard: So when you think about what they're doing, they are in some cases and again, you never know how conscious of a decision this is because you can also just adopt this mindset without even realizing it if you're around people who think this way for a really long time. But the idea that if you're not the only person who can do what you do, you're going to get replaced. I hear that a lot in very competitive like legal law firms and stuff like that.

Rob Howard: They'll say, "Well, you have to be the rainmaker. You have to be the best otherwise it's a dog eat dog world out there." Right? So that's an element of it is like are your fellow employees going to compete against you and beat you because you're not enough of a workaholic? Right? And then of course, there's the manager who is pressuring you into doing extra work and almost giving you these little nuggets of praise, but they're also kind of manipulative in a way.

Rob Howard: So I think one thing that the last two years have done for employees that has been valuable is we all have a lot more options now with remote work with relatively tight job market where it is kind of like an employee's market as opposed to an employer's market.

Rob Howard: So I think you're seeing a lot of people switch jobs because they're now saying, "Well, this is just not a good lifestyle for me anymore and there's other options out there." So I think that for me I've been happy to see that. Obviously, I think we're ahead of the curve on a lot of those work-life balance things at our company ,so we've really benefited and thrived from already being there. But I also look to people who are in other industries or friends or other people that I know, and I'm like, "Wow, I'm glad for you guys that you can achieve or compel your employer to do better." Right?

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Rob Howard: I mean, I think to go back to your original question, there definitely are people who are just straight up manipulative, but also I think there are people who don't realize there's another way to operate, right? Those people who are well meaning, but still stuck in this harmful mindset can, in some cases, be just as harmful as somebody who is actively manipulating you in a malicious way.

Nyasha Green: Gotcha, gotcha. And as a former workaholic, as I just admitted, it took me a while to get comfortable taking vacation days. Was it like that for you? Or how long did it take you to get comfortable like actually vacationing and breaking?

Rob Howard: So I have the dubious distinction of hardly ever having had a real job. So when I graduated from college, my first job was at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the major metro newspaper in Atlanta. And it was like a killer job on paper, but I quickly discovered that I didn't really like working in an office in that type of situation. Newspapers were in a weird place. This was 2005. So I was hired as a web guy, but I was also doing journalism and writing and stuff like that and aspired to that. And interestingly now, 15 years later, here we are running a magazine about websites. Right?

Rob Howard: So I kind of said like, "I don't really like this atmosphere. I have always been a freelancer. I could still be a freelancer." I actually turned down an equivalent job offer at the Washington Post and decided to freelance, which looking back, I probably should have taken that job and just done both. I probably would give myself that advice if I were talking to my 21-year-old self, again.

Rob Howard: But fast forward, and obviously, it's worked out and I'm happy with the career path that I've taken. But in the very short period of time that I had to count PTO, I was like, "Okay, this is super stressful." Especially in the world of newspapers, they work every day. So they were like, "Well, you're the lowest ranking person. You can't go home for Thanksgiving."

Rob Howard: While you're the lowest ranking person, you can't go home for Christmas. Right? My family was in New York and I was in Atlanta. So I was like, "That's actually a pretty big deal for me." Right?

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Rob Howard: None of that is unusual. It's all part for the course. Right? But that is an experience that I was like, "Eh, I'm just not into this." And if I have this other option and at that young age and back in 2005, 2006, it was pretty rare for someone to actually have the option to basically be a digital nomad immediately. But because I was doing web development, I was freelancing, I was already in that world, I was able to basically flip the switch on that very early in my career.

Rob Howard: So in that context, I was always a bigger vacationer than average, I think. But what I will say is that while it wasn't so much training myself, it definitely was training my clients. Right? So my clients would be in the mindset of like, "Well, are you going to be checking email while you're out, or are you going to be available at this time or that time?" And it's like, okay, well, I had to figure out, especially as a solo freelancer, how to set those boundaries and how to convey to people like a level of trust, but also a level of unavailability. Right?

Rob Howard: And those two things especially in that sort of 2005, 2008 world, where there was just way less of the digital nomad remote work stuff happening, that was a very challenging thing. There definitely are clients who just chose not to work with me, I think because of that, but the ones who got it and stuck around and who I was able to set expectations with, we're fantastic.

Rob Howard: And actually some of them are still working with us on client services today, which is really cool. And I think a nice sort of piece of evidence that you can have a life and take care of your clients. Right? I think there definitely is a mindset among some people and companies out there that those two things are incompatible. So I think while I agree that it's not always easy, like I think they can be compatible with one another.

Monet Davenport: Master WP is also sponsored by Cloudways. Supercharge the speed of your WordPress site and save with Object Cache Pro now available for free with any Cloudways two gigabyte plus hosting account. This is a savings of $95 per month. Visit cloudways.com and save with the promo code MASTERWP25. Now back to the podcast.

Nyasha Green: So what types of vacations would you not recommend someone take?

Rob Howard: Good question. So obviously like the vacation where you don't turn off email is not ideal. That being said, there are nuances to that, right? We have a couple employees who are working from other locations for a month this summer. Somebody wants to go to a different city to help out their parents or something who are going through health issues, stuff like that. And it's like that is not really a vacation, but it's not also 100% work. Right?

Rob Howard: So that's like a hybrid thing. And then I think on the other end of that is like, "I'm going to go on a sabbatical or a hiatus for six months or a year." I think that's cool, but not always conducive to actually running a client services business.

Rob Howard: So that's one that I've never done. Not to say that there's not benefits to that, but I have not yet done anything along the lines of the extremely long sabbatical or hiatus. The vacations that I take today are mostly one to two week family trips. Right? So what I try to do is make sure everything is lined up. The team has what they need. And then when I come back from vacation, I just don't change that. And whoever was doing the stuff while I was on vacation, continues to do the stuff. Right?

Rob Howard: So after you do that a few times, you end up with like my most recent vacation. We barely had to really change anything. And I almost am at a place where I could just not show up and you guys would just kind of do every... Know what to do without my direct advice. And I think that is actually a really healthy place for the business to be. Obviously, I love being involved, but I also don't want to be a roadblock ever for anybody on the team.

Nyasha Green: Gotcha, gotcha. Are you sure the reason you won't take six months or a year off is because you're afraid that when you get back, it'll say Nyasha WP instead of Master WP?

Rob Howard: I mean, you technically have the ability to do that right now on the site. So I trust you. But maybe I'll do that hiatus and we'll see what happens when we come back.

Nyasha Green: Right.

Rob Howard: I think BTS WP is probably more likely in terms of the new name you would choose for the company though.

Nyasha Green: Oh, copyright. They would probably sue me.

Rob Howard: Yep. Well, when I'm on on a tropical island and I'm getting legal notices from BTS, I'll know that you finally did that one that you've been planning for so long.

Nyasha Green: You know, they say never meet your heroes.

Rob Howard: Yep.

Nyasha Green: And that's not the way I want to meet them.

Rob Howard: So speaking of BTS, they recently took a break and inspired you to write an article about taking breaks. Right? So I think it's always nice to see like the high powered celebrities doing this type of stuff, because to some degree, they can do it because they're multi-millionaires, but to some degree people who are in that celebrity zone are often just as pressured and cross pressured and more so as like the average person, right? They don't have more time in their day. They still have the same 24 hours. They have a lot more pressure from a lot more directions and a lot more stakeholders.

Rob Howard: It's a big deal to see somebody say like, "Hey, I actually am putting life ahead of work, life ahead of the art that I'm doing and all these things." Because it makes them, I think come back stronger. So I'm curious to hear from you. You talked about burnout in that article. And one of the things that I'm always trying to figure out is how do you handle and differentiate between work burnout and life burnout, right? Even if work is literally perfect, that doesn't mean that you're not going to have big issues outside of work that are nobody's fault, but medical issues, having to move, having to do all those other stuff. How do you think about those two things? How do you handle life burnout differently than work burnout?

Nyasha Green: So I definitely think that sometimes they can blur and yes, that's going to vary by what you do, what industry you're in, or if you work from home like I do, or if you work in an office, or if you're working on the road. I think the big difference between both of them is what you can disconnect from. In my opinion, work burnout is easier to disconnect from than life burnout because just simply saying, it's life, it's something that's always happening. If it's medical issues, you can't really break from that.

Nyasha Green: If it's family issues, you can't really break from that. Especially a need to move. If you work from home, that is a work and life issue. So work is just a little bit more doing some of the things you talked about like making sure you're turning off emails, making sure you're turning off slack, turning off your phone, taking that break away, not answering calls, things like that versus life.

Nyasha Green: Once I shut my computer down, I'm living life, but I'm also living life while I'm at work. So just the major difference in what you can get away from. It's always been interesting to me to hear people either say themselves or talk about people who they just don't want to go home after work. They work outside of the house and they're like, "I'm [inaudible 00:22:02] going home." And they're volunteering for extra hours or like, "I just don't want to go home, don't want to go home." And I had never experienced that before. I never want to.

Nyasha Green: That was just unheard of to me. It's not that all of my jobs have been bad. I've had really great jobs. It's just that I've never been a person that wants to work that bad where I will just forsake my life. But doing work from home, that feeling is a little different. And for me recently, it was switched. Work was going great. And every time I did something at work, I was very happy and I was very proud of it. But when it came time to shut my computer down at five, I was like, "Oh, I have to deal with life."

Nyasha Green: It was a new feeling. I know a lot of people were probably dealing with this as a result of COVID because so many people are working from home. At my past programming job, this was the first time some people had ever worked from home and they had been working at the job for 20, 30 years. So I think they're completely different. Sometimes they can blur and sometimes they can change in your life depending on what's going on.

Rob Howard: Yeah. And I think, as you said, having more control over work is a good thing. And my experience has been like for better or worse, work is really the thing that needs to flex when life requires more time and energy. And that could be, you have to be out to do something that is a medical necessity. It could be that you're not sleeping as well. It could be that you have a new child or even a new pet that's changing your schedule.

Rob Howard: These things are all varying degrees of importance, right? But all things that can mess with your work schedule. I think one of the somewhat unconventional approaches that I've tried to take myself and tried to apply at our company is like, "Work should really be the thing that is flexible because life sometimes is not flexible."

Rob Howard: Right? And I think a lot of companies say the exact opposite. They're like, "Oh, well, that's great. Well, as soon as you're done with your 60 hour week where we stress you out and manipulate you all week, then you can go home and deal with those important family issues. Right? And I think, obviously, that at the extremes lend itself to complete burnout or kind of like system failure. But my view is like work is still going to be here when we get back. And we've even talked about this and we've talked about it with other employees. It's like this deadline can change.

Rob Howard: We made this deadline up. We're building a website, right? It's very rare that we are in a situation where there is a deadline that is actually associated with an unchangeable physical event or something like that. Sometimes there will be like, "Hey, we really want to send this press release on this day." Right? But that's pretty much the extent of the strict deadlines. And most of the stuff we do, like if we really needed to take a week off from the podcast or the newsletter, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Right?

Rob Howard: And I'd rather allow ourselves to do that than set what are effectively arbitrary deadlines. And there are some jobs where that's not true. Sometimes you have to show up at court on a certain day as a lawyer and stuff like that. But especially in our line of work, it's pretty rare that we have true immovable deadlines. So I like to make sure that people know like, "Hey, if you're sick, you shouldn't be working through illness to the point that it's going to hurt you later."

Rob Howard: If you need to go attend to your parents or your kids, or any other loved ones, you got to be able to do that. That stuff matters. And it matters, I think, significantly more than like launching that site on that certain day, or publishing that article on that certain day in at least like 90% of cases. And then if there really is something that's immutable or interchangeable, that's why we have 18 people and not two, right?

Rob Howard: So somebody can fill in for you and help you out. And we try to build a culture of that sort of ability to fill in for each other, which I think really helps in the big picture as well.

Nyasha Green: I agree.

Rob Howard: So I'm curious, a lot of people, when they talk about burnout, they say, "Well, I started meditating and it really helped. I got this mindfulness app for my phone and now I do that for half an hour every morning." And while I've done that stuff and it's been interesting, I've never really gotten into it to the extent that I feel like it is a long-term habit or solution for me. I may just not be like a super Zen guy. I don't know. But I'm curious if somebody says like, "I tried that stuff and I'm just not into it," what are the other ways that people can achieve similar levels of focus, relaxation, and just distance from stress without turning to those meditation and mindfulness type approaches?"

Nyasha Green: People honestly and actually ask me this all the time. They're like, "Yeah, I tried yoga." People are telling me I should go run a 5K or a 10K. People are telling me I should just go drink. And I tell people like, "Do you want to do that?" This is going to sound crazy or this is going to sound unheard of, but you should do something you like to do. And that blows people's mind. They're like, "What? Do something I want?" "Yes, you should do something you want to do. I am not going to learn yoga when I can go to the movies and have the same effect."

Nyasha Green: I mean, not on my physical health, but if it's something I want to do just to relax, I tell people I do simple things. I love cooking. Sometimes I will try out a new recipe where we live. It doesn't have the most diverse restaurants. We usually have to drive either to another state or to a major city to get some really good food. So I will take it upon myself instead of wasting the gas to try to cook something that's different from my culture or where I eat at.

Nyasha Green: That really soothes me. That takes my mind off things. I'm just focusing on cooking and I'm excited because I get a good, hopefully good meal when it's done. It's same thing with movies. I go to the movies. I get to turn my phone off. So no one in life or work can reach me for at least a couple hours. It's dark, it's quiet. And it's just me and a new movie experience.

Nyasha Green: Reading books, things like that. People are so obsessed these days with, like you said, the new fancy, "Ah, I need to do mindfulness. I need to meditate." And it's like, one, they may not know how to do it. So they jump into it and they're like, "Oh, this doesn't work." Or two, it's not something that they enjoy. So I always stress to people don't get too caught up in work or life and forget your joy, and forget things that make you happy.

Nyasha Green: And everyone does. People will say, "Well, I really don't have hobbies." Even if doing nothing is what you like. Sometimes I like doing nothing. If I can sit for 30 minutes and just breathe, I love it. If that's your thing, do that.

Rob Howard: Taking naps is a legitimate substitution, I think, for meditation and mindfulness. And that is okay. And it's interesting. Maybe this is like a sort of growing up in a house that always has lots of food cooking and good smells. That's kind of where this comes from. And I think that's kind of a youth experience that we probably both share is that food as an activity is something that really I always get a ton of just personal value and happiness from that.

Nyasha Green: Yes.

Rob Howard: Right? And it's not like you're not going out and intentionally binging on healthy food, it's like, you're really having a food experience. Right?

Nyasha Green: Yes.

Rob Howard: And to me most of my favorite experiences center around that to some degree. Right?

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm.

Rob Howard: And I think like you said cooking something new at home, even going out for a really different fun, nice meal, if you can, to me, those are experiences that are significantly more pleasurable and fulfilling than like you said like meditating or exercising and stuff like that. For me, I basically have the most efficient exercise routine that I can possibly achieve because it's just not something that I enjoy doing. But some people are like, "Oh, I went for a seven mile run and I have a runner's high and I feel great."

Rob Howard: It's just different for everybody. I think one of the takeaways from what you just said is like it's okay if you're not doing the stuff that creates good Instagram photos, right?

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Rob Howard: Like mindfulness exercise. Right? And it's okay if you do, do that stuff as long as you actually like it. Right?

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Rob Howard: But there's more than one way to get to that Zen-like state and it's not always the actual meditation and exercise and stuff like that.

Nyasha Green: Yeah. And some of those things are pretty... I like them. I've tried some. Like just my Apple Watch telling me to breathe. When I first bought an Apple Watch and they told me to breathe, I laughed for three hours straight. I had to. I was like, "Now, the watch is telling me to breathe. Is it going to tell me to tie my shoes next?" I actually did it and I realized it worked. I felt really good. All I did was focus on breathing for a minute and it really did take my mind off everything and I did feel a little better.

Nyasha Green: And it might be Apple just in my mind, marketing to me to buy another watch. But it really did make me feel good. So sometimes those things, they're okay, they're pretty good. But again, just make sure you like it. If I didn't like that, I would've not have done that again. I would've told my watch to leave me alone.

Rob Howard: Yeah. I will say the Apple Watch has grown on me. I got one like six, seven months ago. And the fitness alerts and a handful of other tools, I really don't use it for that much other than telling time, but the fitness stuff has definitely grown on me and I do use that regularly now and appreciate it. I used to have a Fitbit many years ago and I think this is-

Nyasha Green: Me too-

Rob Howard: ... basically an upgraded version of that. So I'm surprised how much I like it because I was kind of like, "I don't want another device." That was kind of my mindset for a long time. But what I found is that I actually not only can use it for fitness, but I also got the one that has like a cellphone plan attached to it. So I can just not have my phone with me at all sometimes.

Nyasha Green: Nice,

Rob Howard: I can still receive an emergency call or make an emergency call or whatever from the watch, and that's been a really nice change for me as well, because I think just not having the ability to idly almost like fidget with your phone is definitely a good life change.

Rob Howard: Speaking of fidgeting with phones, I have one final question for you. And we are both using Twitter a lot lately for various reasons. And I will say that while I am usually not into social media for the reason that I just described like I'd rather just force myself to do other things with my focus and with my time.

Rob Howard: I do think that social media has value like in the context of sharing our articles and advertising for our company. I think it's a very effective method for us to do that. It's an effective method for us to have comments on our articles. We are currently hiring a new developer and that has already gone around Twitter a few times. And that's actually a really valuable thing. And it's just fun sometimes, right? It is a fun way to interact when it works well. Right?

Rob Howard: Obviously, there's plenty of toxicity on social media that you want to avoid, but I'm not of the mindset that you're better off never touching it. Right? So what I'm curious is how do you think about Twitter, social media? How do you personally handle your own screen time and social media limits so that you can get the good parts of it without getting sucked into the bad parts?

Nyasha Green: So I'm a social media mega user. I have Twitter, I have Instagram, I have TikTok. I have all of the latest stuff that the kids are using these days. It's very easy to get sucked into just any wormhole in any of those places because they have become more so education platforms. I mean, yes, for disinformation as well, but they're largely educational platforms. So you can get sucked into that. You can get sucked into drama, gossip, media, entertainment.

Nyasha Green: So what I actually do is as far as my professional account, I do have limits on what I tweet. Sometimes I think about it. And this is something... I guess, growing up in a social media age, I didn't really have to think about when I was a little younger. Just, hey, going to the park today. That's what you would do.

Nyasha Green: But for me, I think what would help me is having so many eyes on my Twitter account now. I'm not going to say it makes me want to tweet. It does make me want to tweet less. But also just it makes me want to be more thoughtful. Having to be more thoughtful about my professional account has made me more thoughtful about all of my accounts. And I think you actually helped me out a lot when... It was one time, what were we talking about? Oh, we were talking about the podcast and you were like, "We just want to remember that whatever we put out there, it's there forever."

Nyasha Green: And I was like, "Oh my gosh, I think he's talking about Twitter." It made me want to be more mindful. So as a result, I don't post as much, but there are people who it's just their life to not post a lot, but they will spend a lot of time looking and consuming. And for that, I do a lot of muting. And if there's somebody I just know I'm going to get sucked into what they're doing, sometimes I do mute them. And it's not necessarily that they're doing something bad. If it's something that's going to distract me, I do mute them.

Nyasha Green: And most social media platforms have the option to mute temporarily or you can do it permanently. I just set boundaries for myself because I know at this point, after getting lost in so many social media, like threads and trends that it's easy to do. So just putting up those walls. I don't work it in like physically writing it down into my regular schedule, but I just keep an eye on the clock. Sometimes I'm like, "Hey, I'll pop over to Twitter and see what's going on. And if 30 minutes have gone by and I'm still on Twitter, I'm like, "Oh no, this is too long."

Nyasha Green: So it's something I've trained myself to do. Took a really long time, but that's typically how I handle social media. Like I said, it's a great place for education. I live in my college town, the town I went to school at, and most of my friends have moved away. Social media is sometimes the only way I can really contact some of them. So very important to have that as a tool of communication, especially in the age of COVID. But we still have to set those boundaries. If not, it can't consume your life and that's not good.

Rob Howard: Yes. As you said, like it is a legitimate communication platform, right? And we even have like a neighborhood Facebook group that is very active because we need to communicate with each other about stuff. And it's an easy way to do that. Obviously, there were ways to do that in the past, but I think that a lot of these social media apps actually are the best and well-suited for that. But you also have to not get sucked into the rabbit hole, right, as part of that.

Rob Howard: That's the balance. One of the things that I even do is I try to not look at the algorithmic feeds, right? I'll just go to, "Hey, I want to look at this journalist's Twitter to see what they've been up to lately." Right? Or, "Hey, I want to look at this Facebook group to see what's going on in my neighborhood and try to stay away from the feeds." Because obviously those are the things that are primed to distract you and suck you in. And there's just so many bad incentives around that content.

Rob Howard: Awesome. Well, this has been excellent. I think we should both go take a nice break now that we're done recording. It is always a pleasure to hang out. I look forward to chatting again soon.

Nyasha Green: Nice. Can't wait to talk again.

Monet Davenport: Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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There has been a lot of buzz recently about WordPress market share… is it up, is it down, and what does either one actually mean? In this episode, Rob Howard and Brian Coords break down whether or not we really should be following the market share trends.

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Episode Transcript:

Monet Davenport : There's been a lot of buzz recently about WordPress market share. Is it up? Is it down? What does either one actually mean? In this episode, Rob Howard and Brian Coords break down whether or not we really should be following the market share trends.

Brian Coords: Hey, Rob. How are you doing today?

Rob Howard: Hey, Brian. I'm great. How about you?

Brian Coords: Doing good. There's a couple of topics that I wanted to dig into with you. There's two of them. They're kind of parallel topics that I think are related and both a little important but both a little different, the first one being market share. What is the market share of WordPress? Then the second topic that I want to dig into is what is the market in economic terms of WordPress? You've written a few articles about this. Let's start off with market share. In simple terms, when we say market share we're talking about websites that are running WordPress, not running Wix, Squarespace, Shopify or something. Every year we see Matt Mullenweg, he jumps on stage and says, "Market share of WordPress is growing." We've watched it grow from 10 to 20, 30, now into the forties, and just in the last year Yoast of Yoast SEO has published a few reports saying that market share stopped increasing. First he said it kind of dipped and now he's saying it seems it's stabilized over the course of this past year. Kind of in big picture terms, how useful do you even think market share is as a metric for WordPress in general?

Rob Howard: Yeah, great question. One of the challenges here is that there's just so many terms and buzzwords that you need to go unpack an economics textbook to figure out what people are talking about half the time, and then half the people who are talking about this stuff are also confusing those terms in their own articles. I think the first thing we should do is just kind of step back and define, as you just started to do, those two big picture things. Market share being of all the sites on the internet, as best we can tell how many use WordPress. That is kind of versus our competitors, WordPress is 43%, Shopify is 4.5% and so on and so forth. Then market cap or market capitalization is about what is the value in terms of goods and services being sold of this whole ecosystem, and usually that is expressed in dollars per year.

Rob Howard: This is sort of similar to the GDP of a country, the gross domestic product, where you're saying, "In the United States we produce $4 trillion worth of products and services per year, whatever that number is, and that is bigger than Denmark but equal to China." You can kind of compare roughly those things to one another. Market share is something that, as you mentioned, has kind of always been a target that we are tracking almost as a key performance indicator when we talk about how WordPress as an ecosystem is doing. Then market capitalization or the "size" of the WordPress economy is something that has come out of at least one report that was done a couple years ago that we've been talking more about now in the context of, "How should we be funding this? How should we be prioritizing things?" One of the questions that's kind of important in that is, "How big is this ecosystem that we're working with?"

Brian Coords: Yeah. One of the things you said about market share was you said WordPress versus its competitors, like Squarespace. On one level that's true, and then on the other level in our particular corner of WordPress we build high end sites for large companies, and Squarespace kind of isn't a competitor to us in that particular niche for industry because our customers are not going to go DIY WYSIWYG a website. They have way too much economic value on it. Even just to say market share, you start seeing these weird comparisons of this versus that or this versus that. Are you kind of thinking of market share in terms of WordPress versus anybody else who makes money using the internet or how should we really define that?

Rob Howard: Yeah, that's a great question because one of the things that I think is really confusing about the market share discussion and the numbers that come out of this is that WordPress, which is a very decentralized, large, open source software product, is being compared to Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, all of which are closed source and highly centralized software as a service tools. To some degree, that's why WordPress numbers are so much higher than these others because it's open source, but it's also a reason that I think the numbers are not super useful. I think WordPress being compared to Drupal makes a lot of sense because they're both open source, decentralized, widely distributed tools, but WordPress versus Squarespace or Shopify makes less sense because when you think about Shopify or Squarespace, those are private companies which means that they control everything.

Rob Howard: Every increase in market share for them means a new user who's paying that one company directly, whereas that transaction just doesn't exist for WordPress. You could go put up a billion WordPress sites and no one necessarily makes money off of that unless you're buying hosting or you're buying a premium plug-in or whatever. The path from market share to money is just much less direct and different for WordPress than it is for Shopify or Squarespace. So while it's nice to keep an eye on those "competitors," I agree with you that most of the clients who come to us and want to build a 20 or $30,000 website aren't considering a DIY Squarespace site. If somebody comes to me and says, "Well, we kind of want to do a site but my nephew offered to build me a Squarespace site and that seems a nice idea."

Rob Howard: I'll say, "Well, okay. Yeah, you should do that first and come talk to us in three years when you really need the bigger and more intense branding project and the custom site." Because of the WordPress ecosystem being so much bigger and more decentralized, I think that is a significant strength of WordPress in a lot of ways, but it also makes the whole market share conversation just not... You're not comparing apples to apples. I think 15 years ago when we were thinking about Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, maybe a couple others, those pieces of software were all basically distributed in similar ways, were all licensed in similar ways and thus were directly comparable, whereas today Squarespace is just not directly comparable in the way that it's distributed or the way the sort of company behind it makes money. I think that is clearly an area where it's less useful than it was five or 10 years ago.

Brian Coords: Yeah. Then I would say, actually, if you did want to do a market share comparison of Squarespace and WordPress it would be WordPress.com who really is a direct competitor with Squarespace and really is going after the target audience. If we were to say, "Oh, I'm worried about the market share of WordPress.com versus Squarespace," that actually would be a little bit more of a good comparison and something that you would want to keep track on as part of the community. But, like you said, WordPress.org... The comparison I think of is the Android versus iOS where Android has huge market share, the market share leader, they have 75% of the market or something, iOS has a tiny market share but they have profit, they have most of the profit, they lead the industry, they're there where it matters, they're doing very well, they don't need market share to compete, they just are doing the right thing in their own lane. Android has this huge market share because I can put Android on my toaster, I can put Android on my refrigerator. It's just not the same comparison when you compare that huge open source platform to a very fine-tuned proprietary machine.

Rob Howard: Yeah. I think the evolution of Android kind of is... I don't know how comparable it is to the evolution of WordPress but they've definitely gone from being essentially an iOS copycat to a much bigger and broader ecosystem. iOS is still very much leading the sort of... They're kind of the thought leaders in the space, but because Android has all of these other opportunities or potential applications now it is being used on a much larger number of devices. I agree that that is similar to the WordPress versus Squarespace kind of... Or WordPress versus Shopify comparison in many ways and that when it really comes down to it, it's just not perfectly accurate to say those two things are directly comparable. Yeah, they sort of compete for a subset of use cases but they are two things that, while they may have started out being similar and in competition, they are now diverging from each other.

Rob Howard: As they diverge from each other, direct comparisons out of a pie chart of a hundred possible percentage points becomes less and less useful. I think that's where this whole WordPress market shared debate kind of is today, whereas if I were a for-profit company and I said, "Well, I want to control all of the advertising on the internet." Which is basically what Google and Facebook are competing to do. If Google says, "Oh, our market share versus Facebook went down. Now it's 60/40 instead of 40/60." That's a big deal for them that actually causes money to change hands. When we see people talking in WordPress about, "Oh, well, is our market share 43% or 42%?" I just don't see how that is causing money to change hands in a different way than it would have if it went up by 1% instead of down by 1%. I also don't really feel 100% confident that the numbers that we're getting are even precise enough to care about a 1% difference. I think that the margin of error is probably significantly more than that and that most statisticians would probably not feel super good about the data that we're using being that precise, if that makes sense.

Brian Coords: Yeah. I think part of it is that it's really a perception problem where we don't want anyone to think WordPress is getting less healthy and then that's going to trickle down clients wanting other services or something like that, but part of the reason that that perception exists is because it feels like WordPress has sort of... We see this with Netflix and Shopify where they're just built only for scale, for growth, their financial incentives mean they have to grow or they can't just be stagnant. I wonder if you think that sort of tech obsession with growth as just a baseline requirement for existing may be feeding into this perception issue a little bit, too.

Rob Howard: I think that there are a good number of company leaders out there in the tech industry that at least say they want to buck that trend of thinking quarterly instead of in decades, but it's really hard. If you look at Shopify, they were zooming during the pandemic. Everybody thought that they were the future and, in many ways, that's true, they did have a ton of success. They still have grown a lot but if you look at their stock price, because their growth has slowed down everyone started selling their stock. Even if they have the correct mindset, they're still constrained by this need to grow fast so investors buy your stuff. I think that is just sort of one of the downsides of being a public company. Certainly WordPress benefits from, number one, not having too many public companies who are kind of stuck in that sort of quarterly mindset [inaudible 00:13:27].

Rob Howard: Obviously, with some of the acquisitions and some of the bigger hosting companies they are selling stock now, but for the most part we're able to kind of take a step back from that and we're not quite in that constant rush of the NASDAQ, if that makes sense. But we've also been deliberately highlighting this market share number over the years and saying, "Oh, we grew from 20% to 30% to 40%." Now, if that's starting to slow down it's almost a self-inflicted error, if that makes sense, where we're saying, "Oh, well, this number we've been highlighting to show how great we are is now starting to just slow down, whether that's due to something negative or just a natural result of there's only so many things on the internet that can be converted to WordPress." We've kind of stumbled into the same problem where you don't want to make it look you're not growing even if things are going well. We don't have the immediate kind of negative impact that Shopify has, which is that their stock has tanked and people have less paper wealth than they did before who own part of that company. I think there still is a risk, certainly, of overemphasizing the market share and then kind of being in "trouble" when the market share doesn't rise at a fast rate or goes down 1% or whatever that number is.

Brian Coords: I think as much as I think market share is not useful, I do think market maybe economy is more useful but maybe also suffers from the same problem, which is it's really hard to get exact numbers for these things. When I think of economy, I think of just, like you were saying, the GDP of WordPress, how much money literally exists in WordPress. There was a report published by WP Engine about a year or two ago and it kind of just was there. I think... I know I've referenced it in the past a few times and not thought too much about it, but more recently it's come into question about these numbers. I want to say it was half a billion or half a trillion or something like that that they were estimating the WordPress economy at. What are the turn of events that led to this WP Engine report sort of being reconsidered?

Rob Howard: Yeah. That report was released really as just a marketing tool, a whitepaper. It kind of reminded me of some of the security whitepapers that I've criticized in the past because it's like, well, there's such an obvious desire to get the marketing answer as opposed to the right answer when you're producing this type of stuff. That being said, as a standalone marketing thing it was cool. It's something you could share with clients and say, "Hey, look, WordPress really is big and we do have competitors." I'll use that term somewhat loosely, but sometimes we have universities, for example, and they're saying, "Well, we're considering Sitecore, we're considering this custom .NET developer and we're considering WordPress." In that context, I actually do want to show them that WordPress is a big deal so that's useful.

Rob Howard: I think that is where this WP Engine report came from. That was kind of the mindset around that like, "Hey, I want to show that I'm big so that when somebody challenges my legitimacy, I can use these numbers to make WordPress seem legitimate." Which it is and which it should seem that way to people. What happened in the last couple weeks was that Post Status published an article that essentially argued that WordPress needs to think bigger, we need to think more how Apple is thinking as opposed to sort of thinking like an underdog, thinking small. Part of the reasoning behind that was a reference to this report that said that the WordPress economy, however you want to define that, is producing $635 billion per year, so more than half a trillion dollars in value.

Rob Howard: The report goes on to say things like, "Well, that's almost the same as the value of Tesla, that's more than the GDP of Ireland. It's all these things that are kind of obviously questionable." But nonetheless, the report exists and the article referenced the report and Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, basically called out that article and said, "Because this article references this report which uses numbers that are fundamentally flawed, the article is also fundamentally flawed so the point that it's making can't really be defended in the way it's being defended, if that makes sense." "You may still think that WordPress thinks too small but you can't really use these numbers as a sort of way to defend that opinion because these numbers don't make sense," was basically the argument that Matt made. Everybody kind of chatted about that in the Post Status member Slack a bit, you and I both chatted a bit as well as with Matt in that conversation.

Rob Howard: The takeaway that I had from that was, "I want to go dig into this and write more about it and figure out what the real numbers are." I ended up kind of arriving at a very similar conclusion to where Matt arrived in that we may not be able to put an exact number on it, but this sort of top down approach that the report took, which is how big is the digital economy and what piece of that does WordPress account for, just resulted in a way too high number. The correct number in terms of the amount of revenue produced by WordPress is probably a tenth of what that report suggested. That being said, where this all creates a lot of confusion is like, "Where are we getting these numbers from? How are you defining these numbers? Are people comparing apples to oranges or not? For an average everyday company, why does this matter?" I'm curious to hear actually from you kind of where you see those numbers actually applying to real life, and then we can kind of dig into more of the legitimacy of those numbers or the reasoning behind how we're counting those things.

Brian Coords: Yeah. I mean, I think for anybody who works in WordPress you want to know, number one, that the entire ecosystem is healthy and that there's money flowing around. There's kind of an interesting article that I read, and I can add it to the show notes, that was basically just comparing WordPress' keynote events where it's always asking for contributions, always asking for volunteers, to other keynote events in tech that are very like, "Here's how you make money. We're here to make money. Content creators need to be valued for their work, that sort of thing." There's definitely a difference in WordPress to every other tech group where WordPress was built for blogging and not really for business, but now so many people are making money that we're very concerned that we're going to be able to keep making money and that we're going to be able to financially sustain whatever's moving forward. Just from that raw perspective, we want to know that everyone in WordPress is doing okay and can continue to fund things. I think that's sort of the first step, is do we feel like WordPress is a healthy dock to anchor your boat to just in financial terms?

Rob Howard: Yeah. I think when you think about that kind of creator economy where ConvertKit, Substack, Ghost and a bunch of others are kind of digging in there. Honestly, I feel like that's a more interesting battleground than even the Squarespace battleground because... But at the same time, even as I say that out loud I'm like, "Well, it just kind of shows that WordPress is so broad in its possible applications and so decentralized that it's hard to compare to any one thing." WordPress versus Substack is a legitimate thing that people decide upon, WordPress versus Squarespace is also a thing that other businesses decide upon, and WordPress versus Shopify is a third thing that a totally different group of businesses who need e-commerce decide upon.

Rob Howard: Part of it is just that WordPress is just so big and broad and can do so many things. Then I think the other challenge in figuring all this out is just that if you look at a company like ours, if WordPress didn't exist we could still make websites in different ways so you can't really say that all of our revenue is a result of WordPress, but we like using WordPress and it's very valuable to us in a variety of different ways and we can apply it to our clients' needs in a variety of different ways. I think one of the places where the report from WP Engine struggled is how do you take a company ours and quantify the value of WordPress versus what we would be doing in a hypothetical world where WordPress didn't exist?

Rob Howard: Because I was making websites before WordPress, and if it disappeared we'd still need to make websites for people, but it also provides a significant amount of value. Now that we know all those things, I still have no idea what number I would peg to that exact amount of value. It's very difficult to sort of tweeze out the exact correct data, and that gets more and more complicated the more kind of nuances you throw in like, "Well, what about versus Substack? What about versus Shopify?" There's just so much going on that it's almost... As we've said a couple times, it's just not really easy to make a direct comparison between these various different ways of building stuff on the internet.

Brian Coords: The concept of the Post Status article that WordPress needs to think bigger or do more. We all have our areas where we think WordPress should be focusing. Right now it's very focused on that Squarespace competitor as far as building a site from scratch, but there's obviously... Everyone has their own ideas of what WordPress should be doing but it's a volunteer organization at the end of the day so a lot of these arguments start sounding like, "This is what I think Automattic should be paying for at the end of the day."

Rob Howard: Yes. Yeah.

Brian Coords: But there is a broader ecosystem of people who are contributing and so that's... Another sort of aspect of this financial thing is if people are making money off of WordPress, how much are they giving back? That turned into Matt Mullenweg's criticism of the free rider situation, which was basically there's a lot of companies, like a GoDaddy was his example, where they make a ton of money off of WordPress but they don't give enough back so they're sort of draining the health of the WordPress project. But, like you said, it's really hard to tell whether GoDaddy needs WordPress to do what they're doing. I mean, could they not just make their own Squarespace competitor pretty quickly if they wanted to and just kind of skip WordPress? What are your thoughts on this kind of free rider problem and why hosting companies in particular are seemingly just... They're the free riders. Where does that come from?

Rob Howard: Yeah, I mean, at least in the mind of Matt the hosting companies seem to be the biggest culprits. Allie Nimmons is not here on the podcast with us right now, but she and I did this, a similar conversation a couple weeks ago and she would want us to point out that GoDaddy is not the only company that could be singled out in that way, and probably was to some degree singled out unfairly or at least in a way that was kind of a little bit sketchy during that kind of GoDaddy versus Matt outburst a few weeks back. That being said, I think... Obviously I've been thinking a lot about this over the past few weeks since this came to the forefront, and one of the challenges in the way the WordPress ecosystem is set up is that there is really only one, maybe two or three, companies that couldn't live without WordPress.

Rob Howard: The one company that obviously can't live without WordPress is Automattic. If you think about the game of chicken or the poker game that you can play with funding... I'm not saying that we should think about it as a competition, but to some degree people are thinking about it that way or they're at least comparing scoreboards and stuff. If all the hosting companies sat down and Automattic sat down and everybody said, "Okay. How much is WordPress worth to you and how much do you want to bet that WordPress is worth less to us, or however you want to frame that?" The company with the most to lose from WordPress ceasing to exist is clearly Automattic. They have the trademark coming through WordPress.com, they have kind of their whole... Not everything, but a large percentage of the value of that company comes from its association with WordPress.

Rob Howard: Whereas a lot of the other companies, GoDaddy, Bluehost, DreamHost, all the other hosts that have been brought up in this conversation, would continue to be able to host websites on Drupal if in some future world where WordPress weren't getting maintained or would be able to create their own products or whatever. I think what has happened is that by intertwining Automattic and WordPress in all these different ways, it's actually been a huge benefit to WordPress as an open source product and to Automattic as a for-profit company, but it also kind of puts them in a jam if other people stop playing ball because when it really comes down to it, you think about the rational economic behavior... The rational economic behavior for Automattic is to never allow WordPress to slow down or fail under any circumstances.

Rob Howard: It would pretty much make sense for them to invest an unlimited amount of money in WordPress because it is their identity, whereas that's actually not true for many of the other companies that are volunteering to do Five for the Future stuff. I think that is kind of a weird catch-22. You benefit a lot from it but also when you are the WordPress company, you also have to be the group that covers the needs of WordPress when no one else does. I don't know exactly how to reconcile that or solve that. Obviously to some degree there is... There's basically two campaigns. One is the honey campaign and one is the vinegar campaign, right?

Brian Coords: Mm-hmm.

Rob Howard: You can be really nice to people and get them to contribute or you can shame people into contributing. I'm not sure which one of those is going to end up being more effective in the long term but that's pretty much where it stands, is we have to ask and hope that people are on board. Yeah, so in terms of how market capitalization and market share play into funding, people want to be on a... They want to attach themselves to a rising star so it's always nice to see WordPress growing and doing better. That being said, I think that there's just naturally going to be a point where you can't really gain more market share. There's no scenario where we have 100% market share. That's just probably a physical impossibility for our purposes, so that market share is eventually going to slow down or level out.

Rob Howard: Whether it has or not today I think is an open question, but if we think about the mature version of WordPress for the next 10 years or so or however you want to think about that, we probably need to think about different metrics because growth rate is not going to be a good metric for us over the next 10 years because we're big enough that growth rate just can't be the thing that we're attached to anymore. Shopify can have a high growth rate because they're relatively new and their market share is relatively small compared to WordPress right now, but it's just not going to be possible for... We just can't double over and over again. It just doesn't... It's just mathematically not possible. Thinking about other ways to show that WordPress is a healthy and innovative ecosystem I think would be a valuable thing to pivot to as opposed to talking about market share in the next State of the Word speech.

Rob Howard: Maybe we think about, "How do we show that you can make money selling plug-ins via WordPress? How do we show that you can make money doing client services? How do we show that we have a vibrant core product but also interesting side projects and feature projects and stuff like that?" I think maybe that is eventually what we pivot to and we get to a place where we're doing less nitpicking around dollar amounts that just are pretty much made up when it really comes down to it. Whether I'm saying it's 60 billion or 600 billion, there's pretty minimal data to support any level of precision on those numbers and those numbers are just so big that they are difficult for an individual person to use in their daily life in a useful way. But if I can say, "Well, look at this plug-in developer who started off as a solo developer and is now making $200,000 a year by selling stuff in this marketplace."

Rob Howard: Those are real stories that I think people can actually attach themselves to and say like, "As a developer, I'm going to choose WordPress over whatever other JavaScript framework or whatever other Ruby on Rails, Python I might be considering." I think that plays into the idea that we should still be trying to grow and improve ourselves and attract talented younger developers and kind of the next generation. But the fixation on market share or the size of the economy are probably not particularly persuasive ways to do that, especially if you think about a natural slowing of the growth rate happening over the next 10 years, whereas the previous 10 years we were able to grow pretty fast because of where we started. Right now, we're starting at a place where we've already grown a lot, we're already pretty big. The growth rate is naturally going to slow down after that.

Brian Coords: Yeah. There's always that transition of founder energy and then longterm CEO energy where when Steve Jobs passed away... Because you were talking about the keynote speeches [inaudible 00:34:21] every year. When Steve Jobs passed away and Tim Cook took over, one thing that changed about those keynote presentations was it was a lot less of the primary person and then a lot more of all the team leads underneath. If you watch an Apple keynote now, there's 20 people on stage and they each get to talk about their area and stuff. That's a sign of like, "We're not the founder-led company anymore. We're now a larger team, we have the dominance, we're already here, now it's about lifting up all these other people inside and giving you a little more of a peak behind the curtain."

Brian Coords: I think it would be great to see a WordCamp keynote like that where we get to see all the other people that are actually working on WordPress every day share what's really happening and less of the same face. That's just one idea. But the reason I was going to say that is if you were the face of WordPress, this will be my wrap up question for you, and you had priority control for the next 12 to 18 months, you were going on stage on WordCamp and you were like, "This is what we're going to do for WordPress for the next year." What would you think you would make the top focus of WordPress be in any way?

Rob Howard: I was not expecting that question, but it's a great question. I probably could do a whole couple of podcasts about it but I'll try to answer it succinctly. I think one of the big things that I would do is try to set WordPress up for attracting the best younger developers over the next 10 years. If you think about us, we're both in our mid thirties, we've been doing WordPress development for at least 10, 15 years for each of us. I think in some ways we're actually at the younger end of the "experienced" WordPress user developer demographics, so one thing I would say is I would try to set us up as a community to bring in new people, attract them over some of the competitive programming languages and platforms out there and show them that there is a career path for them in working in this ecosystem because I think right now that is not clear to entry level developers.

Rob Howard: We see a lot of people who are coming out of boot camps who are going into whatever the coolest job at script framework is and they're just totally ignoring the software that powers 43% of the internet. I think what's interesting to me is that there is a significant gap between the amount of the internet that WordPress powers and the amount of attention and interest that WordPress gets from sort of the new generation of developers, so I think that's an opportunity in the sense that getting "fresh blood" into the ecosystem would be really valuable not just today. It's actually kind of a cost today because it costs time to train and costs time to market and stuff that, but 10 years from now those people are going to be the 30-somethings who are running companies and kind of making the system work, if that makes sense.

Rob Howard: I would focus on that on the recruitment side of things. On the product side of things, I'm not so much concerned about exactly what we do but I would like to focus on finishing and shipping things. I think one of the huge pain points has just been the amount of time that Gutenberg and full site editing have been basically in beta. I think part of that is that it's a hard problem to solve but part of that is that we haven't had a intensity of focus on shipping something good, and perhaps there hasn't even been a clear enough end point. What I would say is if we're going to compete with Squarespace, which I personally believe that is the point of full site editing, is to be able to compete with that sort of portion of the market, let's do it and let's build something better than Squarespace and ship it in the next year. Then I can actually track how many users we're taking away from Squarespace.

Rob Howard: I think that would be a perfectly legit thing to say if that's what we really want to do, and then we would actually have some numbers and metrics that we could attach to the success of that plan. Then if we say, "Well, okay. We're going to spend the next year building an amazing full site editor, we're going to spend the year after that just crushing e-commerce and making the best e-commerce platform in the world." I think what's happening right now is contributions, as well as large companies like Automattic and kind of their focuses, are so spread thin that we're building the third best full site editor and the third best e-commerce platform and a couple other things that are maybe second or third best all at the same time.

Rob Howard: To me, that is not really helping any particular... It's not helping us dominate or win in any particular segment of the market and it's kind of demoralizing the people who are watching, I think, in a lot of ways. If we can't build the best e-commerce tool and beat Shopify at the same time that we build the best full site editing tool and beat Squarespace, we should focus on one of those ideas, get to a place where we prove that open source is a better solution for that problem than the closed source systems and then say, "Okay, we finished that project for the year. Now we're going to move on to the next project." I think the thing that ties most WordPress enthusiasts together is the idea that open source is better than closed source, but what we're seeing is that closed source competitors are sneaking up on WordPress in ways that are causing us to be the second or third best when we could be the best.

Rob Howard: I think Shopify as a constrained small business e-commerce feature set is more appealing to somebody [inaudible 00:40:55] than WooCommerce right now but there's no reason that should be the case. We clearly have the chops to build something that beats Shopify and also is portable and open source and does all these other things, but we're spread thin right now, we as a community. We're even hearing Matt say stuff like, "Well, WooCommerce is still in its early stages." It's like, that starts to kind of be difficult to believe after whatever it is, five, eight, 10 years. That kind of stuff strikes me as just factually incorrect and almost misleading in some ways when we talk about that. To the degree that it's possible to direct the efforts of contributors, I think directing those efforts into a smaller set of features with the goal of winning something would...

Rob Howard: It gives people a target, it gives people things they can measure and you can still build other plug-ins or do other stuff but you have a much clearer set of goals and measurable performance indicators if you're trying to focus on one thing instead of 10 things. That was kind of a long response to that question, but basically I would say let's set some tangible measurable targets, not just say, "Hey, we're going to build this thing that is really good at building pages," but say like, "Hey, I actually want to get a million new small businesses using full site editing in a way that makes their life easier and better, that's going to support developers, that's going to support small businesses, et cetera."

Rob Howard: Those are things that we can actually measure and give us a clearer path towards success. I think right now we don't really have that as a community but it wouldn't be that hard to turn some of these somewhat esoteric ideas into much more tangible goals. That being said, there's probably people out there who wouldn't want that for the roadmap or for the community but I think if we're thinking about spurring innovation and also if we're worried about market share and competition at least to some degree, then those are the ways to direct our many resources into a more tangible outcome than what we've seen over the last few years, which I think has been a lot of resources going into a lot of things that are basically stuck in beta perpetually.

Brian Coords: Yeah. It's hard for me not to want to jump on five different things you mentioned there in terms of where everything is going, how slow some of it feels, and those are... Even Matt Mullenweg has posted that a number of times about how slow things seem to move.

Rob Howard: Yeah.

Brian Coords: But I do kind of generally agree with, I think, especially your main point, which is that at the last State of the Word thing or something he asked the audience, "How many of you are 19 or younger, younger than the age of WordPress?" It was crickets in the auditorium because it was all a bunch of late thirties guys like us. I think you're right that there's got to be a clear path for the next part of the internet because I think the open source ideology was super powerful in the early days of the internet 20 years ago and we've now proven that most people don't care about where their data lives when they can just log into Instagram. I think that there's a certain shift for longevity that we're going to have to think about.

Rob Howard: Yeah. I mean, I think the open source concept still stands as a better idea but one of the failure points is that I think a lot of the rhetoric around it assumes that the average internet user understands and agrees and cares about that. As you said, we don't see people responding to data transparency or data sharing problems by voting with their feet. We see them using the software that's easiest for them to use, right?

Brian Coords: Yeah.

Rob Howard: Part of what I think is the onus on us is to say like, "We're going to do this in the way that is better from a moral and sort of societal standpoint but we also have to build the best software." You can't lean on it being better for society if you're third place in terms of the quality of your futures. We really have to crank up the quality of those features, especially in those areas where we're getting competition. I actually think WordPress is by far the best in the world of custom built higher end websites, right?

Brian Coords: Yeah.

Rob Howard: That's what we kind of do as an agency, but we're identifying that Squarespace is taking away the DIY customers, Shopify is taking away some of the e-commerce customers, so if we want to compete in those spaces it's not enough to just say, "Well, but we're open source so that's inherently better." You also have to be the best software and have the best licensing structure, the best privacy and all those things. It really ups the ante and I think changes the game a little bit from what we've predicted it might look back in 2005, but I think there's still a lot of potential and regardless of what the "WordPress project" as a whole does, I know that our company and we individually will be kind of pushing towards all these goals of bringing more people into the community, delivering and shipping cool stuff quickly and all that. Hopefully everybody will get on board with some of those ideas and in five or 10 years we'll look back on this and say, "Wasn't it funny when we cared about market share and when we cared about whether it was a six billion or $600 billion economy?" Those things are very esoteric and don't really matter in the day-to-day. What matters in the day-to-day is this feeling of velocity and excitement around the software, and I think that's something that we can inspire regardless of what the kind of macroeconomic numbers say.

Brian Coords: Yeah. I think we're going to have a lot more on MasterWP going forward about the details of those ideas which are, "How do we go from we need things to move faster and be better to what can we all do in a reasonable and sustainable way?" Thank you for having this conversation and I'm looking forward to digging into this discussion in the future.

Rob Howard: Yeah. Great to talking to you as always.

Monet Davenport : Thank you for listening to this episode. Press the Issue is a production of MasterWP produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted, edited and musically supervised by Monet Davenport and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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When you put out your thoughts and opinions online, you're bound to eventually get opposing views in reply. But what do you do when your professional reputation is tied up in those exchanges? In this episode of Press the Issue, Teron Bullock and Allie Nimmons explore how to navigate negative criticism online.

This podcast was sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. Create a course with LearnDash. Visit LearnDash.com.

Episode Transcript:

Monet Davenport: Welcome to Press the Issue, a podcast from MasterWP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show at Masterwp.com/presstheissue.

Monet Davenport: When you put out your thoughts and opinions online, you're bound to eventually get opposing views and reply. But what do you do when your professional reputation is tied up in those exchanges? In this episode of Press the Issue, Teron Bullock and Allie Nimmons explore how to navigate negative criticism online.

Teron Bullock: Hi, Allie, how are you doing today?

Allie Nimmons: Hi, Teron, I'm good, how are you?

Teron Bullock: I am well. I know today we have a great conversation in hand. We're going to talk about criticism on social media and how do you respond properly if you respond at all. So I just want to send this question directly to you. We're going to get started. And so I guess the first question is, how do you respond to social media criticism if you respond at all?

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. It's complex, right? Because it depends on a lot of factors. I've definitely criticized people on social media and I've definitely been criticized. And I think that if you are responding to something that is criticism and not an attack or inflammatory, that's going to change how you're going to respond. And I think that somebody is really being nasty or mean or cruel or those kinds of things, I tend to try not to even engage at all with those sorts of things because that's not... I'm not entering into a conversation, I'm going to be entering into a fight. And a fight is not about let's get to a resolution, a fight is about who's going to win. And especially on social media, I don't think that that's useful. But if it's criticism where somebody is saying this was not the strongest choice, or why did you do this this way, or whatever the case may be, that is usually more of something I will try to respond to.

Allie Nimmons: And I mean that happened to me literally today. I was posting about the BlackPress Slack group, I said, "This is a group for Brown/Black people." And someone was like, "You say that this is for Black people, but then you just used Brown in the tweet, well, what's the deal?" And they criticized my word choices. And my response was like, "Yeah. No, that's a great question, and thank you for identifying that." And I went into detail of more of what I meant and we understood each other. And I was embarrassed because I kind of got called out for not using the correct words to describe people, but I could tell they were coming from a good place. So the criticism was easier for me to respond to and clarify what I was talking about.

Allie Nimmons: But that's not always the case, right? People get really heated and up in arms and then things can get complicated. And so I think that, if you're responding to criticism and you're taking it as that, it's important to understand where is this person coming from. What are they trying to achieve? Are they just trying to understand me better? Are they unhappy with the choice that I've made? Are they hurt? Have they directly been affected by something I've done? Does this warrant an apology? I think it's most important to come at it looking at the other person's perspective first and then saying, okay, well, what did I mean? How can I bridge that gap and find the resolution? And that's not always possible in a single tweet. Sometimes it's a thread. Sometimes it has to go into a DM, but it should start with looking at, how is this person feeling and how can I meet them where they're at.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. Let's pull the layer back a little bit. So when you first received the tweet, you said that you have to make the determination between whether this is criticism or if this is something that's more harsh. How do you first gauge yourself? Because criticism can hurt just as much as something that is more harsh, and how do you take the emotions out of it to be able to determine which one it is?

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. That's a good question. I mean, a lot of the times, it's two things, right? To me, at least. It's word choice and it's tone. The person I just talked about in that example, their word choice was very neutral. They were asking me a question, right? It wasn't like, oh great, this idiot doesn't even know what they're talking about. Once it starts to being insults and that kind of stuff, that sets it over the top. And then the tone, which can be really hard on social media. But a lot of times when people will come with more harsh criticism, it takes the form of sarcasm or really glib, quippy sorts of language. It's not about them trying to gain understanding, it's about them trying to blame or make the other person in the situation feel badly.

Allie Nimmons: And so a good example of that that I'm guilty of is a couple months ago, I criticized publicly the WordCamp Europe organizing team for not having what I thought was an appropriately diverse group of people organizing that event. And my tweet was kind of sarcastic, short, and not helpful, right? It wasn't a hey, I'm really trying to understand why this is the way that it is, or I feel unhappy about this and I'd like to talk to somebody about it. I went for more of a irritated sarcastic approach and that did not go well.

Allie Nimmons: And so if you find yourself writing something like that, that's the kind of time where it's like, okay, maybe I should take a step back. And if I still want to tweet this tomorrow, I'll come back to it. But a lot of those things come from a place of anger. I think it presents itself in bringing out insults and things like that, and then bringing out the sarcasm and that kind of tone, which feels good in the moment, right? Because you feel like, yeah, I'm going to dig into this and I'm going to make them feel X, Y, Z. But it doesn't serve for anything, right? That ends up not being criticism, that's just complaining.

Teron Bullock: That's an interesting point of view because when we first started the podcast or the idea of the podcast, we really were thinking about attacks or criticism coming towards us. But that's a good point that when we sometimes are thinking that we're criticizing or trying to help express our point of view, sometimes it kind of crosses the border, crosses that line of criticism, or like you said, complaining. And the fact that you was able to recognize that and give that helpful point is a good idea. Like, maybe we shouldn't hit that send button right away, give it a day or so.

Teron Bullock: So the other side of that, flipping back to windows, comments are coming towards us, do you ever find yourself not being able to hold back when it comes to negative criticism or complaining coming your way? And have you ever found yourself wanting to just send a nasty tweet back? And if so, what did you do to stop yourself from doing it, or did you do it?

Allie Nimmons: Short answer is just, yes. I find myself wanting to clap back at people on Twitter on a daily basis. I care about this community a lot. I care about a lot of things a lot. And I tend to run hot when it comes to how I feel and I can be a little bit overly judgmental of some people sometimes and I'm trying to rein that in. But yeah, I feel consistently angered by things I see on Twitter. And I don't think that that's special, that's not just me, right? Anyone who uses Twitter will say, "It's not always a place to go to feel good about the world or about life and stuff like that."

Allie Nimmons: I think in the past, I was more quick to reply to things out of anger or out of dissatisfaction. And especially after that WordCamp Europe, and since I've been a lot more careful about how I reply to things and I find that... I'm really trying to pick my battles. And a lot goes into that. It's a thing of if I respond, do I think this person will respond in kind, right? Do I think that they will argue with me in a way that's counterproductive, or do I think that they will engage in the conversation with me? So going back to that first example, that BlackPress example, I responded because I could tell that if that person had additional questions or if they didn't understand me further, just from the way they came at me, to begin with, I could tell that they were going to be easier to talk to. If I get some kind of rude, insulting, sarcastic tweet, I'll respond in my head. I'll tell them all the things I'd love to say in my head. And then typically, I'll just let it go.

Allie Nimmons: I posted this morning in our company Slack, a tweet that somebody actually responded to that same BlackPress tweet. And I believe that they were angry about what I posted. I believed that the message was sarcastic, but I didn't fully understand what they were trying to say, and so I was like, "You know what? I'm not going to walk into this room blind and not know what's going to come back at me." So they could have been trying to give me constructive, positive criticism, or it could have been something nasty. And I was like, "I'm just not even going to respond at all because there's really nothing that I benefit from that." I said what I said, it wasn't something... I don't think what I posted originally was any kind of hot take. And if they feel some kind of way about it, that's on them, that's their problem.

Allie Nimmons: Sometimes I think that, especially in our WordPress community, conversation back and forth in terms of critique can be helpful because we as a community have so many nuanced issues that need to be worked out. Given that this is such a community-run software, right? The open-source community around WordPress is built on the people. And I think it's really important for everybody to feel like I can share my thoughts and views and opinions. I can ask questions. I can call somebody out for doing something that might be harmful, and that we all go into it with this idea that we're trying to make the overall community better. It's not about winning or losing or being right or being wrong, it's about the improvement.

Allie Nimmons: So that's why I am more willing to get into arguments on Twitter because sometimes an argument can lead to a resolution and that's a good thing. Like that WordCamp Europe circumstance, while I did not initially approach it well, good did come out of it. A lot of good things came from it and so I don't regret it. Yeah, I think that all the stuff is super necessary, and it just kind of takes moving slowly and being thoughtful and not responding out of a place of anger, but out of a place of trying to understand each other.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening up to this point, Press the Issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do, now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash visit learndash.com. MasterWP is also sponsored by Cloudways. Supercharge the speed of your WordPress site and save with Object Cache Pro now available for free with any Cloudways 2 gigabyte plus hosting account. This is a savings of $95 per month. Visit cloudways.com and save with the promo code MasterWP25. Now, back to the podcast.

Teron Bullock: You brought up a good point. Actually, two points that I want to touch on. But the first one is, it sounds like you take the approach of kind of trying to anticipate what the conversation will be before you decide whether it's worth taking on the task of responding. That's a great approach, it really is. If we did that more, we might have less Twitter arguments.

Allie Nimmons: I think so. I think it comes in handy, right? I'm a lot more likely to respond to criticism on Twitter from a person I know and have already spoken to than a stranger. Because if it's somebody I know and spoken to, we have some kind of understanding or some kind of mutual ground that we can share and come back to. So I got in a Twitter argument with my friend the other day about Harry Potter. Like about something Harry Potter related. And another friend was like, "Why are you fighting with him?" And I'm like, "Because I know him. I know him. I know it's going to be all good. We can disagree and we're friends, it's going to be fine." If it was a stranger entering into the same conversation, it would be like, well, where is this going to go? Where is this going to end up? Is it that important for me to sit here on company time and be tweeting to somebody about Harry Potter just because maybe I'll be right, it doesn't feel worth it.

Allie Nimmons: I mean, to me sometimes debate about things that don't matter as much as fun. I find that like a good time. But yeah, I think thinking about it in terms of where is this conversation going to go and what am I going to get out of it? Is it something worth standing up for? If it's a conversation around race or gender or equality, diversity, those sorts of things I find worth getting into a more heated argument over because those people need advocates, right? I want to be able to advocate for the people who need that kind of discussion. But sometimes it's just sort of like, you just want to be right. It's not worth my time to show you why you're not right, so I'm just going to let it go.

Teron Bullock: Plus, healthy debates is like the staple of probably every barbershop in America.

Allie Nimmons: There you go. Healthy debate is what moves the world forward. You don't grow, you don't learn new things, you don't challenge your viewpoints unless you're able to have a healthy debate about something. I love disagreeing with people that I like, because it's like, oh cool, we don't only see the world the same way, there's something I can learn from you or something you can learn from me, and let's figure out what that is. And I think that a lot of times criticisms can turn into that, but it's kind of taking the high road sometimes.

Allie Nimmons: I spoke with my friend James when he tried to basically start a DEI effort and somebody accused him of not approaching it in the right way. And he responded politely as much as he possibly could to explain himself. And the other person was just being nasty and eventually, he just walked away from the situation. And I think sometimes that's really the best that you can do, is to say, okay, well, let's see what we can accomplish in this conversation. And once you realize we're just going to accomplish nothing, then you move on.

Teron Bullock: I agree with you. I think that there's two different sides to this. There is criticism for the goal of accomplishing something, and then there's debate. And I think that, like you said, there are certain people that you can have those type of debates with and it's most likely because you guys have that social courtesy. You guys have spent enough time together and you understand each other to the point where you will never let it get to a point where you destroy the relationship.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. You don't let it get personal.

Teron Bullock: Right. And I think that's the key, is even for somebody who wants to offer criticism, it's probably a good start to ask yourself what is the rapport that I have with this person or company before I go down the road of debate. Criticism is another thing because again, we said that goal is we're trying to fix something or to help a process. But just the debate side, that's a really thin ice. And I just think that you have to make sure you know who you're debating with.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. I personally don't feel like we have enough spaces in this community for healthy debate. We have Twitter, which is not conducive to healthy debate at all. It breeds confusion and it limits the amount you can say literally at a given time. And then Slack just creates these silos. And we have comment sections and blog posts and stuff, but that ends up kind of being similar to Slack. And I wish that we had more of almost like a debate club, right? If we had a WordPress debate club, but it's not all hypothetical, right? Like we're actually debating real things in a safe space where people are encouraged to debate each other without the risk of getting personal with it. I think that would have such interesting effects as far as what gets done and how people understand the problems that exist in our community, because then also people may not feel the need to resort to public criticism.

Allie Nimmons: If they feel like, okay, I can go into this space and share how I feel and hash it out with somebody else who feels differently, or at least then you can share that critique in a more informed way. Because then that's the jump side is we could have a whole other conversation about uninformed critiques and how easy it is to just post something on Twitter without doing any research, without finding out any other information first, and just going off of one circumstance or one thought that you had. But yeah, I like what you said, it's a really good distinction to make between criticism and debate. There are different use cases for both, there are different environments for both, and I think different people are better at each one.

Teron Bullock: Right. I like your idea of setting up a space to do it. And I honestly think that Twitter's Spaces is actually a good format for that. It may not be the best, but I think that if a group of people come together and really think about how you could develop something within that space would be very beneficial. Like maybe, you have a certain group of people that you decide ahead of time will do all the debating, everybody else will just be able to listen like the audience. And then you have a person who's a moderator and both sides... Kind of like you said, debate club, and there are rules that have to be followed in debate club and just [inaudible 00:21:34].

Teron Bullock: I think the problem with Twitter Spaces is that there are no rules. So if we could bring some rules in ahead of time because we have a certain amount of people that have agreed to it ahead of time, I think it could work there.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. I think that'd be really cool. And even taking it a step further, I would love to add like a WordCamp. Have something like that where it's kind of like a panel style, but it is almost like a presidential debate, right? Or a debate club where you have people up on the stage and they're able to explain the case for one thing or the other. Maybe there's a Gutenberg debate of like why Gutenberg is great and why Gutenberg is awful. And maybe the point at the end of the day is not to have a winner, right? It's not to declare that one person did better than the other, but for all the people listening to really gain an understanding of both sides of the issue because that is such a rare thing these days.

Allie Nimmons: I mean, maybe always. Maybe it's always been a problem, I don't know. But it's kind of feels like a rarity for people to really seek out an understanding of both sides of one issue. And I think having some kind of organized debate thing, whether it's virtual or in person or both can help people understand both sides of one issue. And then bringing that back to the overall ecosystem and people who own companies and build products. You have to understand all sides of the perspective to build something that's effective. That's a good quote, it rhymes and everything. But yeah, I think that'd be super cool.

Teron Bullock: I'll piggyback on that. I think that just as a human being, being able to see all sides of anything would make you better. So I would love to see that at a WordCamp. If somebody can make that happen, I think that would be awesome. So shifting to the other side of this. So let's go to the criticism part of this. As a company, there are times where you receive criticism that you may not want to address, and always wondered, what is the best practice when it comes to criticism that is said about your company that like you say, you don't want to address, is it okay to delete it? Is it okay to just ignore it? What is the best practice when you come across something like that?

Allie Nimmons: So I don't have as much experience from that perspective, but I have some. First of all, I don't think that it really is ever okay to delete criticism because that implies that you want to hide something, that you're ashamed, that you're guilty. You're messing with the narrative of what's actually going on. You're editing that narrative and that's not fair. So I don't ever think that it's okay. I mean, if somebody has come on your page and is posting racial slurs, like really harmful crazy stuff. Yeah, delete that, because that's not criticism, that's just crazy. But if it's criticism, I don't think it's ever appropriate to hide or delete it.

Teron Bullock: So what about, is it okay to just ignore it or do you have to face them head-on?

Allie Nimmons: Again, I feel like it depends on what it is. I think in most cases you should acknowledge it in some form, right? Even if it's the very standard typical, hey, thank you for sharing this criticism with us, we'd love to take this to a DM or a email to talk about it with you directly. Because sometimes it really isn't in a company's best interest to have that back and forth online. Because again, you can have the best intentions, but Twitter and a lot of these forums, even if it's like in a Facebook group or online anywhere, these are not places that were built for this kind of conversation. They were built to be echo chambers and to breed misunderstanding so people would stay in the website longer. I genuinely believe that. It might sound like a conspiracy theorist saying that, but I genuinely believe it.

Allie Nimmons: So if you're a company, sometimes it might not be a good look for you to have this back and forth with somebody on social media. So bringing it into a private message where you can actually type out full responses and have nuance to the conversation is probably a good idea. At the same time, if it's an instance where maybe somebody has criticized something that your company has posted. Just saying, can you explain more of what your problem is? Can you give me more information? Like allowing that person to really share what the problem is. And then if there is a resolution, if there is something that you can say to provide an explanation or provide a solution, I think providing that publicly is contrary to what I just said, right? Is very useful because then others who might have that same criticism or others who might not have noticed that criticism can see that and say, oh wow, they acknowledged the criticism. They made sure they understood it and they replied to it in a healthy way.

Allie Nimmons: I think that replying to that criticism in a way that's polite and thoughtful and considerate can actually make the company look good at the end of the day. But again, it's kind of looking at it from where is this going to go? Is this person really angry with me and they're trying to fight, let's take it into a DM. If this person has expressed a gentle, hey, I noticed this and I don't really know how I feel about it, I don't really like this, that can be a conversation.

Allie Nimmons: Good example, today, a company posted about an event, like a virtual event that they're holding. And the page title to the link that they shared was basically a pun on Make America Great Again. It was based off that phrase. I was like, "Hey, y'all should change that." I think I just retweeted it and I said, "Please, somebody change this bit to something, literally anything else." And I even went so far as to tag the two people that I know run that company. And I got a very brief perfect response where one of the people I tagged said, "Let me talk to the person who created that page and we'll take care of it." That's all I wanted. That's all I needed, right? I wasn't here to fight. I was just like, "This specifically is probably not okay."

Allie Nimmons: And I'm familiar with the company, I know and have had conversation with both of the people that I tagged so I felt comfortable tagging them. And I on purpose did not come at it from a like, oh my God, this is so racist, blah, blah, blah. I was just like, "This should be changed." And they replied and said, "We will change it." And that's all that needed to happen. And yeah, from a company perspective, if you can approach it in that way, that's really the best that you can do. And then if it escalates, I think it's better to take it off social media.

Teron Bullock: I totally agree. Just using that example and giving the other side of that. I don't know the intent of why the person would've chose to use a phrase that was similar to that and they could have been completely clueless about it. However, just putting something like that out there, they had to be aware. And even if not, at least you or somebody was aware that it would cause some type of debate about it because there would be people who are offended, there were people who would agree with it. And it's like, is that really the focus of what you were trying to do? So the fact that somebody... I say somebody, but you decide to step up and say something is a good example of good criticism.

Allie Nimmons: I hope so. I thought I did okay. I mean, at the end of the day, I think me just pointing it out was enough for them to see like, oh yeah, that is a problem, we'll fix it. If I came at them angry, angry, angry, calling people racist, that puts people's walls up, and it stands in the way of an actual healthy dialogue. And I knew that it wasn't an intentional thing. I knew it was an oversight. And so I tried to treat it as such, rather than treating them like they punched my mom or something like that.

Teron Bullock: Yeah. I think you have to take the emotions out of it if you really want to make change. It reminds me of like the videos you see on the internet where there's a person who's like angry in the Dairy Queen because they didn't get their order right. And it's like, you're not going to get anywhere with that approach.

Allie Nimmons: Oh, absolutely not.

Teron Bullock: Well, Allie, it's been great talking to you. I think we had a great conversation today. And before I close out, is there anything that you would like to say?

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. I had a really great time. I always love chatting with you. I want to challenge people. Let's have a debate about debate. If you're listening to this, go on Twitter, tag MasterWP and tag me allie_nimmons. And let me know how you feel about what we talked about today in terms of where we can be holding more healthy debates in WordPress. Do you feel that Twitter is adequate? Do you feel like we should be using Twitter Spaces or something else? Let us know what you think and why you think that, and let's start a conversation around that.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. And so this has been a great episode, at least, in my opinion. I think that this is a conversation that should definitely continue like Allie just said. So thank you for your time. And let's continue to keep the conversation going on Twitter @MasterWP.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press the Issue is a production of MasterWP. Produced by Allie Nimmons. Hosted, edited and musically supervised by Monet Davenport and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit Masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at Masterwp.com.

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In many instances, WordPress prioritizes accessibility in ways that other CMS's and open source projects do not. But that doesn't mean we do things perfectly. In this full-length episode of Press the Issue, Allie Nimmons explores WordPress accessibility from as many angles as she can in order to answer the question - how accessible is WordPress?

Press the Issue was sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. Create a course with LearnDash. Visit LearnDash.com.

Press the Issue was also sponsored by Weglot. Discover a way to translate your WordPress site that’s easy to install, compatible with all themes and plugins, implements multilingual SEO, and translates your site with machine translation (with full post-editing control). Learn more at Weglot.com.

Press the Issue was also sponsored by Cloudways. Cloudways managed hosting ensures that your sites get the performance boost they deserve. It offers you fast speeds, uptime, and managed security at affordable rates. Learn more at Cloudways.com

Episode Transcript:

Allie Nimmons: I love podcasts. I love creating them, but I mostly love listening to them. In my car, while I get ready in the morning, while I make dinner, and every so often I stop and think about how privileged I am that I can listen without any assistive technology or devices.

Allie Nimmons: A lot of the time as makers of the web, we forget how easy it is to just read something or listen to something, or just do something in the way the creator of that thing intended, without wondering if there will be some kind of special option for us. The world has been created with able bodied, neurotypical people in mind. Michelle Frechette, in addition to being a very good friend of mine, is the director of community engagement at StellarWP, co-founder of Underrepresented In Tech, and the director of community relations at Post Status. In a recent episode of our own Underrepresented In Tech podcast, she shared her perspective as a wheelchair user. She had recently given a talk about accessibility, and here's a little of what she had to say about the content of that presentation.

Michelle Frechette: I talked about Word Camp US in Nashville, and for people who are able bodied, they were like, "Wow, this is a long walk." Well, for somebody walking with a cane, because at the time that's what I was using, who's running out of breath and whose legs and back are about to collapse, it was probably a quarter mile walk. So by the time I got to lunch, because you had to go all the way basically one city block and then halfway down the other one. And so you're talking about a quarter of a mile there at least. And by the time I got there, I was already stressing about having to walk back. So yeah, I could eat, but now my knees are already hurting. My back's already hurting. Is that really accessible?

Allie Nimmons: After that experience, Michelle did share her thoughts with the organizers, and the next Word Camp US she made sure to ask about the spatial accessibility of the event. Organizers assured her that the event space was indeed accessible, but that wasn't completely true.

Michelle Frechette: The people who reviewed those are able bodied walkers, people who go for walks for fun, those kinds of things. And to them it didn't seem that far. But to somebody who has to use a cane or who can't walk long distances, it was still... And luckily I had a scooter for Word Camp US that year, but if I hadn't I would've been hurting and I would not have been able to participate to the extent that I did.

Allie Nimmons: We can often find it difficult to really put ourselves in the place of someone who has not lived the way that we do. I will admit before meeting and spending time with Michelle, I didn't really look at the world from wheelchair level. For example, recently I've been looking at apartments to move into. All of them without fail have had only stairs. Previously I may not have given a second thought to that, but each time I think, well Michelle could never visit me here because there's not an elevator. When we look at the web, things are not that much better. There's a pretty big disparity between how many people need accessible websites and how many accessible websites there are. As one of the largest tools and communities for website building, WordPress has a lot of power to grow or diminish that disparity.

Allie Nimmons: My name is Allie Nimmons, I'm a WordPress builder, instructor, community member, contributor and digital producer of this podcast. As I press into issues relating to the WordPress open source project and beyond, I want to explore how accessible WordPress is. The code, the systems, the events and the community. Press the Issue is sponsored by Cloudways. Cloudways managed hosting ensures that your sites get the performance boost they deserve. It offers you fast speeds, uptime and managed security at affordable rates. Learn more at cloudways.com.

Allie Nimmons: Press the Issue is sponsored by Weglot. Discover a way to translate your WordPress site that's easy to install, compatible with all themes and plugins, implements multilingual SEO and translates your site with machine translation, with full post-editing control. Learn more at weglot.com. That's W-E-G-L-O-T .com.

Allie Nimmons: Accessibility might be a bit of a new topic to you, so I want to go back and give you some context. Globally, more than a billion people are living with a disability of some kind. 19.9 million adults in the US have some kind of disability which might impact their use of a mouse or a keyboard. At least 2 million people have either a near or distance vision impairment, which may require a screen magnifier for webpages. 26% of all homepage images, about 10 per page on average, had missing alternative text. Alternative text is what comes up on a screen reader to tell a blind user what's in that image.

Allie Nimmons: Nearly half of the images missing alternative texts are linked images, which results in links that aren't descriptive. And these stats really just take into consideration visual abilities. Neurological disorders, motor function problems, and even mental health challenges like ADHD all affect how we use the internet. 97.4% of the world's top 1 million websites do not offer full accessibility. WordPress powers 38% of the top 10,000 websites in the world, and 36% of the top 100,000. That's countless pages that countless people rely on for information. And yet we systemically forget to prioritize coding, design and writing practices that ensure all people can experience a website in an equitable way. When we forget, we leave people out, we withhold information, we isolate them, and sometimes, not always, we pay the price.

Allie Nimmons: ADA stands for Americans with Disability Act, and the number of ADA focused lawsuits has steadily been climbing over the years. Over 11,000 people filed an ADA title three lawsuit in 2021. That's a 4% increase from 2020, and get this, a 320% increase just from 2013. States like California, Florida, and New York lead the charge with thousands of filings each in 2021. People are taking this seriously, so seriously that they're taking these issues to court in order to hold companies and developers accountable. Unfortunately it's common for folks to take the easy way out or take shortcuts when it comes to web accessibility. Doing the bare minimum can sometimes make you more of a target for lawsuits than doing nothing at all. Not only that, but contracts now need to be written in order to protect companies, businesses and clients when it comes to accessibility issues. A lot of this knowledge is falling by the wayside due to a lack of prioritization and education.

Ryan Kinney: They're relying on this industry standard that accessibility services are so expensive and outside the norm. So if a contract is silent on the issue that it should be implied that accessibility services are not included in a web development contract.

Allie Nimmons: That's Ryan Kinney. She's an attorney and legal consultant who works in intellectual property, eCommerce, privacy and corporate law. She's super outspoken in the open source and particularly WordPress communities. She was part of a panel with Go WP in may of 2021, where she broke down a lot of the legal side of these accessibility issues. I should say here really quick, we here at Press the Issue are not here to give you legal advice to follow, and neither is Ryan.

Ryan Kinney: It can also be argued, and I guarantee you it will be, that accessibility standards, our industry standard should be contemplated and absent an express provision that they're excluded from the contract that they ought to be. If you have the ability to draft your own contract, do so. And I have actual knowledge and experience with different agencies that have been hauled into court for these theories of vendor liability or contributory negligence, because they had even at a large, they've been doing business for many years, have large clients, had provisions in their contract that stated that their work product or deliverables would conform with all applicable laws.

Ryan Kinney: Quote accessibility in your MSA or your SOW as a separate service. If you're going to have minimum standards, if you're going to do WCAG 2.1 or 2.0 AA, then state it and then anything above and beyond your bare minimum make sure that you are quoting that separately so the website user has the responsibility in writing for electing to take that next step and/or opt out of we understand that you don't provide that service. And here's what I would really strongly recommend, create relationships with experts that do.

Allie Nimmons: So, since accessibility is so important, since it affects so many people and is under such a legal microscope right now, it stands to reason that WordPress should be as accessible as humanly possible. Given that WordPress sites account for so many websites, to what extent is WordPress itself actually accessible? Before we answer that, we have to acknowledge that WordPress is code, but it's also many other things. It's design, it's writing, it's video, it's events. Are all of these things as accessible as they can be?

Allie Nimmons: Spoiler alert, no, but that's not for lack of trying. There are people out there doing the work that needs to be done to try to bridge the gap and make sure that everyone is included. So let's start with the code. How accessible is WordPress code really? The WordPress source code itself is quite accessible actually. I spoke about that with Amanda Carson. She's been a web developer since 1998, WordPress user since 2005, and core contributor since 2012. Her work in WordPress accessibility over the years has been invaluable. Oh, and she's blind.

Amanda Carson: So WordPress core, as long as you're using literal WordPress core, no plugins, no nothing like that, default themes is pretty accessible. I'd probably give it a seven or an eight. The problem comes in when you start talking about plugins, when you start talking about how they need to be set up, and then also themes, the editor, the new editor brings in some fairly significant issues, I've found.

Allie Nimmons: Everyone's favorite editor, Gutenberg, is a bit of a story unto itself. Now myself and Amanda want to make it clear that we have infinite respect and appreciation for the people who build and work on this software. But the challenges that Gutenberg brings when it comes to accessibility really can't be ignored in a conversation like this.

Amanda Carson: So 80% of it is, okay, we can use it, even though it tends to be really inefficient, but then there's like that 20%, 10 or 20% where it's like, okay, this is the hardest 10 or 20%, and you're just not going to get there. And so on certain projects, especially bigger ones, it tends to be really a showstopper in that case. So we usually end up having to put them on classic editor or something like that to try and mitigate that, and to try and lock the client into not... Like, okay, so we build a whole system and do a content sort of publishing guidelines and whatnot. This is how you make it accessible.

Amanda Carson: And there are some things that are really good, in the new Gutenberg as far as some images, right? One of the things I really do like about it is when you publish an image, it just sort of gets right in your face and says, "You don't have alternative text for this image. You should add it, you really should add it or declare, I really would like that," that part is amazing. But on the other hand, there also ends up being in a case where somebody is using Gutenberg, we end up actually having to lock them out of stuff so that they don't go use a block or something like that that creates an accessibility issue.

Allie Nimmons: Amanda also explained to me how much the accessibility team can be overwhelmed. Although they can review things, contributors don't always have the power to veto or fix certain things, or train other developers on what needs doing. WordPress is much, much more than it's core code and the editor. A huge draw to new website builders is the plethora of free and premium themes and plugins that go with WordPress. But with the wide library of customizable software comes less and less regulation when it comes to accessibility. Anyone can design, build and submit a plugin or theme to WordPress, but currently accessibility is not very highly prioritized as a criteria for acceptance.

Amanda Carson: So the ideal would be that any plugin or theme that gets submitted to the repo is vetted for accessibility and is documented so that, okay, it's accessible if you use the default settings or whatever, or you set up the default theme demo or plugin demo. If you get outside of that, we can't guarantee that it's accessible. That being said, I completely understand that, okay, the plugin team has like three people, three or four people. There is no way that they would be able to try and vet. There are something like 60,000 plugins in the repo. There's no way that they could possibly vet all of those plugins for accessibility, even if they wanted to.

Allie Nimmons: We just don't have the resources and the person power to build the kind of machine it would take to fully review and vet the software added to the plugin and theme repositories. Even if the accessibility team, plugin team and theme teams worked together on this, it couldn't really feasibly be done.

Amanda Carson: There are accessibility ready themes. But I think once again, you only have a few people who can vet those. And then you have the problem of, okay, so things get vetted and developers get told what to fix. Can they actually fix the issue? Right? Because if they don't know how, and you have an issue where, okay, you tell a developer that this thing you did is inaccessible so you need to fix this, but if they don't know how to fix it you can end up actually making the problem worse. For example, you can't just sprinkle ARIA on something and it's accessible, right? A lot of times you can actually make whatever problems are actually there, you can make them worse with ARIA if you don't use it correctly.

Allie Nimmons: In July of 2019, a plan was proposed to gradually improve the accessibility of WordPress themes. The plan was to add a new guideline every two months that would address a single accessibility issue. There ended up being some pushback to this. Folks cited popular themes like Astra, which despite over a million downloads doesn't really include accessibility features. Just because something is popular doesn't mean that it's perfect. Currently there's no word on how the aforementioned plan is progressing.

Allie Nimmons: When people look for solutions on a WordPress website, they often turn to plugins. A handful of free plugins can turn a site into a much more dynamic and friendly experience for users. Typically this is a feature of WordPress, but when it comes to accessibility it can almost function more like a bug. There are lots of accessibility plugins out there which can provide front end accessibility options to visitors. Most of them actually serve to make matters worse.

Allie Nimmons: Accessibility overlays provided by plugins can feel like a quick fix. They are marketed to detect and solve accessibility problems on a website by just adding a few lines of JavaScript code to the site on the browser level. The problem here is that in most cases, the majority of accessibility issues simply can't be automated, but instead require a real person to test and to solve. Accessibility overlays typically have poor UI, are complicated for screen readers to interact with, and simply require more steps for someone to follow, as opposed to just coding the site properly from the start.

Allie Nimmons: Accessibility overlays don't fix things like unclear link text, low contrast, incorrect heading orders, improper styling. The list goes on. And yet, despite all this, many WordPress sites utilize these overlays and cite them as solutions when ADA law and accessible site building is brought up. Ryan discussed this in part of that panel that we heard earlier. If your site is hauled into court, what you find as accessible via your testing from an overlay won't be the same as what the courts will find. And that's for a really good reason.

Ryan Kinney: So when they're looking for targets to sue, they start with the scanning tools to assess these vulnerabilities or violations. And then they move to disabled users and people that obviously that needs to be the person bringing the suit, having standing, but it's the actual functional issues they don't typically cite in lawsuits, WCAG standards weren't upheld. There was a lack of alt text. They're not going through that. They're going through the actual experience of the person that's been blocked access from the site. So there's actually a legal and financial reason, not just experiential.

Allie Nimmons: In fact, in mid 2021, there was an open letter being passed around calling for action against accessibility overlay products within WordPress. The tool accessiBe was named as a top culprit, especially after it was discovered that the plugin had tons of fake reviews published in the plugin directory. Now, this is not to say that accessibility plugins are bad or that the people who make them are bad. There are plenty of good accessibility plugins in the WordPress library that can help designers and developers make better choices and automate things when it comes to accessibility, not to mention things that can help non-developers make their code a little bit better.

Allie Nimmons: The problem comes in when you have everyday users who hear about ADA law and accessibility lawsuits who get scared, do a Google search, and find a website that claims that a plugin can make their site entirely compliant automatically, or with one click. By marketing and distributing these overlays that way, we do the average WordPress user a huge disservice. There are of course teams who consistently work on these tools. Currently the WordPress accessibility team only has a few regular contributors.

Allie Nimmons: Alex Stein is one of those contributors. He's a DevOps engineer and accessibility consultant. He's a core contributor as well as a team rep for the WordPress accessibility team. He confirmed a lot of what Amanda shared, which is that WordPress core is fine when it comes to accessibility, but Gutenberg is where most of the accessibility help is needed right now.

Alex Stein: Especially considering how small the accessibility team is, I think one of the best things about the WordPress community as a whole is anyone is free to contribute whenever they want and how much or how little they want. So anyone could go report an accessibility bug. Anyone could patch that same bug, and anyone could help test patches for a bug. However, the WordPress project, as far as anything else goes, doesn't do a very good job of listening.

Allie Nimmons: I have definitely heard this before, and not just when it comes to accessibility. Much of the open source project is run by committee. Everyone's voices can be heard, which means everyone's voice must be heard. That can take a long time and people end up getting drowned out and forgotten. Feedback is generally always welcome, but not always utilized or pushed into the right kind of action.

Alex Stein: WordPress has always kind of been, really it was a pretty slow operation. We tweaked some code here and there, make some improvements. Ever since Gutenberg came along, it's all about, oh yes, let's see how quickly we can build a giant release and let's see how much stuff we can bring in one release. Maybe Matt's plan for Gutenberg needs to slow down a little bit. I know I'm not the only one that feels this way. Considering we are marginalizing a lot of former WordPress users all the way into FSC, everyone has forgotten about the editor. FSE is not even usable for someone who's blind. It takes me 10 times longer in Gutenberg than it does with the classic editor. My hope is that more people will join the accessibility team. Our team is so small. I mean, sure, there's people that show up to our meetings, but as far as like super active contributors, three of us, maybe, four.

Allie Nimmons: There is a sentiment here that I tend to agree with, which is that what's best for the product is not always best for the end user. A lot of folks are being marginalized right now due to the fact that Gutenberg and the full site editor are not accessible, and in some cases unusable to blind users. And yet we are pushing forward consistently with these projects without getting what we already have up to par.

Allie Nimmons: I think the hope is that if we build it, we'll eventually catch up. But after speaking with folks like Alex, that doesn't really feel like the case. We like this idea of a brand new business owner getting started with WordPress to make their dreams a reality. Maybe they don't know a thing about accessibility. They know how to make and sell cupcakes, but they don't know anything about color contrast. So as a result, the impetus and responsibility lands on someone else. Be it the open source devs and maintainers or the premium product developers. When that responsibility is so diluted, does it help or hurt the ability for WordPress to be accessible out of the box?

Allie Nimmons: The great thing that Alex did make me realize is that the front end stuff has typically been pretty okay. Someone can fairly easily launch a simple site with a default theme that will be accessible, which is a huge plus when it comes to site builders who aren't developers. The downside is this. The mission is to make sure that publishing is available to everyone, but it isn't. We can't get that ideal end result because the back end is so unavailable to so many people. When searching for a solution, you'll find that within all of this is a huge catch 22. The GPL license that open source projects like WordPress rely on provide freedom, but not protection. So you could make and distribute and fork and build all you like. But as a result, WordPress can't enforce things like accessibility requirements as readily as some other companies might be able to. Basically it's the developer's choice to make the software accessible or not, or it's up to opportunity and possibility and time rather than intention. If it doesn't happen, people are free to fork the thing and make it accessible if they want to.

Amanda Carson: Well, that's not really sustainable for something like WordPress or you can't expect every user who needs to be accessible to fork and fix it. I don't have an easy answer for how a project as large as WordPress tries to enforce accessibility and say, "Look, we're doing this because we care about accessibility, you can either play along, or you can take your ball and go home." I don't know how they would even enforce that. So I don't want to necessarily say, "Well, WordPress should do this, or WordPress should do that." Because it is really kind of complex.

Allie Nimmons: The thing is, there are communities that do this stuff right. For example, Drupal does a lot when it comes to accessibility.

Amanda Carson: Because Drupal is used in a lot of government spaces and especially in Europe where they have sort of robust accessibility legislation or laws, et cetera, I think they call it something different, right? So there are some things that I think that Drupal does at least as far as general accessibility that are, I don't know if I want to say better, but I think they've got a more robust set of guidelines and criteria for making things accessible. Because they sort of have those constraints where it runs on government stuff and government has to be accessible in Europe. So therefore Drupal then has to do it because if they don't they're going to lose government contracts and stuff like that. So they sort of have that financial, I guess, incentive. In that way, at least, I think that they do a better job. But I also think that WordPress being what it is, and having this sort of large and somewhat more rambunctious community, I think even with that I still think WordPress does a really good job.

Allie Nimmons: I want to pivot the conversation to talk about our events, things like Word Camps and meetups and other WordPress based events. As we learned in episode one of Press the Issue, events are invaluable to the WordPress experience, and usually accessibility is prioritized there.

Amanda Carson: What the Word Camp team has done as far as accessibility and making sure that people with disabilities are accommodated, I mean, one time, when Word Camp US was in Nashville a few years ago, I sprained both ankles that weekend because I had slipped on some ice. For the contributor day, I didn't make the second day. But for the contributor day I was in a wheelchair because there's no way I could have walked around. There were different people who were more than willing to basically push me around the convention center, because there's no way you're driving a wheelchair when you use a cane as a blind person, you're just not doing it.

Amanda Carson: I had assistance with that when I'm walking around. There's somebody to guide me around the area and tell me what's coming up on the schedule and all kinds of stuff like that. And that part of it is just absolutely amazing. And I think the Word Camp team has done a... I think it's the organizers and stuff like that. Every city that I've gone to has just done a phenomenal job making that part of it really, really accessible.

Allie Nimmons: There are guidelines on criteria focused on accessibility that many event organizers need to follow. And these things like live captioning and available quiet rooms among other now standard Word Camp features make the events amazing for people who have had to suffer through other less accessible tech conferences. These days, you'll almost always find at least one talk or panel that focuses on accessibility topics, which is fantastic, but not all WordPress events are created equal, and not all accessibility requirements are always met.

Allie Nimmons: After all, we heard from Michelle earlier about her challenges just getting around the event. And then there are meetups which can easily be inaccessible due to the difficulty of finding locations and limited budgets. When everything runs on volunteers, it's much harder for folks to be required to meet basic accessibility needs. If it's a matter of holding a meetup in a space with no elevator or not holding the event at all, people will typically choose the former.

Allie Nimmons: Then there are what I like to think of as indie WordPress events, which are put on by individuals or companies. Now there are some like WordPress Accessibility Day or Word Fest Live or WooSesh that do go above and beyond to ensure that folks with accessibility needs and concerns are taken care of. But we find a similar problem with events as we do with our open source software. You cannot force someone to provide accessibility features and benefits. The most you can do is shrug, choose not to attend, complain on Twitter, or in some cases all of the above.

Allie Nimmons: A lot of what I keep finding myself coming back to when speaking with folks for this episode, and especially when thinking about events is mindset, attitude, and culture around accessibility. Like Amanda mentioned with Drupal, they're based in a part of the world where there are more laws that more heavily prioritize accessible experiences.

Allie Nimmons: Yes, WordPress is a global community, but in many ways it's a North American community. Our laws and our society have kind of a far way to go when it comes to accessibility law and things like that. And so our mindsets tend to reflect that, which bleeds into the software that we make and market. There are so many misconceptions and judgments about accessibility that stand in our way. I remember reading a tweet a while back that contained the assumption that accessible websites are automatically uglier than non-accessible ones, which is complete nonsense. We see accessibility as this quote unquote other, this extra piece, sometimes even a taboo subject that we don't want to talk about at all. My friend Ahmed Khalifa experienced this first hand and decided to completely part from the community and the software as a result. Ahmed had been using WordPress for years as a developer, as a WordPress SEO consultant, and content creator. He was super involved in his local WordPress community, attending and volunteering at WordPress events. He liked the concept. He liked the people. He liked speaking and organizing. He invested about five years and hundreds of hours in the community until he started feeling like something was wrong.

Ahmed Khalifa: And I couldn't put my finger on it. And I struggled to really work out what is it that's making me feel like that. Over time I remembered I was talking more about my needs for accessibility, and I remember talking about my own deafness and talking about that more. And I even wrote about it in different resources and talked about it in podcasts and interviews. But I remembered being a bit annoyed about, for example, work with TV and about how very few out of thousands of videos were captioned. And I remember feeling a bit annoyed by that. And it was during the contributors day in Glasgow, I thought of getting into it and realized there's a bigger problem. I was vocal about it and I thought let's do better. We should do better. And over that time I felt like I received some pushback from people in the community.

Allie Nimmons: I'd say pushback here is kind of a gentle term. The more he spoke up, the more he was basically asked not to. He didn't get any support from other leaders or influencers in the community, and he even got private messages from people who were upset with him for raising his voice and who asked him to stop.

Ahmed Khalifa: I didn't, I kept on going, and to this day I still talk about it, but I don't talk about it in the WordPress sector anymore.

Allie Nimmons: This really weighed on him over time. Despite the number of amazing people that he knew were working on accessibility within WordPress, he felt ignored and like he just wasn't as important as other people.

Ahmed Khalifa: That was when I thought, you know what? I think I will step away from WordPress. I didn't feel like I was needed there, my issues were not taken seriously. It was pushed aside and they were more important things to talk about. I'm not saying it's the most important thing, but I believe that it should be discussed among many, many other things.

Allie Nimmons: For the past four to five years, Ahmed doesn't really speak at or organize events anymore. He doesn't contribute. He doesn't consider himself a member of the community. He doesn't even use WordPress on his own sites anymore.

Ahmed Khalifa: My argument was on one hand, I want to learn other things. I want to learn other CMS and see what they have to offer. But on the other hand, it is because of this deep, underlying feeling that I don't know if this is the right place for me to be. And I didn't really feel like I have received any assurance that it's going in the right direction, which is a shame because I know there are people who are fighting so hard to make sure that we are having a positive impact and I think they are. And today as we speak, I am not contributing at all.

Allie Nimmons: While Ahmed is only one person, I truly believe that his case cannot be unique. I wonder just how many people have left either the community, the team or the software, because they didn't feel counted. At the end of the day we can't ignore this problem. We can't ignore the marginalized people who matter and who serve to make our community richer with their experiences. But in a lot of ways we do. And the people who do fight to make change often feel unappreciated. Ahmed tried creating actionable change, tried creating conversations and was pushed away. Alex has been working on the accessibility team for years and he shared with me that he'll actually be leaving that team soon.

Allie Nimmons: Accessibility advocate Deborah Edwards [inaudible 00:35:31] has been using WordPress for 10 years. And she spent seven of those years consistently, determinately asking wordpress.com or Automatic to add captions to their videos that they publish online. Seven years and over a dozen requests. And you know when they did it? Directly after Deborah posted an article to her blog explaining how long she had been asking with no response. Now all of their published YouTube videos have real English captions. Now this is a huge victory for Deborah and proof that we need accessibility advocates in the community, but we need them because the decision makers at the top aren't advocating for those people, and that doesn't feel great to me.

Allie Nimmons: Now, none of these issues will ever be solved by sitting around and pointing blame. They'll be solved by uncovering the root causes of these problems, which can then lead to better outcomes. So now that you have some idea of the degree to which WordPress is and is not accessible, what can you do? You can make your own content accessible. There are free and paid courses and resources available in all corners of the internet. You can ask for accessibility features to be baked into the products that you use via feedback and reviews. Do your best to understand accessibility law, and if you run an agency or build sites for clients include accessibility language in your contracts. I highly recommend connecting with someone like Ryan Kinney on that one. Attend and support WP Accessibility Day and other similarly focused events. The people who put on those events could really use your support and encouragement. Advocate, stick up for and highlight the voices of those who get left out. That could start by sharing this podcast, so the stories in it can be amplified.

Allie Nimmons: And finally, let's go back to what I said about mindset and attitude and culture. We don't want to other people. And what does that mean? Thinking about Michelle's story about Word Camp US. I have no problems walking, yet I would still prefer my location to require less walking. I can hear, but I still use and want subtitles on all the videos I watch. There are times like a podcast like this to highlight that these things are special, because they tend to be overlooked. But the reality of the situation is that they need to be standard, expected, normal and not special at all. Features that help those with disabilities should be standard and not an additional option, because they help us all.

Allie Nimmons: To completely part from the community and the software as a result, Ahmed had been using WordPress for years as a developer, as a WordPress SEO consultant, and content creator. He was super involved in his local WordPress community, attending and volunteering at WordPress events. He liked the concept. He liked the people. He liked speaking and organizing. He invested about five years and hundreds of hours in the community until he started feeling like something was wrong.

Allie Nimmons: While Ahmed is only one person, I truly believe that his case cannot be unique. I wonder just how many people have left either the community, the team or the software, because they didn't feel counted. At the end of the day, we can't ignore this problem. We can't ignore the marginalized people who matter and who serve to make our community richer with their experiences. But in a lot of ways we do. And the people who do fight to make change often feel unappreciated. Ahmed tried creating actionable change, tried creating conversations, and was pushed away.

Allie Nimmons: Alex has been working on the accessibility team for years and he shared with me that he'll actually be leaving that team soon. Accessibility advocate, Deborah Edwards [inaudible 00:40:55] has been using WordPress for 10 years. And she spent seven of those years consistently, determinedly asking wordpress.com or Automatic to add captions to their videos that they publish online, seven years and over a dozen requests. And you know when they did it? Directly after Deborah posted an article to her blog explaining how long she had been asking with no response. Now all of their published YouTube videos have real English captions. Now this is a huge victory for Deborah and proof that we need accessibility advocates in the community, but we need them because the decision makers at the top aren't advocating for those people, and that doesn't feel great to me.

Allie Nimmons: Now, none of these issues will ever be solved by sitting around and pointing blame. They'll be solved by uncovering the root causes of these problems, which can then lead to better outcomes. So now that you have some idea of the degree to which WordPress is and is not accessible, what can you do? You can make your own content accessible. There are free and paid courses and resources available in all corners of the internet. You can ask for accessibility features to be baked into the products that you use via feedback and reviews. Do your best to understand accessibility law, and if you run an agency or build sites for clients, include accessibility language in your contracts. I highly recommend connecting with someone like Ryan Kinney on that one. Attend and support WP Accessibility Day and other similarly focused events. The people who put on those events could really use your support and encouragement. Advocate, stick up for and highlight the voices of those who get left out. That could start by sharing this podcast so the stories in it can be amplified.

Allie Nimmons: And finally, let's go back to what I said about mindset and attitude and culture. We don't want to other people. And what does that mean? Thinking about Michelle's story about Word Camp US, I have no problems walking, yet I would still prefer my location to require less walking. I can hear, but I still use and want subtitles on all the videos I watch. There are times like a podcast like this to highlight that these things are special because they tend to be overlooked. But the reality of the situation is that they need to be standard, expected, normal, and not special at all. Features that help those with disabilities should be standard and not an additional option because they help us all.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press the Issue is a production of MasterWP, produced and hosted by Allie Nimmons, co-hosted, edited and musically supervised by Monet Davenport, and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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Recently, the WordPress community has been buzzing with discussion around Five for the Future and the balances of contributing. In this episode of Press the Issue, Rob Howard and Allie Nimmons take a deep dive into the topic and discuss the degree to which Five for the Future serves it's intended purpose.

This podcast was sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. Create a course with LearnDash. Visit LearnDash.com.

Episode Transcript:

Monet Davenport: Welcome to Press the Issue, a podcast for MasterWP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts and more information about the show at Masterwp.com/presstheissue. Recently, the WordPress community has been buzzing with discussion around Five for the Future and the balances of contributing. In this episode of Press the Issue, Rob Howard and Allie Nimmons take a deep dive into the topic and discuss the degree to which Five for the Future serves its intended purpose.

Rob Howard: Hey Allie, how are you today?

Allie Nimmons: I'm great. How are you, Rob?

Rob Howard: Excellent. It is great to talk to you as always.

Allie Nimmons: Same, I'm really excited. I wanted to talk to you today about your conversation, well, your post that I think has started a larger conversation about Five for the Future and the toxicity of keeping score of WordPress contributing, something that I'm passionate about and curious about as well. So yeah, I had a couple of questions for you.

Rob Howard: That sounds great. Fire away.

Allie Nimmons: So one of the huge things that launched us into this conversation was the fact that Josepha who is the Executive Director of the WordPress open-source project, seems to say and think one thing about Five for the Future. That it's this aspirational thing that people should use to help them begin contributing. And Matt Mullenweg stance as the leader of WordPress, the owner of Automattic and all these things, seems to think something different. Given that there's this disparity right now that exists between the two leaders that we look to, what do you think that, that says overall about the gap between WordPress, the product and WordPress, the Foundation?

Rob Howard: Yeah, that's a great question. I think where I would start is that I'm not necessarily confident that we 100% know what Matt's public position is on this. Because what we are seeing is Josepha is taking a public position that it is an aspirational recommendation. I think Matt would publicly agree with that and I'm sure has many times when asked directly. But then we had this issue or Twitter storm or whatever you want to call it around the question of, does GoDaddy contribute enough to the WordPress open-source projects? Now there's a lot to dig into there, GoDaddy as a competitor of Automattic, which is the for-profit company that Matt Mullenweg owns and Josepha is employed by. So there's a lot to unpack there, but I think what a lot of community members, including myself took away from that episode was that, yes, Five for the Future is presented as aspirational, but also people are watching and keeping track and that can be used against a company who someone wants to present negative information about.

Rob Howard: So I don't know exactly what the motivation was, I know Matt has deleted and apologized for a lot of the statements that he made around GoDaddy but I also think that he still is concerned about people not contributing enough. And he talks about the free rider problem from an economic standpoint and saying, who should be pitching in and how much should they be pitching in to this thing that is a public good? So I think where we end up with a disconnect is, we have two people who are authority figures, it is unclear what their interplay is on this issue, who is ultimately the decision maker or who is the person who is conveying the actual position or the actual rule.

Rob Howard: I mean, I think it makes sense for us to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and say, "We all do want it to be an aspirational goal," which I think would be the healthiest approach. The flip side of that is that sometimes actions speak louder than words and if you say it's aspirational, but then you go after a company who is contributing half a percent instead of four and a half percent or whatever that is, my personal reaction to that was, "Whoa, I better go check my profile and make sure that I'm good enough." And obviously that's a little bit of an unhealthy reaction on my part, but I think that it would not be totally crazy or totally unusual to take that away from somebody who is obviously looking at the scoreboard and counting.

Rob Howard: So to bring that back to your original question, I think the lack of clarity around the WordPress product, the WordPress Foundation, Automattic as a for-profit company, in some ways I think contributes to the confusion around this. And the fact that we're hearing multiple different things from multiple different people who are involved in all three of those organizations that I just mentioned and it's unclear how those three organizations even technically interrelate with each other, in some cases. I'm not surprised that it's hard for somebody who's coming into this community to figure this out. It's very difficult to unpack and navigate even who works for whom in a lot of these situations. So I think that, that is not necessarily an issue that is at all solely related to Five for the Future but I think that, that need for more clarity all around also applies to this question of, well, is this 5% number an appropriate thing for us to be measuring and keeping track of?

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. And I mean, I think about it too, is this Five for the Future thing appropriate for everyone? I think there's value in an individual looking at it like, "Okay. Yeah, this is something that I can work toward if I decide I'm going to start with 1% and then you know, next month I'll try for 2%." And something to build toward as far as making the time to contribute. That's not the same experience as a giant company like GoDaddy to look at and say, "Well, maybe we should do that too." Sometimes I wonder if Five for the Future should be something that is aspirational to individuals and there's maybe a different system of accountability for larger companies and organizations.

Allie Nimmons: Because I think what we owe to WordPress is different. What I owe to the WordPress project as far as my career and my professional life is different than what the company of GoDaddy owes to the project. So it seems almost unfair sometimes to have the same expectation as far as contributing to these two giant things. Which when you have somebody coming at the problem from a business owner perspective, like I think Matt does, and somebody coming at it from a community based perspective, like Josepha does, it makes sense to me that there's a disconnect there.

Rob Howard: And what's also really interesting is I've actually heard people say the exact opposite of what you just said. Which is, "Oh, this is more appropriate for large companies and less appropriate for individuals." So I think that, that just speaks to how unclear the current parameters are. The 5% thing is not unclear, we understand what 5% is but it is unclear how I should act in order to accomplish this goal or this aspiration. So I think, Matt, within the last few months talked about, "Well, it could be two hours of your 40 hour per week." And I perceive that as being targeted toward that individual contributor or small freelancer or small agency type of thing. And then I've heard other people say what you just said, which is, "Well, maybe this only matters if you're making above a quarter of a million dollars a year in revenue or something, maybe that's the point where this should kick in."

Rob Howard: And I think either of those things could be correct or true, but it is completely unclear to me what the intention is or if there even is an intention. And I think what's happening is we have something that is ill-defined, people want to participate and want to do the right thing, but it is extremely difficult to figure out what that right thing is. So I think Josepha has been working on clarifying that and also in doing so she's getting feedback that is all across the map, like we just talked about, things that are basically the polar opposites of one another. And I think that makes this a really hard problem to solve. But at the same time, when I look back at the 2014 blog post that introduced this idea, all of these problems were raised within a day of that blog post going online.

Rob Howard: And they're actually linked in Matt's blog post at the end, he went through and he said, "Oh, here's some feedback. Here's feedback I agree with, here's feedback I don't agree with." And when I look back at that, I'm like, "Okay, I wrote an article two weeks ago and these people wrote articles eight years ago and we're all struggling to answer the same questions still." So it's not to say that this needs to be the top priority of everybody at the company and we need to drop everything and figure this out but I think it is an indication that there's something big missing here.

Rob Howard: And we all agree that we want WordPress to be a successful and thriving open-source project. We all agree that there are things about it currently that are confusing or that could be a lot better in terms of onboarding new contributors, in terms of the community vibes in general. But I think Josepha has correctly identified that this is a problem, but what struck me and was kind of a bummer is I was like, "This was a problem eight years ago and it was well documented eight years ago and we're still trying to figure out some of these basics about how we should be interacting with each other as a community."

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. So a core part of this problem that was also included in your post is the degree to which it is aspirational versus having this amount of time, "Count," for something or having it be public-facing as opposed to just being an internal way for you to determine and keep track of your contributions. Do you think that in some cases having it, "Count," could actually be a good thing in terms of creating a sense of accountability for companies like for GoDaddy? So the idea that maybe Matt has a point that companies should be held accountable, especially companies that build their entire business model off of WordPress, should be held accountable for how much they contribute. Maybe that's not to say they need to be admonished or punished if it's not at a certain number, but that information should still be public-facing so that there is that sense of accountability.

Rob Howard: I think so. I mean, I think the tricky thing about this is that, Matt unquestionably does have a point, it's just that there are multiple points being made that sometimes conflict with each other or interact with each other in weird ways. So I think point A is, GoDaddy is competing directly with WooCommerce and Automattic. They are in Matt's view, and I think this is a defensible view, almost poaching business away by using their economies of scale and their general vision of, everything is super cheap, to not just bring more people onto WordPress hosting, but also take some payment processing revenue away from competitors, including Automattic. And those are things that Matt argues, if you scale this up, now we have a company that's not really significantly contributing back to the project, taking a lot of potential revenue away from Automattic, which is a company that is contributing significantly. So that is-

Allie Nimmons: And we should also point out that Matt has a very specific definition of contributing. A lot of people came after that and said, "Well, look at all that GoDaddy does for events and sponsorships and all of these other sorts of things that are not what Matt thinks of, I guess, as contributing or has identified in his tweets as contributing." Because apparently-

Rob Howard: Yeah, I mean-

Allie Nimmons: And apparently he was sick with a fever or something so I don't even know how much I can trust a lot of what he said as how he actually feels. But yeah, sorry, I just wanted to interject that as context as well because GoDaddy got absolutely dragged into this conversation by Matt as an example, due to the reasons that you've just stated, I don't think that's fair. And I think there are other companies that fit the bill as well, that are not being talked about and it's just... I don't know, that whole part is weird to me too.

Rob Howard: Yeah. And I mean, I think in an ideal world, we don't have to take our leaders' phones away from them when they go on tweet storms but that is a thing that happened. And we can be good people who care about each other, who make mistakes but also I would like to move towards a place where there's no risk of that ever happening again in that way. I don't think it was a good look for the community, I think it was, as you mentioned, a mix of points that were fair and unfair, but also presented in just a really inappropriate way.

Rob Howard: So everyone makes mistakes and that's okay and if that happened to one of our employees, I would support them and try to help them learn from that. So I don't like to be punitive about what people do on social media whenever I possibly can avoid it. But at the same time, whether you run a million dollar company like ours or a billion dollar company like Automattic, it is better to not have outbursts against competitors in public, if you can avoid it. Unless there's a really good strategy behind it but I don't think there was in this case.

Allie Nimmons: No.

Rob Howard: So there's this point about direct competition. And I think you can be upset with your competitors, especially if you feel they're acting unfairly. And that is a thing that exists between two companies. What I think is not great for the community is then trying to intertwine that and conflate that with, "Well, you're not contributing enough back to WordPress and I'm going to pull out the scorecard." What struck me when I read the initial conversation, as well as, there was a follow up article from GoDaddy where they basically said, "Well, here's all the stats, here's what we're doing." And they mentioned, as you said, the funding of other things like sponsorships, WordCamps, stuff like that. And they basically said, "Okay. Well, if you're going to trot out the scoreboard, we are going to also trot out the scoreboard."

Rob Howard: And to me, that is just a super unhealthy cycle of behavior. And it reminded me of, if you go out and you Google, "Score keeping between spouses." It's kind of like, we can identify that this is not a healthy way to have a relationship, whether that is a romantic relationship or a relationship between friends or colleagues who are working together on what's supposed to be a public, good open-source project. And what everybody says is like, "This is just a really destructive way to communicate." If you spend your life keeping score, everybody gets stressed out, everybody gets overwhelmed and it often overshadows actual problems. It's not to say that there's never a situation where somebody doesn't do something that they promised and should be called out for that, that happens all the time.

Rob Howard: But if you have it in your head that there is a scoreboard of goodness or however you want to think about it, I think that pretty much instantly creates a bunch of bad incentives and ultimately a pretty toxic experience for everybody. And it doesn't just affect the two large companies whose leaders are arguing. Because, as you mentioned, we have thousands of smaller companies and also thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals who are watching this and taking cues from it. And they're not necessarily showing up in the forums or on Twitter, but they're saying to themselves, "Okay. Well, what is the expectation here? Is the expectation that I should put in eight hours a month per employee or do I need to hire an employee and dedicate them specifically to WordPress? And what if I made a plugin that competed with WooCommerce? Would I be the next target of ire from various different leaders in the community."

Rob Howard: So I think to the extent that it was just almost accidental bad behavior, you want to give people the benefit of the doubt on that. But I think what happened was it illuminated the fact that there's really no clear guidelines. And that saying, "Give 5%, if you want," is not enough to give people clarity. And then from there, we now need to decide, do we want to add more clarity and more specifics? That's one way you could go. Or do we want to just scale this back and say, "Hey, we're not going to keep a scoreboard. And here's what we do, here's what you could do if you wanted to." And it just ends there and there's no checking in for approval, no checking in to get the badge or the digital high five or whatever it is.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah. It's so strange. I love that we're talking so much about this issue because I think that it opens up the magnifying lens almost on the structures, through which we create this community. Because I'm seeing so many parallels in terms of how we give people expectations about contributing. The podcast that I did a couple of episodes ago about how the pandemic affected the contributor shortage. Because people are contributing, that's a very volunteer-based thing. It's a choice that people could make and then decide not to make if they want to. And so we tend, as a community, to not want to tell people, "Well, this is what's expected of you. This is what you have to do for it to counter-matter," or whatever.

Allie Nimmons: We're just like, "If you want to help, that would be great, that would be nice. Thank you so much." And so people don't know what to do with that. In so many aspects of our community, there's not a lot of direction to tell people, "This is what is helpful. Here's a checklist of things that you should do to help move the needle forward." Instead, it's just, "If you want to help, here's a handbook." Maybe that nobody probably reads. And I think a lot of that then bleeds into the mindset around Five for the Future where it's like, "Here's sort of a guideline for you." But it's so nebulous because we don't want to confine people by telling them exactly what to do. If Five for the Future, as a concept came with, "Here's five ways in which a company can contribute to Five for the Future."

Allie Nimmons: That's maybe 5% of your employees are paid contributors, maybe 5% of your products are open-source, free WordPress products. Giving a list of things that count, I feel like to a lot of people feels too limiting. I think it would be helpful because people would say, "Okay, I can do that. That's something that I can actually measurably do." And then we wouldn't have this, "Well, what counts? What doesn't count? Does code count? Does products count? Does helping with events count? Where are we with all of this?" But I think that, that's almost a systemic problem within the community, that's not just a Five for the Future problem.

Rob Howard: And what we discovered as our business grew from, let's say, four independent contractors to 18 or 20 employees now, is that, that process of scaling, if we wanted to do a good job with it, it required us to start documenting things that were previously unwritten rules. And what we see now is we have a 30 or 40 page employee handbook and the whole point of that project, to create that was exactly what you just described, not only do you have a big picture vision in here, but you actually have specifics. So you can still ask questions, but there's a lot of stuff in here that is just simply, already figured out and documented for you in a way that is quantifiable and actionable. And I think that is what is largely lacking.

Rob Howard: One of the things that we have even taken out of our diversity studies and seminars is that unwritten rules are a big problem for people who are new or people who are coming from different or diverse backgrounds into a community that already exists. So that community could be a company with five people, that's now growing to 15 or it could be WordPress in 2008, that's now starting to grow and we're bringing a lot of new people. And there's a lot of things that are like institutional knowledge or unwritten rules, that everybody, "Knows," already, but guess what? That new person doesn't know that or somebody who's never worked in a downtown, big city office might not know all the rules and unwritten rules and etiquette and different stuff like that automatically.

Rob Howard: So I think if you make too many assumptions about what people know coming in, you end up with this sort of deeper problem of like, "Well, the rules aren't really written, I'm uncomfortable asking, I feel like I'm getting judged." And so on and so forth. So we see that in companies and I think we're seeing something similar in the various structures that exist around the WordPress open-source project. And this is me speculating a little bit, but what I would say is that the open-source ethos, in some ways, it feels good to be a small community with a team that is working towards a common goal, has a common mindset. That obviously works early on but I think now WordPress is clearly at and well beyond the point where the unwritten rules are actually hurting way more than they're helping.

Rob Howard: And when Josepha tries to go write rules, we get feedback from 20 people who are like, "Well, I always interpreted the unwritten rule to be this." "Oh, no, I interpreted that unwritten rule to be that." And it's like, "No one's right or wrong because you guys all just have this stuff stored in your head from 15 years ago." And we need to clarify and actually codify some of this stuff. Not to say that there can't be any leeway, but a system that is as large as WordPress is needs way more written rules than what currently exists. And one of my pet peeves is the, No Jerks Rule because I'm like, "What does that mean?" That's in every single WordPress code of conduct and I'm like, "Am I being a jerk if I ask about the No Jerks Rule? Is it being a jerk if you call go daddy out on Twitter and you basically start tweet storms?"

Allie Nimmons: It's very subjective.

Rob Howard: What does that mean and how could that ever be enforced? The only way it could ever be enforced is in a way that is completely subjective and arbitrary. So it's stuff like that where that made sense when WordPress was small and it's like, "Yeah, we're chill, we're a cool community, no jerks allowed." But now that there're thousands of people involved, you have to accept that, that needs more clarity or shouldn't be in there.

Rob Howard: So yeah, those are the kind of things that I see are just growing pains that I think Josepha is clearly trying to address them, but what she's also running into is feedback like, "Oh, well, actually I thought this rule meant this." "Oh, I thought this rule meant that." "Oh, I've been around since 2004." "I've been around since 2005." It's like that kind of stuff is a significant limiting factor in actually getting written rules that can help everybody and also help new people come in with more comfort and also help people who've been around forever. Because there's no reason to believe that a company that's been building plugins for 15 years couldn't someday be called out for not contributing enough under the current paradigm.

Allie Nimmons: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think we can tie this off here, we covered a ton of ground. And yeah, I really love this article, I believe it's a part two or a sister article to another one that you wrote. And yeah, if you have not read Rob's article, it will be linked in the podcast show notes for you to go find. And I encourage you to read it and reach out to us online, on Twitter so that we can keep talking about it because it doesn't really serve the community to write an article and just send it out and nothing ever comes of it. Our goal here, I think, is to start conversations with the things that we're releasing so that things can actually come of them. Yeah, Rob, thank you so much for hopping on with me, I always love talking to you.

Rob Howard: Thank you. It is always a pleasure and I will talk to you soon.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press the Issue is a production of MasterWP. Produced by Allie Nimmons. Hosted, edited and musically supervised by Monet Davenport and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit Masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at Masterwp.com.

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It is the duty of those who build with the internet to ensure accessibility. But what does that all mean, beyond completing a set of checklists? In this episode, Devin Egger and Teron Bullock connect to discuss the realities and challenges of web accessibility.

This podcast was sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. Create a course with LearnDash. Visit LearnDash.com.

Episode Transcript:

Monet Davenport: It is the duty of those who build with the internet to ensure accessibility, but what does that all mean beyond completing a set of checklists? In this episode, Devin Egger and Teron Bullock connect to discuss the realities and challenges of web accessibility.

Teron Bullock: How you doing today, Devin?

Devin Egger: I'm doing good, Teron. How are you?

Teron Bullock: I'm doing excellent. I know we have an exciting episode today. We're going to talk about web accessibilities and we're going to deal with it from the perspective of the end user.

Devin Egger: Yeah. I was really excited when I started this article and presented this idea. As a developer, we're both developers, I'm sure you as well as I have read lots of articles on how to make websites accessible, and they always are tackling it from a very technical mindset and this is what you do in the code to make things accessible. And I feel so much that when you do that, yeah, we nerd out on it and we like that. We're like, "Okay. Yeah, cool." But then your project managers and your content writers and your designers then, they just tune out. You know?

Teron Bullock: Right.

Devin Egger: And I think that it's a conversation for everyone to have. And so I think by taking a step back and looking at web accessibility from a non-technical perspective, we can gain a lot and we can really look at it from a personal standpoint, because at the end of the day, we're doing this for people.

Teron Bullock: So hearing you speak about the end user, it makes me think, why did the end user become the focus for you?

Devin Egger: That's a good question. I mean, it kind of started off way back when I was a kid, before the web was even really a thing. I grew up with my grandma, one of my grandmas was blind, and so there was all these braille books around the house. So she knew how to read braille. I kind of started learning how to read braille when I was a kid, but that's not something that ever really materialized anything. But I'd always kind of thought in the back of my mind what would this be like if you couldn't see right. Just kind of fast forwarding several years, decades later, being a web developer, the whole idea of accessibility first came to mind. I think as a lot of web developers do, I had a client that was afraid of getting sued. So they're saying, "Hey, there's all these lawsuits going on. And people are getting sued for their website not being accessible. I don't really even understand what this means. But either way, we need you to make our website accessible."

Teron Bullock: Right.

Devin Egger: And so to be completely honest, I really didn't know what that meant either. And so when I initially started getting diving into it and doing research about what accessibility was as it relates to websites, I always like to look at the history of things, so looking at the history of web accessibility stems back to the Americans with Disabilities Act. It started with people busting curbs, people taking sledge hammers and busting curbs so that people in wheelchairs could actually use the streets, could get over the curbs.

Devin Egger: Knowing that that kind of was the start of it really brought a personal aspect to it for me. There's a lot of videos out there that will share what the experience is like using websites, for example, if you're blind. And that's kind of the big one that comes to mind all the time, it's most easy for us to think about, "Well, if I just close my eyes and then I can't see the website," and so you can kind of just imagine how difficult it would be to use the website. But then think about some of that's been amputated or that has cerebral palsy. See people that I didn't even think about like, "Oh, what if you couldn't use a keyboard or mouse?"

Teron Bullock: Right. Right.

Devin Egger: How do you use a website or the internet in general if you can't use a keyboard or mouse? Yeah, so hearing those personal stories is what really brought it home to me initially as a developer. And I thought that was my basis for this article, is I thought that if we could touch on accessibility from the perspective of the end user, maybe that would help people understand why this is so important.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. To touch on one of the things that you had said, speaking about it's easier to imagine a disability such as blindness and say, "I could perceive how an end user would experience this particular site," because you could just close your eyes, but there are other disabilities that may be much harder for you to imagine that you can perceive.

Devin Egger: Right.

Teron Bullock: What about the person who takes the opposite point of view? Who says we have the tools out there? Why isn't the screen reader enough? Why can't I just maybe make the website black and white or put a button in there that toggles the experience or something? Why isn't that enough? What would you say to that particular web developer? Do you think that the tools and thinking about it basically from the bare minimum mindset is enough?

Devin Egger: I don't, because first of all, there's a lot more work to be done that. I think that's one of the bigger points, is that I don't think we're ever done thinking about accessibility. Just for example, we're talking a lot about, and in my article, I talk a lot about website accessibility, but that's not even going into the idea of authoring tools being accessible. And that's one of the people's qualms with WordPress, is that it's not exactly very accessible as an authoring tool. I didn't have time to get into that in the article because it was already way too long, but there's a lot more work to be done.

Teron Bullock: Right.

Devin Egger: And if we're always taking a retroactive stance to it, instead of a proactive stance to it, if we're always playing catch up, then I don't think we're really doing anything justice because we're not really thinking about it in the right way. And I think the right way to think about it is just to look at your website that you're building. Again, whether you're a designer or whether you're a content writer or whether you're a developer, there's a chance for you to sit down and look at the thing that you're creating and go, "Well, what if I couldn't use my arms? What if I didn't understand things quite as well as people?" The disabilities that are kind of more overlooked, such as cognitive abilities or learning abilities, like I said earlier, it's easier to just close your eyes and think, "How would I how would I interact with this website?"

Devin Egger: But if you're making a website that has this crazy design, that one thing's over here and one thing's way over there, and the typical buttons are not in the typical places and this button is really small or whatever, those are all things that we don't really think about in typical website, accessibility, like adding alt tags or adding visually hidden elements that are screen reader only elements. The organization and the structure of the website is not something we always think about, but it's also very important. You know?

Teron Bullock: Right.

Devin Egger: If I have a cognitive disability that makes it hard for me to understand things, or if you're dyslexic, it's very hard to read a very long, just … thing of text all the way down. But if you break that text up, then it becomes more understandable. If you add images and graphs to highlight your point, it becomes more understandable.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely.

Devin Egger: That's why I don't think it is just enough to just do the bare minimum because if we do that, then we're kind of stuck at just, "Oh, I added all the alt tags. We're good. It's accessible. Screen readers can read my website." In this article that I wrote, I listed out quite a few different conditions that could affect your ability to use the website, but that's not anywhere close to all the different things. So really at the end of the day, what helps the most is just making a good website, making a website that is as clear and well structured as possible. And really, what I'm doing is just outlining evidence for that and reasons why that's an important thing.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. I think that you had touched upon, I think, a great point, not just from the end user standpoint, as far as using the tools that may be presented from a business standpoint, but also like you said, from a content creator from a person who's using WordPress. A lot of times when change comes, it comes because of compassion and empathy.

Devin Egger: Right.

Teron Bullock: And so if you could put yourself in that person's shoes, like for example, I like to ride bikes and I'm also a web developer. We had touched upon this before we started the podcast. What if I was riding a bike and I happened to get injured and I can no longer type? As a developer, we're talking about now my livelihood. How can I continue to develop if I lose access to my lens?

Devin Egger: Right.

Teron Bullock: We have to have certain tools that will be able to help us. We can't just say, "Hey, well, that sucks for you." Society will have to figure it out or whatever. But it's better for us to think about, again, from a compassionate standpoint, if we can think about putting ourselves in that person's shoes, then we can make things better. So the bare minimum, I think, couldn't be enough. And just in that aspect alone, anything that you want to make better for someone, doing the bare minimum is usually not the best approach. You know?

Devin Egger: Right. Right. And that's kind of, I think, where a lot of times people will just put a plug in on a website that adds stuff to the website to make it accessible. And they go, "Okay, got it. I'm done."

Teron Bullock: Right.

Devin Egger: When we look at it from the lawsuit perspective, because you and I were talking about this earlier, we look at it from the lawsuit perspective, that's enough. Right? So if you've made the attempt to make your website accessible, i.e., installing this plugin and paying this company money for your accessibility, then that's enough to prevent you from getting sued. So then that leads us to the conversation we were having earlier, like the carrot and the stick.

Teron Bullock: What is better? Is it the carrot or is it the stick? Is it better to think about web accessibility from the beginning as a forethought? Or is it better to wait for a potential lawsuit and therefore you're dealing with the stick?

Devin Egger: A lot of times this discussion is started by someone that says, "Hey, I need to make my website accessible because I'm afraid of getting sued." In my opinion, right or wrong, at least it starts the discussion. But at the end of the day, when you're doing that, when you're just adding a plugin, it can help with some things, but it doesn't help with everything and it doesn't help with the actual structure of the code of your website that's going to enable a screen reader or a voice navigation software to actually navigate your website. And so what we're talking about, making your website so that robots can understand what your website is. Right?

Teron Bullock: Right.

Devin Egger: The nice thing is, and here's the carrot side of it, is if you do that, then guess what? The Google index robots are also robots. So by making your website more accessible, by making your website more easy to understand from a machine perspective that is going to help a human use your website, you're also making so that Google knows better what your website is. And so you get a little bit of an SEO benefit out of that as well. I like to queue that in when I'm trying to convince a client that it's really important to actually make their website accessible from the get-go and think about it as a forethought instead of an afterthought.

Teron Bullock: Right.

Devin Egger: That's a side benefit that we get.

Monet Davenport: Master WP is sponsored by Cloudways. Cloudways managed hosting ensures that your sites get the performance boost they deserve. It offers you fast speeds, uptime, and manage security at affordable rates. Learn more at cloudwaves.com. Now back to the podcast.

Teron Bullock: What are some of the downfalls from a web developer's perspective when you are trying to basically reengineer a website or trying to place in a plugin and also make it functional with the original thought that you had with the particular website?

Devin Egger: Oh, man, there's so many things on that note. So, I mean, for example, the big thing that just comes right off the top of my head is, a lot of times these plugins, they alter the website to make it more accessible using JavaScript. So you have JavaScript turned off right there, immediately you've got an issue there where that plugin's not going to do its job. That's kind of a fault right from the get-go. Whereas if you had just used the right semantic HTML in the first place and did your alt tags and your visually hidden elements and all that to describe stuff and used a clear organization and layout and all that, then you wouldn't have had that problem in the first place. You don't need JavaScript to make your website accessible. So there's part of the problem.

Devin Egger: The other answer to your question is, when you're trying to re-engineer themes that have been prebuilt, that you just install a theme and you kind of change some variables and all that, is you really have such limited access to the code that that theme is spitting out. So then you're either stuck going into those theme files and editing those files, which takes a good amount of programming know-how to do, and so you're going to have to charge quite a bit to do that. So again, that's a question of the carrot or the stick. As a developer, it can be hard to tell a client, "Yeah, it's going to take me 80 hours to get this website accessible." And so that can be a hard conversation to have. So it can be easier to just turn on a plugin.

Devin Egger: At the same time I've done some research on some of these plugins that try to help with, like you had mentioned before, just changing everything to gray scale, and that should help with some colorblind issues. And is that really what we want? Do we really want to have to have users completely turn everything to gray scale to use our website? Granted, to be fair, there are some things that a plugin can do that we really can't do in code. There are people that have color blind issues that are very, very specific. So one color on top of another color, a text color on top of a background, may work for one person, but that also may not work for another person. So a plugin can actually be better at helping with that because it would be very difficult for us to build a website that is just perfect for everyone, with every factor of color blindness to see. Or just with low vision, a plugin can make it more easy for you to increase the text size or the size of everything to magnify a website.

Devin Egger: So there are cases where I think that it does make sense, but coming back to the point of, if you're using a pre-built theme or whatever that is not a hand coded theme, like we choose to build, when you don't have control over all the code that gets spit out by that theme, neither does the plugin. And so that's also kind of one of the things that happens with those plugins and why sometimes they catch so much heat, is they can actually make a website less accessible than it was in the beginning. Because then it tries to read the screen, and the screen reader goes nuts and there's all sorts of kind of weird little outlier things that can happen. And that's because the code that the theme is putting out there is so convoluted, and it's like a div inside of a div inside of a div inside of another div, and then a span, and all these other things and stuff that you just wouldn't do, you and I wouldn't do for hand coding a website.

Teron Bullock: Right. I look at it from a perspective of building an entire house or office building or something. Well, you talked about busing up the curves in order to first start with making places more accessible towards for wheelchairs. You could tell the difference between an establishment that thought about it from the beginning versus an establishment who just had to put the ramp in after. Often, there are times where you see buildings where there's a ramp to make a wheelchair accessible, but the ramp is so steep that is it really accessible? You're creating maybe more of a problem now because I recognize that you see that it's a problem, but you really didn't address it in a way that actually is helpful, which makes it worse than not thinking about the problem at all.

Teron Bullock: And so when we look at websites in that particular way, I also think, like you said, maybe it's a little more time in the beginning, but it's a lot more time to go back into a website and try to reengineer. Like you said, different plugins can access certain things or not be able to access certain parts of code. I'm thinking about, like you said, with the gray scale and having the plugins alter the website may take away from the experience. And when you think about web accessibility from the beginning, you're never going to cover everything. Like you said, there's going to be outliers out there and we're going to always try to cover as much as we can. But when you think about it from the beginning, you can design something that works for as many people as possible, and still make sure that everybody experiences the website in the same way.

Teron Bullock: If I switch a website over to gray scale, it's almost like having two different restaurants and you say, "Okay, so these set of people with these abilities can go here and these set of people with these abilities can go there." And anytime that you have two different things, you lead to a point where someone questions, "Why can't I fit in that crowd?" And I just think that it's never best practice to do something like that. So as much as we can offer, thinking about, again, the mindset of how do we solve it from the beginning so the experience is the same for all people, I think that that works in a better way than trying to jury-rig something afterwards.

Devin Egger: Right, right. That's the key point there, Teron. You nailed it. Because what we're ultimately talking about here is making an experience better for all people. And even if not making the experience better, making the experience the same. These people that have disabilities that impact their ability to use a website, all were really asking for here is to give them the same ability to use your website that a person without those disabilities would do. For example, let's say you are someone with cerebral palsy, you have a difficulty using a keyboard and mouse, and you get to a website that you can't use. Do you think that they're going to take the time to find the developer's email or the website owner's email and then write them an email and let them know that the website's not accessible? Probably not. They're probably just going to go right to the next website that is accessible and rightfully so.

Devin Egger: That's not their responsibility to go and say, "Hey, website, owner, I tried to use your website and I couldn't do it. So I went and used someone else's website." Maybe they would. And that's great, but again, it's not their responsibility. And I think that a lot of times, as developers, we get kind of caught into this mindset that, "Well, if there's a problem, someone will create a ticket and tell me about the bug and then I'll be able to fix it and then we'll move on." And that's, again, that retroactive mindset.

Devin Egger: But we got to really just accept the fact that if your website's not accessible, chances are, someone that's having a problem using it is not going to then take the time to write you an email to tell you that. They just want to be able to access their bank account and deposit a check. They want to just want to be able to do the same thing that everyone else can do. So again, it just comes right back to the point of, this really is something that needs to be a part of the conversation as we build websites, as we're creating the internet to make it a good experience for everyone.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. And I think that maybe from a developer's perspective, it's a good idea for us to maybe look at some of these tools to see or experience how someone who has a disability may experience your site. And that will ultimately go back to the beginning, what we said about having empathy for someone. It's easier once you've walked in someone's shoes, to have that empathy. It's harder when you've never experienced it.

Teron Bullock: And just as an example, I was listening or attempting to listen to one of our articles, and I wanted to see if I can use a screen reader on a particular device to see how one would accomplish this. And it became a very frustrating experience. Once I turned on the particular tool, first of all, to back that story up a little bit, there aren't any readily accessible screen readers on a mobile device that you can just go to right away. I did a quick Google search. I tried Google translate, but it only had a 5,000 word or caret limit.

Teron Bullock: So just thinking about that from a user's perspective who needs this versus somebody who wanted to use it, that already would be a frustrating step. Then to go to my particular mobile device and to realize that they had a tool that I could use. Once I turned the tool on, it was frustrating just to get out of the menu. Just with the tool on, you get all these clicks, these chimes, it's just repeating the same thing over and over, but there was no clear direction on what do you do next in order to move on to reading the article.

Teron Bullock: By some happenstance, I was able to get to the article that I was looking at, and then it just kept reading the headline or the title. And once I started trying to scroll, it just went back to getting these error chimes. And I got extremely frustrated. And again, I don't have this disability. It was just me trying to experience it. Imagine somebody who relies on this. How would they have experienced it? And someone who may have low vision, they wouldn't be able to tell whether it was just the tool itself that was causing the problem, or they may have thought that they were causing the problem, not being able to see if maybe a box is on the screen that they had to press in order to move forward or anything of the sort.

Teron Bullock: And the screen was clear. I'm looking at the website and there's nothing that I could do in order to move the screen down. And so does that mean that I have to turn it off, scroll the screen down and turn it back on? Just all these different steps is problematic. It really should be more intuitive, which leads me to the next question, which is, how do we become better allies more than just making it more intuitive? What are some of the things that we can do moving forward, or mindsets that we can use, in order to make this process better for everyone?

Devin Egger: Yeah, that's a great question. That experience that you're talking about is I think indicative of part of the problem and a part of indicative of the solution. And the answer to your question there is, we got to try to use these tools before something happens, that makes us have to use them.

Devin Egger: In doing the research for this article, one of the things that the WCAG, which is the guidelines that is put out to give us the guidelines for accessibility, talks about is that not all of these disabilities are things that happen from birth. Some of these things happen in an accident. I mean, there's all sorts of different things that could happen, that could make you blind, that you could get in an accident and lose a limb. And then you're in a position where all of a sudden, brand new to your life, you've got to figure out how to use these tools and you can't see.

Devin Egger: When you're telling that story, I just keep thinking to myself, "Man, that is so frustrating." And I've tried to do the same thing. I think we've all accidentally turned on voiceover on our computer, and then not being able to figure out how to turn it off. And it's hard to figure out even when you can see. And so to answer your question, I think, how do we become a better a11y is try to use these tools, try to navigate the world of the internet as if you didn't have the ability to use both of your arms. When you're building a website, have you tried to tab through it, just hitting tab, tab, tab, tab? And can you access most of your website that way?

Devin Egger: Maybe it's good to take a step back, and for those of us that don't know, when we talk about being an a11y, that's A-1-1-Y, and you can do learn a lot about how to become an a11y by searching that, and that's because there's 11 letters between the A and the Y in accessibility. So that's why we do a11y, a11y is a11y.

Devin Egger: So really, I think part of what we can do is really try to use these tools. As web developers, as content writers, as designers, as project managers, you try to use these tools and try to see how easy or how difficult it is to use them. Because as developers, we're problem solvers. We like to put together puzzles and figure out the solutions to problems. So naturally, if we try to use these tools and we have a difficult time using them, we're probably going to try to come up with solutions. But we need to be doing that before a client comes to us and says, "Hey, I'm afraid of getting a lawsuit," or, "I already got a lawsuit, and now I need to make my website accessible."

Devin Egger: And we need to think about it beyond just like, "I'm trying to make an accessible website." It needs to be something that we're kind of just always thinking about whether you're posting something on Twitter or whether you're building an app, or whether you're building a website. I think that part of this whole movement of becoming an a11y is, A, keeping the conversation open, don't stop talking about it. And then also trying to use these tools and really kind of immersing yourself in the experience of what it would be like if you didn't have a typical functioning body that would allow you to use a website. You know?

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. I think that we can leave this right here. It's such an extensive conversation. This is a great article that you wrote, and I encourage everyone to go check it out. It's on Master WP right now. The title is Screen Readers and Beyond: How Web Accessibility Makes Lives Better. It's written by Devon Egger. And I encourage everyone as well to, if they have any input that they would like to add to it, reach out to us on Twitter, and we can keep the conversation going there.

Teron Bullock: Devin, I thank you for your time. I think that this was an exciting conversation, and I look forward to us having other conversations about other topics.

Devin Egger: Oh, you're welcome, Teron. And likewise, look forward to keeping this conversation open with you and with everyone as we go along into the future.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press the Issue is a production of Master WP produced by Allie Nimmons. Hosted, edited, and musically supervised by Monet Davenport. And mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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Conversation has been ramping up about who WordPress is for, and who it leaves out. Community members are speaking up about why they are choosing to abandon the CMS for other systems. In this episode, Brian Coords talks to Nyasha Green about how the WordPress market disparity is challenging, but not dismantling, user loyalty.

This podcast was sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. Create a course with LearnDash. Visit LearnDash.com.

Episode Transcript:

Monet Davenport: Welcome to Press the Issue, a podcast for Master WP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show at masterwp.com/presstheissue. Conversation has been ramping up about who WordPress is for and who it leaves out. Community members are speaking up about why they are choosing to abandon the CMS for other systems. In this episode, Brian Coords talks to Nyasha Green about how the WordPress market disparity is challenging, but not dismantling, user loyalty.

Nyasha Green: Hey, Brian, how are you doing today?

Brian Coords: Good. How are you doing?

Nyasha Green: Doing well, doing well. It's almost Friday, so very happy. But I'm very excited to talk with you today. About one of your articles. You wrote one about the WordPress exodus and it's called My So-Called WordPress Mass Exodus. Really loved this article. Really, really, really in tune with what's going on with Twitter and other social media with people talking about how they want to leave. Can you talk a little bit more about why you wrote the article?

Brian Coords: Yeah. So when I started writing this article, there were a lot of tweet threads going viral of people saying, "I'm done with WordPress because I'm trying to do X and it's not working for me. And I'm out of here." And so there was this constant stream of just different examples of it. And part of me feels like when things are happening on Twitter, it's not real life. And it's always the extremes that you see. It's always the crazy versions of things that you see. And so I wanted to comment on that. But also I think there is some justifiable complaints, or not even complaints. But just concerns people have. And we're always wanting to think critically about WordPress and where the ecosystem is going. So that was what stuck out to me.

Brian Coords: The other piece of it is that I live in California and everyone in California knows that there's a constant conversation about people leaving. Whether it's like famous rich people like Elon Musk or Joe Rogan or whatever. Just, I mean, people I know who are constantly getting out of California to move to Texas or Idaho where the rent is a little cheaper or they can have a little more room or whatever it is. So it's one of those things where it's a big conversation, but it also like doesn't affect 99% of your real day to day life. So I just thought it would be fun to bring those two things together.

Nyasha Green: Well, I love the comparison between a WordPress exodus and a California one. Because I am newer to WordPress than a lot of other people in the community. And I don't see any big things with the new changes that's making me want to leave. And I also am a big fan of California and I really want to move there. So are we the ones that are just not in our right minds? What do you think?

Brian Coords: I love California. I've lived in a bunch of different parts of it because California it's so different. There's so many like different pieces of it. And that actually is like a good metaphor for WordPress where like living in the Bay Area of California is nowhere the same as living in San Diego or living in the inland desert or there's these crazy backwards parts of far Northern California that don't even call themselves California. They have like a different name for themselves and a different flag. So there's just so many… That's a whole other topic. There's just so many different versions of it. And WordPress is the same way. But at the same time, it's beautiful and there's a reason so many people want to live here. And so I think the comparison to WordPress maybe is pretty apt.

Nyasha Green: Yeah, I agree. So we're talking about a lot of complaints and people talking about they want to leave. Do you think WordPress is stagnant?

Brian Coords: Yeah. So that was the first collection of things that I had seen. There was a lot of people who just feel like things aren't moving, things aren't changing. The tech industry is always meant to feel like whatever you were doing yesterday is obsolete and out of date and you better jump on the next new thing. So we love seeing progress. We love seeing new shiny things. So a lot of people like to complain that's how WordPress is. I think there was also just through the COVID era, we've seen so many different things.

Brian Coords: A lot of the big name writers and bloggers and WordPress have moved on to different industries. You know, the big push for acquisitions and companies getting acquired every other day has really slowed down. That's been not a big thing and we're starting to see layoffs and all that stuff. And so I don't know if stagnant is the best word, although a lot of people were saying that. But it there's definitely a shift in the industry that people are feeling very sensitive to. And these shifts come along sometimes and things change. And we're going to start seeing probably hopefully some new voices and new companies and things take that next wave.

Nyasha Green: Yeah. Yeah. And I know you talk a little bit in your article about how it seems like this big…. Well, people have talked about leaving in the past when WordPress 5.0 happened, and this is reminiscent of that. What do you think it is? Or some of the things about 6.0 that has people like rehashing their want to leave right now?

Brian Coords: Yeah. So the 6.0 release, in one way, it's just another release and that's a lot of us are trained when we see a big number, like 6.0, we maybe subconsciously expect big things and that's not how WordPress works. Every release is just the next few months of progress. But a lot of the progress has really been about full site editing. And most of what WordPress does right now is focus on making that experience better. But if you don't use that tool, which a lot of people don't. Because it's a very cool, but it's not really useful for every situation. It's useful for a good amount of situations. If you're not using full site editing your experience with WordPress just looks the same as it did five years ago.

Brian Coords: You're basically seeing the same things. The post editor is new and it's different. But most of the rest of WordPress really hasn't changed in the last few years. And I think 6.0 was another thing where it was like, "Okay, if I'm doing full sight editing, these are some cool, incremental changes and stuff. But this feature is not done yet. It was supposed to be, but it's not. It's way more complicated than we're all expecting it to be. And it's a very hard problem to solve and is going to take a lot more effort than I think anybody initially thought. And if I'm not part of it, then what's really happening in WordPress for me in this latest release. Not to say that there's nothing. But there's maybe not as much as sometimes we're used to."

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening up to this point, Press the Issue by Master WP is sponsored by LearnDash, your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash, visit learndash.com. Master WP is sponsored by Cloudways. Cloudways managed hosting ensures that your sites get the performance boost they deserve. It offers you fast speeds, uptime, and manage security at affordable rates. Learn more at Cloudways.com. Master WP is also sponsored by Weglot. Discover a way to translate your WordPress site that's easy to install compatible with all themes and plugins implements, multilingual SEO, and translates your site with machine translation with full post editing control, learn more at weglot.com. That's W-E-G-L-O-T.com. Now, back to the podcast.

Nyasha Green: I know you also mentioned that it seems like not just getting a little bit out of the actual code and features. But the community, it seems like a lot of people are just having trouble wanting to stay. Of course, we know COVID played a big part of that. But also, as you mentioned earlier, we have people leaving publications and then local meetups, you mentioned, we're having trouble getting people back. How much do you think that the lack of changes or the focus on just specific areas is playing into that, to the community feelings?

Brian Coords: Yeah. The community one is hard because, obviously, the lack of in-person meetings and conferences has gotten, has really affected things. I think everybody hit like digital conference fatigue at a certain point where watching a bunch of recorded videos of conferences just didn't really do it for people after a certain point. Unless, like WP Engine, you get a DJ to boost up the energy level. So it's hard to separate that from like what's been going on. I think there has to be some push to start seeing local meetups, again. Getting people, just talking. That's really how new people join is they, they go to local meetups and you can ask questions and people are just there to help. And just there to share knowledge and you can go to the smaller Word Camps.

Brian Coords: Like my local one was Word Camp, Orange County, which hasn't been around for the last few years. But it was such a great opportunity to just hang out with people. A lot of WordPress developers, sometimes you're the only person at your job who's doing this. And all the people you work with are in different departments. And so being able to go to a meetup or something is your one chance to nerd out on WordPress stuff. I mean, we don't have that issue. We're luckily a team of developers. But I know a lot of people and a lot of times in my past where I'm the one guy at the organization working on the website. And you just like, "Nobody knows what I do and there's nobody to talk to about it. And nobody to get excited about it with." And so I think hopefully we'll start seeing those sorts of things come back. And there's just never going to be a replacement for being in the same room with people. As soon as we get to a place where we can do that again.

Nyasha Green: Playing off that, because I know we talked about community is very important in being around likeminded people. Do you think part of the reason people are feeling like they need to leave is that the target market is too big.

Brian Coords: Yeah. That's been another topic that people have where they say WordPress is trying to be so many things to so many people. That at a certain point, you hit whatever 40% of the internet is WordPress. At a certain point, that's going to stall out because you can't be all things to all people. You can't just be this thing that is going to solve everybody's problems. And what we're seeing is that there's these very specific things that are really good at solving one problem that are doing really well. So it's Shopify for ecommerce stores. And it's Substack for newsletters. And it's Ghost for content creators. And these very specific platforms can do really well because they are proprietary. They're completely controlled by one company. They can just funnel tons of venture capital money into growth, those sorts of things.

Brian Coords: WordPress just doesn't work that way. WordPress is open source and it's owned by everybody who's a part of it and that wants to contribute to it. And so at a certain point, we're going to see all these different directions that it wants to go. But the beauty of WordPress is when it pulls that off well and you can use it for anything. But it may not be the best solution for that one thing that you're trying to do.

Nyasha Green: So with that being said, do you think WordPress is still the best choice for a development agency?

Brian Coords: I would say that in 99% of situations, WordPress is still going to be the best choice. Because the thing about WordPress, I think, that's the most important part of it is not really the actual core software of WordPress, which is great and is useful. But it's really the ecosystem and the community. And if you were to walk away from WordPress and go move to some other platform and stuff, it's like leaving where you live or it's like leaving a religion or something where you're just now you have to come redo everything from scratch. Whether it's how you do contact forms to what hosting companies you use to all this stuff.

Brian Coords: And there's so much that is so good about the entire ecosystem and all the relationships and all the community things that you join and the online groups and the blogs and all that stuff. And it's to walk away from all of that, just for a few better features or a little bit of better performance, to me, is just not worth it, at this point. I would much rather just stay here and try to make it better and find ways to energize the community and just stand up for WordPress.

Nyasha Green: Awesome. I agree. I have my issues with WordPress, but I have no intention on leaving and I am coming to California. I know you mentioned Trader Joe is getting crowded. We could just carpool. We'll make it work. We'll make California work. We'll make WordPress work. I'm ready. I'm ready for it.

Brian Coords: I think all of WordPress is coming to California for Word Camp US this year. So I'm definitely looking forward to that. They picked San Diego, which is in my opinion, the best part of California, by a long shot. I think I could never go to Los Angeles again. But San Diego where I used to live there and it's the perfect city. So I'm super excited about that. So we're going to flood California with some WordPress energy.

Nyasha Green: Yes. And it's going to be so great. And so what you're telling me is I should house hunt at Word Camp too, like after hours. That's what you're telling me.

Brian Coords: Yeah. If you can house hunt in San Diego… Yeah. Good luck. Oh man. But yes, you should definitely. I'm going to show you all the best neighborhoods. The best part about San Diego is there's the nice big downtown tourist neighborhood. And then there's the real San Diego and there's so many cool neighborhoods and coffee shops and craft breweries and all that outdoor patios and all that great stuff. So yeah, definitely we'll house hunt. We'll craft beer hunt and we'll find one of the classic donut shops or something.

Nyasha Green: Great. Great. I can't wait. Well, Brian, it's been so great speaking with you today and I'm ready to see what WordPress does and I'm ready to see if people will stay, leave and I'm ready to see what happens next.

Brian Coords: Thanks. It was really great talking to you.

View Details

Contributors are the life blood of open source projects, and WordPress is no different. When the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult for people to contribute, how was the project affected? How and where did our structures and processes change and evolve to match this challenge?

Press the Issue was sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. Create a course with LearnDash. Visit LearnDash.com.

Resources mentioned:

2020 Timeline: The Year Of The Covid Pandemic
The Impact of COVID 19 on Volunteering
Civic Engagement Research Report
Helping Others, Helping Ourselves
How the open source community came together to fight COVID-19
Collaboration and Conflict Resolution in Global Open Source Communities w/ Andrea Middleton

Special thanks to:

Allyson Souza
Andrea Middleton
Brian Coords
Cami Kaos
David Bisset
David Spinks
David Wolfpaw
Ian Svboda
Marieke van de Rakt

Episode Transcript:

Monet Davenport: Welcome to Press The Issue, a podcast from MasterWP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show at masterwp.com/presstheissue.

Allie Nimmons: By 2020, Allyson Souza had been working with WordPress community events, word camps, and meetups, for about 5 years. In early 2020, they were excitedly planning the third WordCamp São Paulo. They had high hopes. The last two WordCamps in Sao Palo were pretty successful. They had around 700 attendees in 2019, they had begun a kids' workshop, and they were focused on boosting diversity and getting more speakers.

Allyson Souza: I enjoy being around people that share my visions about free software, publishing, democratization, and part of me really like to see people at our events, being able to get knowledge and make connections, and even sometimes find a job or freelance. It's very satisfying.

Allie Nimmons: Then, 2020 happened.

News Clips: ... High alert, screening passengers for symptoms of a deadly new virus. But first, though we know now it's possible the virus could have been spreading as early as December 2019, by the time the White House partially banned travel from China, infection levels start to explode all over the world.

Allie Nimmons: So, a lot changed for Allyson, and they could feel their WordPress community change around them too.

Allyson Souza: Everybody was tense. I felt that everyone was tired, afraid to be sick, and afraid for their families. I was feeling that too. After the pandemic started, our agency moved to home offices a week before the government recommendations, because we saw the news and how things were evolving in other countries. My mental and physical health started to drop. With everything that was happening, the community involvement started to feel more like a duty than something I was happy doing.

Allie Nimmons: Allyson is definitely not the only person to experience this kind of a shift, and he's definitely not the only person to stop volunteering as a WordPress open-source contributor during the pandemic.

Allie Nimmons: My name is Allie Nimmons. I'm a WordPress builder, instructor, community member, and the digital producer of this podcast. As I press into issues relating to the WordPress open-source project and beyond, I want to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic, the biggest most impactful event of the century thus far has affected our open-source system.

Monet Davenport: Press The Issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now, let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash, visit learndash.com.

Allie Nimmons: The most recent WordPress release, 6.0, was developed in tons of different ways by over 500 people. And what's so crazy about this is that these contributors are all volunteers. The definition of "volunteer" here gets a bit loose, but we'll address that later. So, knowing that, let's take a minute to look at volunteering overall.

Allie Nimmons: So, in the first few months of the pandemic, volunteermatch.org released a report that stated nearly a quarter of nonprofit had to temporarily halt their operations, and 1% had to stop permanently. When asked, volunteers cited health concerns as being the main reason why they stopped volunteering. No big surprise there.

Allie Nimmons: The Corporation for National and Community Service found that before the pandemic, nearly a third of all Americans volunteered at least once a year, and during the pandemic, that number plummeted by about 66%. Fidelity Charity shared that two in three people who continued to volunteer ended up relying on virtual opportunities.

Allie Nimmons: So, that means that about a third of the people who volunteered before either didn't want to, or couldn't figure out how to continue volunteering online. That's a lot of people stepping back and a lot of problems not being solved. There seems to be somewhat of an uptick in volunteering now, over two years since the beginning of the pandemic.

Allie Nimmons: According to a research engagement study done by Pointsoflight.org, 73% of people in America say that volunteering is more important now than it ever was before. There isn't a lot of data about how volunteering was affected in the long-term. A lot of the data is from the start when things were really fresh and people were still in that hoarding-toilet-paper phase.

Allie Nimmons: But what I think we can learn from this is that the pandemic changed and challenged people's ability to volunteer, at least in the beginning. As we felt more fear, we felt a greater need to step back from volunteering our time. And as the fear subsided, the desire to go back to normal, to get back to those volunteering opportunities that brought us joy, returned. And perhaps the pandemic made us see just how valuable our time is, and feel more generous with it.

Allie Nimmons: Psychologists have identified five main motivations for volunteering: values, community concern, esteem enhancement, understanding, and personal development. It's easy to volunteer when you feel the work you're doing aligns with the things that you value: your love for your community, the way you view yourself, the understanding you may gain of a new group, and how the work benefits you overall.

Allie Nimmons: People volunteer or contribute to WordPress for the same kinds of reasons. At the end of 2021, I actually asked on Twitter why people think contributing to WordPress is important. And answers included stuff like the desire to give back, giving a voice to the voiceless, leaving stuff better than when we found it, creating the change we want to see, all that good stuff.

Allie Nimmons: And this all aligns with why people volunteer generally. WordPress as a project displays values people agree with, they feel community concern and want to contribute to make the community better, there's a degree of esteem enhancement that comes with being a contributor, understanding comes into play as we meet and work with other people around the world, and we achieve personal development as we gain new skills as contributors. So, surely despite a global pandemic, those emotional triggers don't change. So, what did?

Allie Nimmons: It's harder to volunteer when people don't feel those five things, but it's virtually impossible when those motivations are deprioritized in the face of health concerns, burnout, fear, and grief. My hypothesis, from being a contributor myself and speaking with others over the past two years, really comes down to the prioritization and the burnout.

Allie Nimmons: It feels really good to get out of the house, to go to a local shelter and take care of puppies. That's probably the volunteering that we'd all like to do. But volunteering online when you've spent all day working online, performing tasks that don't have immediate payoff, not the kind of serotonin boost you get for playing with a puppy, and working on software that feels much bigger than you, it just doesn't provide that same level of satisfaction for most people. But those are all just my thoughts. So, I wanted to speak with someone who experienced all of this firsthand.

Cami Kaos: Hi, my name is Cami Kaos. My primary role was to maintain community relationships, wrangle our volunteers, mentor at WordCamps, and keep things going with the WordCamp program, the mentor program and the meetups program.

Allie Nimmons: In 2020 Cami was one of the people who led the charge to move WordPress contributing online. And she watched as people went through that same up and down that we talked about before. As the fear kept them indoors, they were eager to move things online.

Cami Kaos: My job was to work with those volunteers, to wrangle the volunteers, to have consistency. Suddenly we moved from really having a big push on in-person events, meetup groups, do action events, to how do we do all this online? And at first I was seeing a lot of people excited to organize online events, fans who didn't live in an area where they could get in... and they couldn't make everything balance when they had to go be somewhere, but they could find a way to make it balanced when it was just online.

Allie Nimmons: But as the fear subsided and the burnout, stress, and confusion set in, people wanted to do more.

Cami Kaos: About a month in there is just this utter and complete fatigue where we realize this is no longer a fun novelty thing that we're doing. This is our world now. We can't go and see our friends, we can't do in-person events. Now, rather than being excited that we can do these fun new event types, we're upset because we can't do the at-there event types, "Why won't you let us?" Then, I saw people start to just ghost.

Allie Nimmons: Within that period of time, how many people, roughly, do you feel ended up ghosting or stepping back or disappearing?

Cami Kaos: More than half. It was pretty significant.

Allie Nimmons: The attempted solution was Learn.wordpress.org. It's a series of workshops and lessons that help people to not only get started with WordPress, but get started with contributing. It's a great resource. Highly recommend. But even this proved difficult. In terms of getting volunteers on board, it's kind of a catch 22. We need volunteers to build the thing to help support the volunteers.

Cami Kaos: And I have never, in my decade with WordPress, had a hard time getting people to volunteer to do something until it came time to work on the Learn program, because A, it was a whole new thing people had to learn how to do, but B, everyone's life was just bogged down with heaviness. We have to look at the mental health crisis that the pandemic created, we have to look in families where you have children in the home, those children were no longer going to school, they were no longer going to preschool or daycare.

Cami Kaos: The time that they were going to use to spend to engage with other humans needed to be more meaningful to them than just working on a project that they weren't sure what they were going to do with it. There were people that just didn't answer things, and then there were people that were, "Yes, I will get to that."

Cami Kaos: So, if I asked 20 people, I would say 10 of them would say, "No," five of them would say nothing, and five of them would say, "Yes, I can start working on that on this day or this day." And those dates just kept getting pushed further and further and further out.

Allie Nimmons: And it got so bad and so stressful that eventually Cami decided to step back herself.

Cami Kaos: And I needed to prioritize taking care of myself and my family and maintaining my equilibrium. It had become such a frustration that I think it's part of the reason that I started looking for different employment opportunity.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening up to this point. MasterWP is sponsored by Cloud Waves. Cloud Waves Managed Hosting ensures that your sites get the performance boost they deserve. It offers you fast speeds, uptime, and manage security at affordable rates. Learn more @cloudwaves.com.

Monet Davenport:

MasterWP is also sponsored by Weglot. Discover a way to translate your WordPress site that's easy to install, compatible with all themes and plugins, implements multilingual SEO, and translate to your site with machine translation with full post editing control. Learn more @weglot.com. That's W-E-G-L-O-T.com. Now, back to the podcast.

Allie Nimmons:

So, on the whole, most people stopped volunteering locally, traveling to volunteer due to travel restrictions and CDC guidelines, things we can't really help. And you'd think that a virtual environment, a contributing environment that takes place largely in Slack, would have thrived. And in some ways it really did.

Allie Nimmons:

The good thing we can look at here is that open-source as a whole, not just WordPress, has thrived under the remote-only model. And in a lot of cases, it really looks like open-source had a lot more of an effect on COVID-19 than the other way around. GitHub has this really great article about how all of these COVID-19 dashboards and research groups and open-source projects burst into effect as a reaction to the pandemic.

Allie Nimmons:

Users created over 5,000 new repositories that were specifically related to COVID-19. But when you take a look at these projects, they're not WordPress projects. Why was WordPress not affected in the same way? Simply put, WordPress as an open-source project has nothing to do with COVID. It's a much broader, older project, meant for a more wide variety of purposes.

Allie Nimmons:

Contributing might have felt so indirectly helpful as to not matter to some people, as opposed to a brand new novel open-source project that was directly in reaction to the pandemic. Kind of makes you feel you're doing something in a time where everyone felt they couldn't do anything.

Allie Nimmons:

The other factor is that our community is so dependent on events. Without those events, without that person-to-person interaction, people's enthusiasm for the project and the work waned. It's an "out of sight out of mind" thing.

Allie Nimmons:

I want to appreciate for a second how big the WordPress open-source project really is. These numbers genuinely surprised me. Here's Andrea Middleton on the Masters of Community Podcast with David Spinks in June 2020, and she's talking here about the size of the community team alone in 2019.

Andrea Middleton:

Round about two or 3000 people strong. We have made up meetup groups, I believe our last count was about 850 local meetup groups in over a 100 countries in the world, and then last year I think we had about a little over 140 annual conferences, all centered on WordPress and all organized by and staffed by and everything all done by true volunteer labor.

Allie Nimmons:

Andrea talks optimistically about how the shift to virtual might end up being a great thing. It may allow more diverse voices. Maybe people who couldn't participate before will join in.

Andrea Middleton:

We're really doubling down on our speaker training as well in our program. So, we had this long campaign to train people from groups traditionally marginalized in tech to become conference speakers. And we had been trying to train organizers to give this great workshop that we call our Diversity Speaker Training Workshop.

Allie Nimmons:

I can tell you off the bat that these workshops are great and they work well. Are they enough? Can a project like WordPress ever do enough? I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. Despite amazing new virtual opportunities that presented themselves, is the current volunteer system enough to pandemic-proof a project like WordPress?

Allie Nimmons:

We heard about how Cami's volunteers slipped away. Did they come back stronger than ever before, or are there still gaps? To get a view for the state of things I spoke with Angela Jin. Angela is Head of Programs and Contributor Experience for Automatics Division, sponsored to work on the WordPress project full time.

Allie Nimmons:

She shared that at the beginning of 2020 she was focused on increasing the number of WordCamps from the 140 WordCamps that were successfully held in 2019. But very quickly that focus changed to helping organizers pivot or cancel their events entirely.

Angela Jin:

It was really painful because while we were doing the responsible thing, it did mean the loss of a beloved part of our community. So, we certainly lost in-person organizers during that time because the role wasn't available.

Allie Nimmons:

But it did seem, from the ashes rose new opportunities, new events, and stronger ways to connect.

Angela Jin:

Realizing that people couldn't meet in-person led to teams organizing some really amazing online events for a period that showcased community strengths, like WordCamp Spain's late night show and WordCamp Austin with an innovative platform and the musical community talent show. And when people got tired of online events, because that was what we were doing all the time, people came together to explore other options like more education and training opportunities through Learn WordPress. All of that happened in 2020.

Allie Nimmons:

Angela speaks to a lot of people who make the WordPress community team events and contributions happen. I wanted to know how people really felt and how they reacted across the pandemic. A lot of the solution was leaving the door open for those of us who wanted to step away, and creating opportunity for people who wanted to amp up their volunteering.

Angela Jin:

People were hurting, and understandably so. And that meant that people needed to step away from contribution for various reasons. And in those moments, the best thing we can do is to be supportive of each other and remind them that when and if they want to come back, they are more than welcome to. And at the same time, there were some volunteers who found connection and agency in volunteering. And for those people, I was super happy to match them to a WordPress Make team.

Allie Nimmons:

Unfortunately, but probably predictably, the number of events, and therefore number of attendees, over the last three and a half years has been waning. Like I said before, there were 140 camps in 2019, there were 33 camps in 2020. A third of those were in-person and the other ones online. There were 19 purely online events in 2021. And so far, in the first half of 2022, there's been one online and six in-person events.

Allie Nimmons:

The numbers around core contributors over the last few years has fluctuated. This was encouraging to hear, especially after hearing Cami talk about the way people disappeared so early on.

Angela Jin:

Our last major release in 2019 was 5.3, which had 645 contributors, which at the time was the largest contributor group, the lowest being 481 contributors to 5.7 in March 2021, and the highest being 805 for the 5.5 release in August 2020. The most recent release was 5.9 in January, which had 624 contributors.

Angela Jin:

Of course, we can't just look at major core releases. There is so much more to the project. So, another number that I like to revisit is the results of the WordPress translation day, or month, really, because it ran throughout September 2021. That event included 22 local events, six global events, and many sprints, discussions, and projects.

Angela Jin:

The numbers there are incredible. They have a whole page where they've listed what was achieved during that month. We had over 500,000 strings approved, and almost 2,000 active translation contributors participating, including 697 new contributors.

Allie Nimmons:

So, sounds like, from a lot of what Angela told me, we were experienced with working online already, and so that pivot to online events and online collaboration wasn't as much of a pain point as it could have been. And the removal of in-person events, the dissolving of geographical boundaries, led to an increase in collaboration cross-nationally, and we'll see other examples of that later on.

Allie Nimmons:

But before we go too much further into events, I want to deviate for just a second. Remember when I said the definition of "volunteer" here is a bit loose? When it comes to open-source, contributing and volunteering are often thought of as the same thing, but it's not always the case. A lot of contributors, like Angela herself for example, are paid or sponsored.

Allie Nimmons:

Through the company they work for they are given the time and support to contribute. Given that so much of this focus has been on giving up that free time to contribute, I want to compare that to the experience of paid contributing. And there is really no one better to speak to about this than Marika Van de Racht.

Marieke van de Rakt:

I'm not the founder because, Yoast, my husband is really the founder, but I'm the founder of parts of the company, so the founder of Yoast Academy, for example, and I've been with the company for ages. During the pandemic we sold Yoast to Neufville Digital, and afterwards, I already indicated that I didn't want to be the CEO anymore. So, I'm now the Head of Strategy at Yoast.

Allie Nimmons:

For those of you who don't know, Yoast created Yoast SEO, which is an SEO plugin for WordPress, with 5 million active installations and 350 million downloads. To give you an idea of Yoast's relationship to the WordPress open-source system, in 2021, WordPress co-founder, Matt Mullenweg shared his annual State of the Word, and in that he shared that Yoast was the second largest supplier of paid contributors to the WordPress project.

Allie Nimmons:

Even though they had a fraction of the employees as a lot of other companies on that same list, they still blew them out of the water when it came to contributing. And 2021 wasn't the first year. They have been consistently at the top of this list when it comes to WordPress companies with a strong base of contributors. It's been something that the company has valued from the beginning.

Marieke van de Rakt:

Yoast, the person, founded Yoast, and he was contributing long before he ever made money out of plugins. So, I think he started his first WordPress site in 2006, and has been contributing ever since.

Allie Nimmons:

So, the pandemic. How did this affect the number of contributors on the Yoast team during lockdown?

Marieke van de Rakt:

I think the number went up during the pandemic, and I think the main reason why it went up is because we are a very in-house-oriented company. We were. And we noticed that during the pandemic everybody was working, well, from home. So, we noticed that worked really well, and that opened up a new market for us because then we could hire people that were not living in the Netherlands. So, we hired a lot of people during the pandemic.

Allie Nimmons:

More employees means more people contributing to WordPress for Yoast, plain and simple. One of WordPress's strongest assets is its global contribution team. So, the more global, the better. The pandemic helped the Yoast leadership team realize just how much they could expand and open up. Now, that remote work was so ubiquitous.

Allie Nimmons:

Paid WordPress contributors definitely have a leg up. They have the privilege of being able to contribute with direct compensation, they have a community of coworkers around them to help them get started, and they have a support system financially, emotionally, intellectually, especially at a company like Yoast.

Marieke van de Rakt:

So, just like you have contributed days at WordCamp Europe, we have those in our offices, and we also invite people that live in the Netherlands that can join us, but you can also join us online. So, some people like to contribute in a team from their own home but still with other people, and then that day is dedicated contributor day.

Allie Nimmons:

So, this is amazing. This is one of the reasons wifi for the future exists, to encourage companies to do exactly what Yoast is doing. But the fact of the matter is there are still people who are not lucky enough to work someplace where contributing is baked in. With that in mind, I did want the full picture. I was curious about whether or not the emotional toll of the pandemic was enough to supersede the benefits of contributing in such a supportive way. The short answer is, yes. And where does this take us back to? Events.

Marieke van de Rakt:

And I think, internally, for the people that are not in our core team, there has been a decrease in wanting to participate because you hire new people and you have to onboard those people into WordPress. But the only way to properly onboard them, in my opinion, is to bring them to a WordCamp and to let them really meet people and to let them understand why WordPress is so awesome.

Marieke van de Rakt:

And we try to do that internally, but that was hard. So, I do see that those contributor days we do at Yoast get a bit less attention because it's less fun. It's less fun, because if we do it in the office you'll get a nice lunch and everybody's excited, and that's just hard to get that atmosphere via Zoom and via Slack.

Allie Nimmons:

When I spoke with her, Marika had just come back from WordCamp Europe, which was the first big WordPress event in a very long time, well, two years, but it felt like an eternity. I wanted to see where her head was, what she was looking toward and what she was hoping for as far as the future of contributing. And I must say, personally, I quite agree with a lot of what she had to say.

Marieke van de Rakt:

More companies are going to really contribute to the Fight the Future Initiative, because up until now it really felt that there were only a few that participated, and that makes it just hard. And I think it would be a good thing if it's not just automatic and a bit of Yoast, and then some other small ones, but that we get the big host that make the most money out of WordPress to get involved as well. I hope that's the future.

Allie Nimmons:

I love that Marika said this. WordPress contributors don't just appear out of thin air. If they aren't being onboarded and coached by companies who have pledged time to Five for the Future, they may not find their way in at all. Before the pandemic, so many people found the community through WordPress events. That's how I did. But if we're thinking of future-proofing our open-source project, leaning on companies who depend on WordPress to bring in more contributors is the next best thing.

Allie Nimmons:

So, speaking of events, let's circle back. There have been numerous challenges to those events in the past two years as volunteers struggle to adapt to the experience online. Just like Marika said, the events are where its lifeblood of our community is. And this lack of physical events and lack of enthusiasm for virtual events seems to be a big reason for the dip in contributing.

David Bisset:

So, me and a few other meetup organizers, came up with the concept of what we call a "mega meetup".

Allie Nimmons:

That's David Bisset. He's been organizing WordPress meetups and WordCamps in Miami since 2008. David found a unique way to make the local virtual events space more engaging when folks were finding it difficult to engage.

David Bisset:

The goal was that we could all meet together virtually since we're not meeting together in-person, virtually would be easier, and we could share the load collectively in terms of finding speakers and topics to talk about. So, assuming that we had a topic, we had a speaker and we promoted it, we have had close to 200 people, maybe even a bit more on a mega meetup. The feedback we've gotten so far for the mega meetups for the most part has been very positive.

Allie Nimmons:

These virtual events had some pretty cool surprise benefits. Of course, a virtual event means the elimination of travel and those kinds of boundaries. You can invite whoever you wanted from wherever they happen to be. While so many people felt the stress of virtual calls, others found them more stimulating simply because they were able to meet people that they couldn't before.

David Bisset:

The results from this action means that we got people from the WordPress community from all over the world. So, we would have this thing in the beginning of the mega meetup that would allow people to see where they're from, they would announce it in the Zoom chat. And we would get responses a lot from the local area, but also areas of the meetups that we knew that we invited, but also get responses from other states in the US and other countries, sometimes literally on the other side of the planet. So, we're in South Florida, so we would get people from India, from South America, from Europe, Africa, a whole bunch of things.

Allie Nimmons:

There is somewhat of a pipeline that brings people from casual users to event attendees to, hopefully, contributors. The more contributors, the more things get done. So, how did the move to virtual affect people's relationship with creating and using WordPress software?

David Bisset:

I had someone tell me that thanks to seeing people from Taiwan on the meetup and the people from Taiwan giving comments, that these people, it helped them appreciate that the plugin they were developing or writing, they maybe should add some additional translations or features to make it easier to use just because they heard other WordPress people on the meetup from another country.

Allie Nimmons:

What kinds of effects in terms of challenges came to organizing within the pandemic experience?

David Bisset:

So, while there is a drop-off on our meetups, there's always the same core people that you see every time. Some of them only have one or two hours to spare a month just to be there sitting and listening. And as a volunteer and an organizer, I don't think we should ever take that for granted. That doesn't mean there weren't any challenges, however. I would probably say that virtual meetups, there is a struggle sometimes to some of the instructional experience, some tutorials and walkthroughs from speakers could be better in-person.

David Bisset:

But on a positive note, thanks to the virtual meetups, organizers are able to secure speakers that specialize in skills. So, the person that wrote this plugin or the person that's worked on WordPress Core, they can virtually speak to the meetup.

Allie Nimmons:

And moving forward, of all the challenges and all the things we've learned, having to take our contributing system and adapting it, how are things going to change? I don't know about you, but I don't have a crystal ball or anything. But David has some thoughts, based on his active involvement and observations, regarding how our community has worked and how it's working now.

David Bisset:

I've heard a lot from numerous people who share their opinion that contributions are in a bit of decline today, or at least of a need, because of the lack of in-person events. WordCamps probably were away, or at least a recruiting station for contributors, especially the large ones. We haven't had the same education that we now have today, two plus years afterwards, so in the beginning it was hard for people to go up that on-ramp when suddenly WordCamps ceased two exist for a while, meetups too.

David Bisset:

The growing complexity of certain aspects of WordPress also makes contributions sometimes a little difficult, especially in code, but ultimately, in-person events, I think, directly or indirectly drove more of the contributor wave than most people probably thought. Fortunately, some new WordPress developers and contributors have been seen in every release, but one has to wonder of projects like WP Notify, or up until recently, the Performance Enhancements team, that those things could be along much faster now or bigger if in-person events continued. So, it's something one has to think about at times.

David Bisset:

Hybrid events are probably the best experience in terms of accessibility, if one is able to do that. So, we did learn some lessons on that. And I know that we'll probably, even after events are starting up as they are now, I'm hearing from people both inside the tech space and in other adjacent markets, that conference attendance is still definitely not where it was pre-pandemic, at least for certain types of groups.

David Bisset:

So, I think we still have to wait a bit longer to start noticing positive events for in-person events anyway. And let's not lose what we've learned in the past couple of years too about diversity, growth, accessibility, and let's see moving forward if we can just be even a better version of ourselves than we were a couple of years ago.

Allie Nimmons:

The issue is definitely complex. We're talking about thousands of people here who come and go and return and leave all as they need to. I don't think any number of podcasts can fully unravel what COVID has done to our community. But like David told us, it definitely wasn't all bad. We've been seeking out ways to connect and find meaning, and they've been working.

Allie Nimmons:

In many ways, the pandemic has actually encouraged people to volunteer. It forced them to make changes, and sometimes even put themselves in situations where contributing was easier. My friend, Ian Svoboda is a great example of this. We met at a WordCamp in Florida in 2019. In 2017, Ian had tried to start contributing and found it very challenging. He even attended a contributor day at a WordCamp and didn't find much success getting started that way either.

Ian Svoboda:

It was very difficult. I found it to be very confusing to work with SBN and the Core track ticketing system and all that. Maybe it's just me, but I did not find that stuff easy to understand at all. Maybe I'd just been spoiled by slightly more modern tech or something, but it just felt really, "Man, I'd love to, but I'm not really sure how," because every time I've ever tried, I've always felt roadblocks for literally making a contribution, let alone what, and so on.

Ian Svoboda:

And it's difficult too trying to put a lot of energy and effort into a ticket that you don't actually care about and it's a first time contributor ticket, so you know it doesn't really matter very much either. So, there's a whole pile of reasons why it didn't really go down, but it had been difficult even in the best of circumstances.

Allie Nimmons:

I could do a whole episode just about how difficult it currently is to start contributing. It's not the focus of today. Ian's job at the start of the pandemic wasn't necessarily his dream job. And with the added stress and anxiety that came with surviving a global pandemic, Ian started to realize there were so many other opportunities he could pursue that paid better and added less stress to his life.

Allie Nimmons:

So, when his job started talking about going back to the office, he started checking out job listings elsewhere. That search led him to a managerial role at TenUp, and I'll let him tell you the rest.

Ian Svoboda:

Doing open-source work wasn't necessarily part of the stated job responsibilities, because we actually do employee people. Up until recently, Helen [LuSandai 00:36:20], who's one of the WordPress lead developers, or what have you, she's been employed. She was the first employee tenant, been there for a while. That was her job was mostly do stuff like that, or some of these other people.

Ian Svoboda:

So, for the rest of us, it's more just as time permits, and if you have the capacity to do that sort of thing, then that's always on the table since we as a company maintain a lot of open-source projects. Through necessity and having to stay where I was in that job and then having to work remotely, it led me down the path to learn certain things that I think ultimately made it easier on my personal journey as a developer to arrive at the right spot.

Ian Svoboda:

Because the Core Contribution I ended up ultimately making was of course for Gutenberg, which is itself a separate project that is included in the Core of WordPress. But the only reason why I found out about the issue at all was because I was working there and I was going through training that the company provided. And I think that if it hadn't been for that, I don't think that I would have proactively looked for another opportunity to try to figure it out again just because it had been such a disaster the first few times and it felt so out of reach.

Ian Svoboda:

And there's just so much stuff going on in the world of development, there's always a new thing to learn and whatever. Realizing during the pandemic just how valuable programming labor is, is the thing that ultimately inspired me to actually get a new job which would allow me to have the time on the clock, so to speak, as well as the lower stress requisite to find the energy to do that.

Allie Nimmons:

So, we have companies like TenUp and Yoast that are clearing the way for contributors to make the impacts they want to make. What about those who are not fortunate enough to work at one of these companies? I asked Ian to provide us with a few words of wisdom for folks who would like to contribute but who are struggling right now.

Ian Svoboda:

The thing that is going to help it all feel understandable and a bit less like a mountain, and I want to be very clear that I had this as well, is networking and having the support of other people. I'm fortunate enough to work at a place where there are other people that do Core Contribution, and there are folks who have experience who can like look at it and say, "Yeah, you might wanna make sure when you write this up you cover these points," and so on.

Ian Svoboda:

And it's not like they had to completely write a book for me or anything, but they gave me a couple little tips for success there. And even though a lot of it was the type of stuff that I would flag under it's pretty intuitive, like most people would, "Well, that makes sense."

Ian Svoboda:

But just hearing a person who had done it successfully before tell me that was really big for me, because it established my own personal confidence that what my instincts were actually not too far off. I'm actually doing what these people were suggesting, "Just maybe in this little area, change this up," or whatever. So, that was big. So, maybe look for somebody that you know that has done any kind of Core Contribution or any other even similar stuff, and maybe just ask them.

Allie Nimmons:

We've chatted to a lot of people within this episode. And I wanted to save one of the most eagle-eyed perspectives for last. This is Josepha. She's the Executive Director of the WordPress open-source project. I asked her some questions about how contributions were affected, and she really cemented some of the ideas that we've already touched on. I'm going to let her do a lot of the talking in this area. So, first, here's her speaking on the extent to which we were able to react to the events of the pandemic.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

And this really put all of our philosophies and tools and the systems through their paces, I think. So, yeah, we saw a bit of a decrease in 2021, we're starting to see people come back to it in 2022, and it fluctuates as we go, and hopefully it continues to rise as we get back to in-person events.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

But I mentioned at WordCamp Europe that there was something of a disaster-recovery plan already in existence for, in the event we lose our event series, what can we do to replace all of the things that happened there and all of the connections that happened there?

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

And there were a couple of things that we hadn't figured out by the time that we suddenly were confronted with this. And I think that we still haven't quite figured them out. I said it boldly on the stage there, the recruitment part is hard, especially of underrepresented folks in the space.

Allie Nimmons:

She also talked to me a little more about the limitations of contributor onboarding and the challenge of bringing on people with the right prerequisite knowledge.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

I think it's clear to all of us that onboarding contributors fully offline is one of the hardest things that we have encountered. And we felt we were pretty good at it in pre-COVID times. And we were, but it was because most of the time, the moment where you decide to onboard to your team in the community space on make.wordpress.org is three or four steps into your overall research process of wanting to get involved with WordPress.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

And all of the information is out there, it all exists, but the work to get people from, "I've never heard of this WordPress thing before," to, "And now I'm ready to show up and work in Core," the ability for someone who is new to find those things, not as easy. We don't have a good sorting hat mechanism available to everyone.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

I think that particular part of it, we never did solve. And it's not to say that we don't have new contributors showing up for us here. We have some new contributors. And they are showing up boldly and working with care in open-source, which is always an excellent thing.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

But I have found that some of the 21st century skills that you can learn in WordPress, by merit of it being a distributed open-source ecosystem, don't, right now, match the things that we expected people to have already learned by being in a classroom together or by being in an office together. Some of the 21st Century skills required to do this have started to not be as readily available, by no fault of WordPress.

Allie Nimmons:

I asked her to speak a bit about the topic of paid versus unpaid contributors. It's a super complicated and nuanced topic that Josepha dove into beautifully. And a lot of it comes down to what kind of work each type of contributor is asked to do.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

You don't ever want to get to a point where you have so many sponsored contributors that you lose the ability to hear your self-sponsored contributors or your users or whatever it is. And it's complicated, because also, I believe that open-source maintainers should be paid.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

We have so much of what we rely on, especially right now in the middle of people still semi locked down, so much of what people rely on to connect with each other or just run their daily lives or have any income whatsoever relies on this 1% of 1% of people who are able to give back to the open-source projects and languages that create the web that we have and that we all benefit from.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

Pre-COVID times, pre-pandemic, I always tried to make sure that what we had was a balance of one third of corporately sponsored contributors compared to about two thirds who were not, which I felt gave a pretty workable balance of the right type and right flow of information that sponsored contributors needed in order to do what I consider janitorial work of working in open-source.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

Things that I would never ask volunteers to do or things that enable volunteers to show up with the 100% of time that they're able to give, which is four hours a week, four hours a month, however it is that they are doing that, and they don't have to load all of the things into their mind and then figure out what the best first step is, and then also have to figure out how to accomplish the first step, because that takes up the full four hours of that.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

If what you're looking at is just a two-year look-back window of who is contributing now, of course we're going to see fewer self-sponsored folks, and I think that's appropriate.

Allie Nimmons:

And finally, I've mentioned Five for the Future a couple of times in this episode. So, Josepha broke down a little more of the aspirational mindset behind this initiative, how it serves us, and how it can refactor how we look at contributing when contributing is hardest.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

I understand that giving back 100% of the 5% you have available of your resources is a much bigger burden than looking at your available resources, identifying what the 5% would be, and just giving us 1% of that 5%. I understand that someone, any contributor giving a 100% of the possible time to the project is always more valuable because it's more painful than people who are giving back a small fraction of their available time.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

So, that 5% is aspirational. We will not hold anyone to. "Please show me your receipts for what you made last year and what you gave to WordPress." It's not that cut and dry. And on the same token that we were talking about before, when you look at the pros and cons of that, when you do know that someone is sponsored by a company and 40 hours a week can go to WordPress, then you know that that's not the right person to compare yourself to, but when we label those people, then it puts them aside as this other group that can't be touched, which is not good either.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy:

There's no good way, as far as I can tell, for us to identify how to help people see their contributions are on the maintenance and janitorial work of WordPress, and we're labeling it as such so you don't think that you have to give 40 hours a week without also making it look like those are the people that maintain WordPress and your stuff is nice too. I haven't found a way to make that clear and tidy.

Allie Nimmons:

So, I'm going to turn all this around from the macro to the micro view. Let's check in with Allyson one last time. While the pandemic hit Brazil hard, and while Allyson's mental and physical health took a toll, the way he thinks about contributing to WordPress is not only still optimistic and insightful, but now a little more critical. He's thinking big picture now.

Allyson Souza:

The pandemic helped me to evolve my vision about free software and the WordPress project especially. I would definitely like to dedicate some time to community, but probably in a more critical way. Being involved for years helps us understand our position in the community. Most of our efforts is to events and translations, but what about the other parts, code, design documentation? How many South Americans are working in those areas?

Allyson Souza:

I would love to dedicate more time to the community, but we are still in the pandemic, and the current economic scenario is not good. And I think to improve our involvement in the community is not a matter of personal or individual efforts, we need companies to help us with this process.

Allie Nimmons:

So, we don't have all the answers, obviously. But what we can come away with is the importance of two huge things: events, and Five for the Future. I think those are two of our strongest pipelines right now to get people active and to keep WordPress maintained for the millions of people who use it.

Allie Nimmons:

Currently less than 1% of the people who use WordPress work to maintain it. It definitely needs to change. And given how we've weathered and begun to recover from the pandemic, it is possible. Before I leave you, I want to go back to those five reasons that people contribute or volunteer. Values, community concern, esteem enhancement, understanding, and personal development.

Allie Nimmons:

If you're listening and you feel that WordPress supports your values, if you like the idea of giving back into the community that you use, if you don't mind a boost to your self-esteem, if you're someone who enjoys learning, and if you think that you could benefit from joining something bigger than you, you should probably contribute. You can do so by going to make.wordpress.org, pick a team that sounds fun, and hop into a weekly meeting. It might be challenging, but it will be worth it.

Allie Nimmons:

This episode has been written and hosted by me, Allie Nimmons. A huge special thank you to David Spinks, Andrea Middleton, David Wolfpaw, and all the guests who volunteered their time on this episode.

Monet Davenport:

Thank you for listening to this episode. Press The Issue is a production of MasterWP. It was produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted and mixed by Monet Davenport, and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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As the pandemic moved in, in-person events moved out. As a result, WordPress meetups became 100% virtual, for better or for worse. As things go back to normal, are virtual meetups here to stay? Today Teron Bullock and Nyasha Green are here to figure it out.

This podcast was sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. Create a course with LearnDash. Visit LearnDash.com.

Episode Transcript:

Monet Davenport: As the pandemic moved, in person events moved out. As a result, WordPress meetups became 100% virtual, for better or for worse. As things go back to normal are virtual meetups here stay? Today Teron Bullock and Nyasha Green are here to figure it out.

Teron Bullock: So how are you doing today Nyasha?

Nyasha Green: I'm doing well, Teron. How are you?

Teron Bullock: I'm awesome. I know today we have an exciting episode. We're going speak to meetups and how do we feel the future of meetups will be? And I just think it'll be an exciting conversation to have.

Nyasha Green: Yeah, I'm very excited.

Teron Bullock: So let's jump right into it. With the world getting into post pandemic phase, at least we hope. I'm pretty sure however the CDC and the world decides to handle COVID, it might be something that is here to stay, but we also have to figure out a way to continue to live life around it. And one of those things that we have to also think about is meetups. And during the pandemic meetups switched from being in person to being virtual. And now that we're in this era of figuring out how to live with the world being different now, how do we handle conferences going forward? Will the virtual conference be here to stay, or will we transition back into in person meetups?

Nyasha Green: I think that's going to have a two part answer for me. Because I want to say, just answering that question is, should we go back to completely in person events? I think at some point, yes. But I think there always should be the option to have a virtual component of it. And the reason I think that is because COVID is a very unfortunate thing that's happened to the world, just the devastation, the loss. It's been a lot on everyone all over the world. One of the things it's brought out though is how much more accessible things are when we can do them virtually, whether that be tech conferences, working from home, meetups. So will companies want to go back to in person? I think of course they will. Will all lot do that? I think so as well. Should everybody go back and it just be no virtual conferences and just a hundred percent meetups? No, I don't think so. But I think that virtual conferences and meetups have worked so well that I think they're always going to be an option now, just seeing the sheer success of them. I think companies have noticed that and that they're going to work hard to make sure there's some type of virtual component to it going forward.

Teron Bullock: And I happen to agree. I think that the virtual component to a meetup is very beneficial. Going to meetups in person, while I think that's also very beneficial, seeing somebody in person you can never replace that in person feeling. But I also think that, like you said, accessibility regardless of if it's financial or maybe it's location based. I just think that the virtual component is very necessary and it's definitely something that should continue moving forward. I think we need to figure out a way to host it both in person and still include that virtual side of things.

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm.

Teron Bullock: So I know that there were a lot of newbies who entered into this space as well during the pandemic. Like somebody in New York who's a newbie and really is excited about a meetup that's happening in LA, they wouldn't be able to benefit from that meetup or that information if we didn't include and keep these particular components. So I know that you deal with new people that's entering the tech space, and thinking about a meetup can be a daunting task for somebody who may be an introvert into a public space and meet with different people. They could benefit also from the virtual side of these meetups. And I was wondering if you could speak to some of the benefits that a person like that can gain from these type of meetups.

Nyasha Green: Yeah. So a few things that newbies can definitely get from these meetups. One, networking. They have a chance to actually meet people who are in the field and possibly in the specific field that they want to go into in tech. So that's just right there a way to get more information on your potential future job. And also maybe to actually get into a networking relationship where you can actually maybe get an interview somewhere, have a reference, maybe get an internship or find some freelance work. Also the tech world can be a little overwhelming at times, and having someone who's in there who's already been through what you've pretty much gone through, that helps give newbies focus. So instead of today saying I want to learn the newest JavaScript framework, and then the next day saying they want to learn Scrum, and then the next day saying they want to learn Salesforce, they can have someone to kind of guide them. That's been a lot of what I've been doing meeting up with these newbies. Like, "Hey don't get stuck in tutorial hill. You need a solid roadmap". And they can find that in people at these conferences, it's just a whole host of opportunities for newbies in tech and I think they benefit the most. Of course we, as existing developers, we benefit from these conferences, but I just think that the newbies benefit the most.

Teron Bullock: That reminds me of an experience that I've had. I've only been to one meetup, which we'll speak about, but I've been joining a lot of these Twitter Spaces. Which I guess you could look at as virtual meetups themselves. And while I feel like the newbies definitely benefited from that Twitter Space, I walked away feeling like I've benefited as well. So the situation was a gentleman was just really stuck, like you said, he was going through these tutorials. And as long as he was dealing with the tutorial he was fine, as most of us are. Tutorials are pretty much on-rails learning. You can't really go wrong as long as you follow them because they're taking care of this one use case and they've already given you all the answers. So things seem wonderful while you're on the tutorial. But then once he stepped away from the tutorial and said, "Hey, I want to build a project". He just got stuck in thinking about how hard it was to get to the next step. Like, "Okay. I know what I want to build, but I don't know where to go from here". And so he would just stop. And having heard that I thought about some of the lessons that I had learned when I first started.

Teron Bullock: And one of the biggest things that I benefited from was I was told, "Just write out the comments". And so anytime I start a task, even if I'm not sure of everything, I started with "Step one: what do you do?". And I'll write it in the comments. And literally with number one, step two, step three. And I told them if you could write out steps, then you can just fill in the blank. Right? I may not know how to do step four, but if I could do step one and step two, that's already a bit of code that's already there. I could do step five, now just got to step back and figure out how to do three and four. And it seems like I could literally see the light bulb go off while we were on the virtual page, because he was like, "Oh wow!". And immediately he just started thinking about how he can handle that process. I walked away feeling great about that experience because I was able to help somebody break through something. I know he may have benefited the most, but I also benefited from that experience.

Nyasha Green: Yeah. And that's a great feeling. There's a lot of people like us. We just naturally, when we know we've gotten through to someone or helped someone, you can see it on us as well. The happiness and just the "wow", the good feeling. So that's another very, very important benefit.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. Absolutely. So why do you think that people who are new to the space avoid going to meetups?

Nyasha Green: I think the big boogieman right now with people avoiding spaces is COVID right now. We're pretty much ignoring COVID at the moment, even though it's still here. But I mean to a lot of people, myself included, I've not been to any in person meetups since before COVID. We still take it very seriously. We don't want to get sick. I am frequently visiting my family who are older members and we just had a newborn baby. And it's just people I don't want to risk giving COVID to. So COVID is a big one right now. And with that, the second biggest one to me would be accessibility. We've talked a little bit about that, about how much more accessible these conferences and meetups have been since they've been virtually, because you can basically participate from wherever you're at.

Nyasha Green: And that leads into other things like finances. Some of these conferences are really expensive, and even if they're free or not as expensive they may be miles and miles away from where we are. I don't live in a tech city. I have to go an hour and a half or two to three hours to another city just to participate in big tech meetups. We have local events, but they're not on the scale of others. So there's finances, there's distance, there's COVID, there's accessibility.

Nyasha Green: And then there's going to conferences or meetups and then there's just not that acceptance to newbies. We talked a little bit about Decode and how they really were accepting to newbies, and they explained everything in a way that even experienced developers could relate to, comprehend, and digest. And you just don't see that at a lot of meetups these days. Even if the focus is on we want more people to meet up with us, we want newer people, we want new faces. But when you get there it's the opposite. Or in your experience, if you want to talk a little bit about it? I know that you went to your meet up and they had to kind of talk to you about it because they had questionable people trying to enter in. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. I will not mention any names. So I went to my first meetup and it was an interesting experience in the beginning because the first question I got was, "Are you a troll?". And I was thinking, "Is this how all meetups are handled?". And they explained to me that for some reason that there were a lot of people who were joining the meetup just to troll. And I couldn't figure it out. I said, "Really? You're going to join the tech meetup just to troll?'. But I guess to each their own. I don't get it, but what I will say is that once that initial response was given they were wonderful. I enjoyed [inaudible 00:12:32]. The funny thing is that I literally joined a meetup about a topic that... I mean it was WordPress, but I was unaware of what the actual meetup would've been about. I just said, "I want to jump into the water. I don't want to dip a toe in there, I just want to jump right in". So I just found the first meetup and I said, "I'm going. I'm going to meet people who are in this space. And I'm just going to put myself out there". And like I said, they were really wonderful. And just to speak to networking, a lot of the people that I met at that meetup our company wound up having connections with, we wound up building connections with afterwards.

Teron Bullock: So it was just so interesting how that works. And it wasn't planned or anything, it just happened organically. I just think that my experience I hope is not as uncommon as it sounds. Since I've only been to one, I've had that feeling like you said where you go there and you feel kind of excluded. I felt very included. So I will be going to more, and I just hope that I gain that same feeling I had from the first one.

Nyasha Green: Yeah. And I'm so glad you had that great experience and just built not only wonderful personal connections, but company connections as well. I think that has been so awesome. I think with conversations like this that we're starting, I think that people are going to be a little bit more aware of how more accepting they can be. Because sometimes, to be honest, it's not intentional. It's just the way things are, and it's just the way that people are. Sometimes they just need a little push in the right direction, or they need something that gives them self reflection. And I think these conversations are going to be something that starts that, because someone might listen to this and say, "Hey, you know what I have been doing that. I've been starting these meetups and it's just been the guys from work and people they know. What can I do to go out into the community and get some of this new blood into these meetups? How can we be more diverse? How can we just make this bigger for our community?". So I'm optimistic.

Teron Bullock: I like the approach of, like I said, the Twitter Space as a meetup. I think that would lean towards more acceptance and inclusiveness as well, just by sheer nature of it being on Twitter. It's a lot easier to invite other people. Or even when you jump onto Twitter at the very top, the way they did it's like, "Hey, a lot of people that I'm following are in this particular Twitter Space. Let me go see what they're listening to". It creates a more social environment and I'm glad that they added that feature. I think it's awesome. I think it will help the tech scene. Because like I said, I've only been to one actual meetup, but I've been to several tech Twitter Spaces. And it seems to be all the rage. I think every week I've been to one or two, at least. And everybody, maybe just because they're new developers, but it seems like everybody is willing to share. Everybody is accepting of one another. And maybe it doesn't hurt the fact that you have to ask to speak, you know?

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Teron Bullock: So I'm not sure, but I just think it's a good format and I hope that more people decide to use that avenue as well.

Nyasha Green: I agree.

Teron Bullock: My first Twitter Space was your Twitter Space.

Nyasha Green: Oh really? Yeah.

Teron Bullock: And I'll admit I'm not on Twitter that much. And I happened to just jump on it. I think probably I jumped on because Rob had said, "MasterWP is live" or something like that. And I was like, "Oh, I got to go tweet about it". And when I jumped on, I saw you at the top of my screen in a Twitter Space. And I was like, "What's that?". And so I was like, "All right, this is cool". Because you think Instagram is just really pictures or video. Facebook, whatever that's become, because I'm not on Facebook anymore. And Twitter was always just a place where you got your, what is it 128 characters or whatever it is now? And that's it. But I'm hearing audio, people are interacting. I'm like, "Wait a minute. This is my space right here. I could do this".

Nyasha Green: Oh Myspace.

Teron Bullock: Well, that's funny you said that.

Nyasha Green: Oh, my space. Not myspace.com. Gosh. I was like, "Oh yeah, I love myspace.com".

Teron Bullock: Yeah. So like I said, once I saw that... And then the funny thing is, I think I told you this, but I was in a noisy area. Like I said, I just jumped on just to retweet something real quick and I got hooked in. I'm like, "All right. Now I got to listen". And when you was like, "Hey, join and talk". I was like, "This is not going to happen right now".

Nyasha Green: Yeah. I absolutely loved. And that's the only one I've done. I'll appear on the other Spaces every week. I get begged every week to do one. I want to do a recurring one, but my life outside of work it changes week to week. Like I have a strict work schedule, but my life I like to be as carefree and flexible as possible. So I just can't get on the schedule where I can do it weekly, but that's something I'm working on in the future. I think Twitter Spaces are amazing. Even though that's my professional account, I can kind of just be more raw and unfiltered as I was in mine. And I really like that as well, because when I talk to my newbies I am raw and unfiltered and I tell them what they need to know. And I think I don't water down anything. And if they ask me something, if I know it I will tell them the answer. I don't hold back. And I think Twitter Spaces gives us an opportunity to do that because a lot of us need that.

Nyasha Green: And a lot of us come from different places where... Not different places, but some of us are culturally different and there's nothing wrong with that. And sometimes it feels good to talk to someone else who's like you, in that culture, to help you adapt to tech. Because we talk about how tech is mostly white male, upper class, and it's a circle and it's an echo chamber. And there are things that I might need to talk to other black women about or black men about that they probably won't be able to hear in those echo chambers because it's culturally different. And that's another issue, diversity problems in the pipeline and echo chambers and gatekeeping. So those are all separate issues that we could talk about separately. But I think Twitter Spaces, like you said, it's a way where everybody can come. I talk to people all over the world and we can all talk and listen to each other, raise our hands to speak. And it is just wonderful. And I really, really, really, really wish more platforms would adopt that. We could do so much with that technology.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. And to piggyback off what you just said, I think that, at least in my mind, I feel like that's old tech. You know how they say old money and new money?

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm.

Teron Bullock: That's old tech. And I feel like the new wave of tech, especially with the conversations that we have here on the podcast as well as MasterWP, I just feel like we're opening up the door for that new tech. Where everybody has a voice, everybody's able to hear one another. And we can have a difference of opinion and still have a conversation. I think some of the best conversations is where we don't agree, but we have enough respect for one another that we're willing to listen. And I think in this day and age, not to get so political, but I think one of the bigger problems that we have is that we've all shut down our ability to listen. We all want to talk, nobody wants to listen. And I think that, like I said, with our conversations that we're opening up, we're willing to listen. There are plenty of articles that went out and people have had a difference of opinion and they made it loud and clear, and we've listened to each and every one of them.

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Teron Bullock: So I just think that leaving that room open we're ushering the new wave of tech, new tech. Because Twitter Spaces or meetups, like you said, the importance of having a culture that you can identify with is important in all aspects, not just tech. I think that culture that we're creating is the culture of tech. We have this one thing that we're all passionate about and we may just be passionate about it in different ways, or have different upbringings, or different values, but we all agree that WordPress is awesome. So I just think it's a good start. And I enjoyed this conversation, which like I said is ushering... I'm just going to keep using that word until it rings in. I don't know if I'm branding or what, but I think this new tech is going to be a philosophy that we all can kind of get behind.

Teron Bullock: What was your first meetup, if you remember, and what was your experience like?

Nyasha Green: My first meetup was a Google developer conference that was local to where I'm located. And there was a hackathon where these people were creating an app, it was a dating app, and it would make you compatible with others based on your food type. So they were doing that, and while they were I got to go around and talk to different people about different things in tech, like accessibility, security, just a little bit of WordPress. And it was wonderful. It was actually where I met my first mentor, Kenneth Elliot. And we were just talking because I was at the sticker table just taking all the free merch. I think I was taking so much and he was just kind of looking at me like, "What is she doing?". And I'm like, "Oh, I love stickers". And we just busted out laughing and we just started talking and we are close to this day. He mentored me, he helped me get into WordPress, he helped me get my first internship in WordPress, and we talk every week. So it was just a great, great, great experience. I met so many people that I still talk to, and it just opened my eyes to conferences. And up until COVID I went to every one I could. Every one.

Teron Bullock: So I have to ask you, why was it a dating app? Who came up with that idea and why?

Nyasha Green: Oh, I have no idea. I don't know why, but it was pretty hilarious. And I had heard of hackathons, because this was when I was still learning how to code, but I had no idea what they were. So just having that silly concept and just seeing these people just sit there and work at it, and then seeing the finished. It made me so much more invested in tech. I wish more people would go to these while they're learning, because to me it's more motivation to learn. You actually can see what you're doing or what you will be able to do with those skills. So mine just solidified in my mind that I knew I was on the right path, and once I was able to get those skills that I knew I was going to be able to succeed. Even if I wanted to do a dating app based on food. That was just the best. That was so hilarious to me. But yeah, it's just such a good motivation and you meet so many good people. And you never know, that opportunity changed my life. So you never know what opportunity is waiting for you at these meetups as well.

Teron Bullock: It's been great having a conversation with you about meetups and the different type of meetups and what we can look forward to in the future. So thank you for joining me and I can't wait to talk to you about other topics.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press The Issue is a production of MasterWP. It was produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted and mixed by Monét Davenport, and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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The DeCode 2022 conference just passed and it was nothing short of amazing. In this episode, Nyasha Green shares all the things she really loved about this virtual developer conference hosted with WP Engine.

Check out the original article here: https://masterwp.com/decode-2022-is-how-you-put-on-a-tech-conference/

This podcast was sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. Create a course with LearnDash. Visit LearnDash.com.

Episode Transcript:

Monet Davenport: Welcome to Press The Issue, a podcast for Master WP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show at masterwp.com/presstheissue. The DE{CODE} 2022 Conference just passed, and it was nothing short of amazing. In this episode, Nyasha Green shares all the things she really loved about this virtual developer conference hosted with WP Engine.

Teron Bullock: How's it going, Nyasha?

Nyasha Green: Hey, it's going well. How are you doing today?

Teron Bullock: I'm well. So I know today we're going to talk about The DE{CODE} Conference. And you attended as well as writing an article, so that's going to be pretty exciting.

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Teron Bullock: So for anybody that's listening that is not familiar with DE{CODE}, can you explain what it is?

Nyasha Green: Yes. So DE{CODE} is a tech conference that the people behind WP Engine put on. And it was the first time having it in a little while due to COVID, and it was completely virtual. So they talked about all things WordPress, they had it in different time zones so it could reach the maximum amount of people. And they talked about the present, the past, and the future of WordPress in terms of updates, where we were in WordPress, where we are now, and where we're going. And it was just an excellent conference in terms of just the talks they had, the information they shared, the entertainment. They had a live DJ to keep people interested in what was going on. And then they just were so accepting of different sides of how people felt about the community. So it was really, really great to be a part of it, and it was just a very, very wonderful experience.

Teron Bullock: I was able to tune in for the last maybe hour and a half to two hours. And from what I could see, it definitely was very entertaining. It was definitely something that I wish that I would see more in the universe, if I could say it that way. The conference to me, like I said having tuned in late, was spectacular. I loved it. I loved every minute of it. The DJ was, he definitely brought a different side to the conference that I've never seen before because a lot of times you go to... You watch these conferences or even if you go to them, let's be honest, we want the information, but it's kind of boring.

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Teron Bullock: But the DJ was dancing. Even the DJ, I expect him just to play one record or play another, he's dancing. And it was just very entertaining.

Nyasha Green: Yeah, it definitely kept people's attention. Normally when you go to an in-person conference you have outside rooms where you can kind of talk to people network, or you can kind of wonder outside. You pretty much got to find your own energy and find your own things to do in between conferences or in between panels. But it's like they understood we all would be home or working from a specific place.

Nyasha Green: So the DJ just was the life of it, and kept bringing energy back to us. We would sit there and listen to this information. And then instead of just piling on more and more information and maybe making people lose focus of what was going on, they had that DJ in between panels to get the party back up, and then a hour break, and then good music, good energy, good vibes. And it was just a great, great situation all the way around.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. Piggybacking off of something that you had just mentioned, you said, "When we normally attend in person conferences, we can go outside or remove ourselves just a little bit in order to network." And I know that they had a tool in this conference that could be used in the same way, which was the chats. Would you like to speak on your experience with the chat?

Nyasha Green: Yeah, so the chats were really good. While they had panels, they had chats where you could... Just a general chat. Well, they had a main chat and then they had smaller chats, where you could talk about what was going on in the panel. They weren't taking questions in most of the panels, but it's just a way to talk to other people. And they actually had other people in the chats that could answer some questions. Maybe not the speaker specifically, but other people, I believe, that were working at the conference.

Nyasha Green: So that was great. You were able to meet people from all over the world. It was just a very excellent networking opportunity. And at the end of the conference, they just had a big networking event where everyone could talk to each other. I could not catch that part, but if it was anything like what was going on at the beginning, I don't doubt that people were able to make a lot of good connections. And that was very beneficial to a lot of the people I'm mentoring because I told them, "Hey come on, check out this conference. Take a look."

Nyasha Green: And they're trying to build those connections because they're trying to get a job. They're trying to get that first tech job. And as we all know, and what we've talked about a lot at Master WP is, unfortunately it's sometimes who you know, not what you know, so the chats were just a wonderful networking opportunity and a chance to connect with some of the best minds in WordPress.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. I know they broke us out into different rooms. I don't recall if you had said that, but there were different rooms that you would go in to hear about different topics. And the room that I was in, the chat was on fire. It was surreal because on one hand you have the conversation that is going on about the topic, but then in the chat, they were having almost a different conversation, but about the topic itself. And it's like, you just never know where the chat will go.

Teron Bullock: And I kind of like that experience. It almost reminds me of going to a theater. At least, in my neighborhood, you can go to a movie theater and just somebody would say something at the screen and it's just at the right time. I love those experiences when it comes to movies. I'm not a person that wants to sit in the movie and be quiet. I think the energy of the theater is just as important as going to see the movie.

Teron Bullock:

And that's how I felt the chat was, is like it was on point. It was on target with the message, but it was just its own thing. And there were certain things that weren't being covered, or maybe something was said and the person didn't understand exactly what that topic was about, and so they went into more detail and the chat. And I just thought the chat was very beneficial.

Nyasha Green: Yeah, I agree. I definitely agree.

Teron Bullock: So as far as the way that they handled this conference, would you think that this is now a challenge that might be brought up compared to the rest of the WordPress community? Should this be the standard? Did they raise the bar on what conferences should be like?

Nyasha Green: Yes, they definitely did. Especially in the time of COVID, just going through the last... The last few years have been hard on everyone, and I don't want to diminish what any of these organizers or organizations are going through. They are, in my opinion, still doing a phenomenal job with everything that's stacked against them. So I want to say that first and foremost, I think no matter what, for you to put on and, or to organize a conference right now with everything going on, I think that takes a lot and you deserve your props for it definitely.

Nyasha Green: However, DE{CODE} really, really, really set a high standard. First of all, they made it completely virtual. I know we're all pretending like COVID has gone away, but it's still here, and it's still affecting us. And by them making it completely virtual outside of COVID, they made it very accessible. Before COVID, during COVID, and after COVID, we're going to have people in our community that want to participate in these type of conferences, but they can't. Whether it be because of money, because of ability or disability, accessibility, first step is making it virtual.

Nyasha Green: Making it virtual, opening the doors for a lot of people. And not just people already in the community, again, newbies. A lot of my newbies were able to join this conference because another great thing about it was, it was recorded. It was recorded and all of the panels were put up. So people could go to them and digest them in their own way. I have a few people who told me, they were like, "I just cannot sit there and listen to someone speak. I won't retain the information. I won't digest it. It just will go out my other ear, or I won't be able to focus. I just can't do it."

Nyasha Green: And when I told them it'll be recorded, you can stop it and you can come back to it whenever you like, they were so ecstatic. It's people who would've never checked it out. They would've never gotten this good information if it wasn't for the work they put in to make it accessible, to make it easily picked up or paused or just made it easy for people to get to. And we don't see that as... We have the technology. We're not seeing that at a lot of conferences these days, but DE{CODE} didn't care. They didn't care at all. They definitely set a high standard. They're just doing amazing, and WP Engine is amazing.

Teron Bullock: I would definitely agree. I think that one of the biggest benefits to DE{CODE} was the fact that they have the recordings so that you can go back to them. Not just for anybody who may have missed it, but sometimes you need to repeat the things that you have learned, to hear more than once in order for you to retain it, or even to take notes from it. And just the fact that you can go back later, to me, it speaks to their attention to detail, as far as making sure that they make their information accessible to the community at large. And so I commend them and I also think that the bar has been raised. Anybody who's trying to hold a conference now, just know we've already experienced DE{CODE} and we're paying attention.

Nyasha Green: We definitely are.

Teron Bullock: What was the one thing you would say stood out to you the most about the conference?

Nyasha Green: The one thing that stood out to me the most would be how accepting the conference was to newbies and to new people, to the WordPress community. Brian Garners, he's a principal developer at WP Engine, his talk was basically on the past, present, and future of WordPress and how the updates affected and changed WordPress and where they were going. And he started off the conference, not talking like "Okay, you guys have been in the community a long time. You guys know who we are. You know what this is. This is what we're doing."

Nyasha Green: It was more so like, "Hey, I'll, explain who I am, who I work for, what we do, what WordPress is." It's a WordPress conference, but still I'm sure he was like, "Hey, there might be people who are tuning in who don't know."I feel like a lot of us bypass that when we're speaking on the WordPress community. Even if you think you're speaking to a group of people who should know everything, you don't know that, but he was very open with everything. He explained WordPress, the origins, where it's going. He explained the naming patterns, which we talked about.

Nyasha Green: I had no idea that the updates were named after jazz musicians. I just thought that was a coincidence, so that was very interesting to learn. And I've been in the WordPress community for years. It was just something I didn't pay attention to. So even me being someone who's not a newbie to the community, I was able to learn by him just taking the time to go slow and explain. And my newbies who did jump into the chats are as well, they were blown away. They were like, "No one's ever broken it down like this for me."

Nyasha Green: And that wasn't his... I won't say that wasn't his goal. I'm not sure if that was, but he was just talking about WordPress in general. I don't know if he knew he would enlighten so many people to it. And that was just the biggest takeaway. That's how you get more people into the community. You talk to them, you explain to them, you teach them, you're patient with them. And you're calm, relaxed and cool. And that's what he was. And that talk was just amazing to me.

Teron Bullock: That's awesome, and I just learned something new myself, because having been in the community for a while as well, I never realized that.

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Teron Bullock: So that's something I will definitely look forward to now looking for the next release, I will look forward to who's it going to be named after this time? So why do you think that approach is so important for conferences to take for the new developer to slow, I guess, the pace down and not treat anyone as if this information should already be understood?

Nyasha Green: Yeah. Well, Rob and I talked a little bit about that, about how in our community, we have people who think you should already know a certain amount of WordPress knowledge before we let you into the community. It's been explained to me, and I've also seen that most WordPress jobs, you have to have already been in WordPress to get. So where are these people getting this entry level or beginner's WordPress knowledge? Where are they learning about WordPress? It's like there's these barriers up, you must already know so when people come to learn, they're like, "Why would I learn this? If they're making it this hard, why do I want to get into this community?"

Nyasha Green: So I think it was very important because these newbies and even someone like myself, I haven't been in it for a long time, but I'm not new either, but I felt so much more enlightened on the WordPress systems and how it works in the future of it. I felt so much more optimistic listening to Brian. And outside of a few things, it wasn't that much new information, it was just the way he conveyed it. And I think that's very beneficial to the future. We're telling these people, "Hey don't worry if you don't know everything, we are here for you." And I am a WordPress developer, so I try to convince more people to get into the community.

Nyasha Green: And this has probably been the best way. Everyone who went to that conference is now interested in WordPress development. Talking to me and me showing them what I do, they were a little interested, but actually hearing these big names and these really, really nice and important people in the community talk about it in a way that's not, I don't want to say threatening, but in a way that's just like, "Hey, I'm talking to a friend, I'm talking to... Using kindness to spread positivity and show you the great things about this community." It made them want to be a part of it. I think we can't ask for anything more.

Teron Bullock: Absolutely. I think accessibility, like you said, is the biggest benefit to that approach. If you're assuming that you should automatically know this amount of information and you teach from that perspective, it could become off-putting, and it definitely will close the door on the amount of people who would be interested in learning. So I definitely agree with you. And I think that even if you know something, it doesn't hurt to go back over it again anyway, because like we just said, having heard it again will just solidify it for you.

Teron Bullock: So I agree. I think that I didn't get a chance to hear that particular talk, but I definitely need to go back because I think that that's inspiring to know that we're continuing to help more people getting into the community, which will only make it better. So Nyasha, it's been great talking to you about The DE{CODE} Conference. I looked forward to us having many other discussions about other great topics. And so thank you for joining me.

Nyasha Green: You're so welcome.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press The Issue is a production of Master WP. It was produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted and mixed by Monet Davenport and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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Are WordPress developers real developers? Your initial response may be... well of course they are. But this isn’t the universal opinion. Rob Howard and Nyasha Green want to get to the bottom of where this assumption comes form, and exactly why it’s false.

Check out the original article here: https://masterwp.com/are-wordpress-developers-real-developers/

This podcast was sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. Create a course with LearnDash. Visit LearnDash.com.

Episode Transcript:

Monet Davenport: Welcome to Press the Issue, a podcast for Master WP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show at masterwp.com/presstheissue. Are WordPress developers real developers? Your initial response may be, "Well, of course they are," but this isn't the universal opinion. Rob Howard and Nyasha Green want to get to the bottom of where this assumption comes from and exactly why it's false.

Rob Howard: Hi, Nyasha how's it going?

Nyasha Green: Hey, Rob, it's going well.

Rob Howard: Excellent. Well, today we're going to talk about an article you wrote a few weeks back about the fact that in the web development industry, WordPress developers are often perceived as quote, "Not real developers." Can you tell me about how this came up for you and kind of how you were inspired to write about this?

Nyasha Green: Yes, so this is a conversation that's actually really recurring that I see on Twitter. A lot of developer outside of the WordPress community, they always take jabs, not always, but they take jabs from time to time on WordPress developers, if we really do truly develop, if we really do truly code, if we are worthy of the money we make, and things like that. It actually was something when I was first getting into tech that came up as well and it did play a part, a small role, in what I thought about WordPress when I was first learning. But luckily for me, I had some really good mentors who had been in the WordPress community for a really long time that were able to kind of clear the air and clear any misconceptions of things that people were spreading. So I thought it was very important to talk about that because I know a lot of people getting into tech don't have those mentors and they don't have those people to clear things up for them, so I wanted to write about it and try to help as many people as possible so it can get some fresh blood into the community.

Rob Howard: Yeah because it sounds like, to some degree, I don't know if this is the intention necessarily of the people who are saying this stuff, maybe it's purely just an ego trip for the non-WordPress developers to talk about the WordPress developers in this way.

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Howard: But it sounds like to some degree at least, it has the effect or could have the effect of deterring people from learning PHP or WordPress in favor of some of the other languages or JavaScript frameworks that are out there. Have you actually seen people saying that and kind of reacting in that way?

Nyasha Green: Yes, I actually have. When I first started, my internship was what got me into WordPress development, and when I was first offered it, I hate to admit this now, but I was a little scared because I had heard so many bad things about WordPress and the only knowledge I had was that's where we used to blog. I don't think it's bad, but if all these developers are telling me it's bad and they're developers, will I be a real developer? I was one of the people that actually affected and even now, because I do a lot of mentoring for new people coming into tech, some people I'll talk to and I'll tell them I love WordPress and what we all can do with it and what they can do with it. Then they'll go talk to someone after me and they'll tell them, "No, you won't get paid. The community's too small. It's not diverse. It's gate-keep-y," and that'll scare people away, especially people coming from other industries that may have been like that, very gatekeep-y and very restrictive. They don't want to jump into another career like that. It's definitely having a negative impact on new people coming into the community.

Rob Howard: Yeah and I think the fact that WordPress is tried and true, right, also, that's a good way of framing. It's a tried and true system.

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Howard: The negative way of framing it is saying, "It's old and boring."

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Rob Howard: Right? So you could almost spin the exact same information in those two different directions. I think what we see is people who were coming in and saying, "Oh, I want to learn all these new JavaScript frameworks, you weren't learn Go, I want to do all this other stuff." I remember this same dynamic when Ruby on Rails first came out in the 2005 to 2010 timeline where people were like, "Well, that's it for PHP. We're going to all learn Ruby on Rails." Fast forward 10, 15 years and I would say PHP continues to have a larger market share than Ruby on Rails in terms of actual websites that exist.

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Howard: There's this feeling of always wanting to work on the new shiny object. I think that plagues developers in a lot of different ways, but it sounds like it also is muddying the waters for these entry level developers who are coming in and they have to make that decision of, "What am I going to learn and what am I going to promote as my expertise?" They're being discouraged from making PHP and WordPress their expertise.

Nyasha Green: I definitely agree with you. Just taking from one of the advisors we had when I was learning code, it's similar to what he said at the time about cyber security. He was like, "Cyber security is the sexy part of tech right now. Everybody wants to jump into it and they want to learn it because that's what everyone is buzzing about." I feel like that's the same thing with these JavaScript frameworks. People hear them and they're like, "Ooh, that seems hip. That seems new."

Nyasha Green: Then you come and you say, "Well, what about WordPress? What about PHP?" like, "Oh no, that's old, that's boring, that's not hip."

Nyasha Green: It's like, "What do you mean? We're using it. It's worked for a long time." Yeah, it may be older, but like you said, it's tried and true. Let's look at this, let's do this, let's boost this up. We don't have to all learn JavaScript. Well, all the frameworks.

Rob Howard: Yeah. There's learning JavaScript and then there is chasing every fad in JavaScript.

Nyasha Green: Yes.

Rob Howard: I think people tend too, oh, I know a lot of people who do the latter and they believe honestly that it is actually going to improve their career to go learn that fifth or sixth JavaScript framework in the last five years. When I look at this as both a business owner and a developer, I'm like, "Why would I want to spend ..." It's not that it's not fun to learn so if you're doing it for the fun of learning, that's one thing.

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Howard: But if you're chasing the trends, then what ends up happening is nine out of 10 out of those trends are going to not exist five or 10 years from now. That's one of the reasons that from a business standpoint, I've actually chosen to stick with WordPress and PHP because as we said a couple times, it is that tried and true system and it is extremely powerful and does a really solid job for the job that it's built to do.

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Howard: It's not trendy, but it is something where ... I guess the way I would look at it is if I'm building a career, I want to learn the core infrastructure and then I can layer on the interesting, trendy, exciting stuff but if you don't know how to run a site without React or without Next.js or whatever the new trend is five years from now, five years ago it was Angular and that's gone gone by the wayside.

Rob Howard: I think WordPress teaches a lot of these core things that ... I see people coming out of boot camps and they're learning only front end JavaScript or only React and they don't understand some of the basics of the internet, in my opinion.

Nyasha Green: I agree.

Rob Howard: I feel like that's been a bit of a distraction and, that, as you said, is affecting the ability of people to recruit into WordPress, the ability of people to be enthusiastic about joining the WordPress community, and it has a lot of weird knock on effects around the whole community.

Nyasha Green: I completely agree.

Rob Howard: What do you think the community, the WordPress community, could do, if anything, to improve this perception among people who don't know WordPress already, that it is sort of a lower end or less advanced development system? Because I don't personally think that is factually true, but it's clearly a perception. Let's talk about maybe ways that we or others might be able to improve on that perception.

Nyasha Green: I think there are two main things we can do. The first one is, and I've had lots of conversations about this with many people, we've had this conversation before, more people in the community need to invest in WordPress education. Courtney Robertson who does a really great job at WordPress, learned at WordPress.org and on her own as a teacher, she is just doing so much by herself to try to get more people and more fresh minds and more new developers into the community but she's just one of a couple people. We need an overall community push because right now, coming into WordPress and becoming a WordPress developer, it's almost impossible if you don't have any WordPress experience, but how do you get that experience if we don't have anybody who is willing to take the time to give it to people? For me, I got lucky because two of my mentors, Shambi Broome and Kenna Elliot, they were WordPress developers and had been in it a long time and they were local to where I live and they love the community and they love what they do. They decided to take their time, their free time out, to help me learn it. It's great and I'm very thankful to them for it, but we just don't have enough people doing things like that. We need to invest more in the education.

Nyasha Green: The second thing is we need to be more receptive to new ideas. That's one thing I've been seeing that we get a lot of pushback on, especially with Master WP. Any articles that may go against what the status quo likes, it's met with lots and lots and lots of pushback. I understand disagreeing with people, but it seems like if we like something and they don't, it's a lot of pushback. If we hate something or no, I won't say hate, we dislike something and they don't, it's a lot of pushback. It's like we have to be on 100% the same page and that's just not realistic, it's not feasible, and it's not something we can do to grow the community. We'll still be in those echo chambers and we won't have a growing community. It doesn't matter how many updates we roll out. Those are the two main things.

Rob Howard: Yeah and to some degree that inertia that you just described of, everybody in the world has a status quo bias. That is just a natural human thing, however if that is something that outsiders perceive as noticeable or extreme in the WordPress community, that almost reinforces the perception of WordPress being old and busted rather than tried and true. It's like, "Well, if it's hard to get into this community, the people who are already there have a very strong status quo bias, and then you look at React or View and perhaps the opposite is true in those communities," that's going to push people towards these other frameworks or platforms for reasons not related to code. That's something that, as you said, is really a big picture community change as opposed to something specifically related to like, "Are we going to build Gutenberg with React or view or J Query?"

Nyasha Green: I agree.

Rob Howard: The other thing you mentioned that we probably could do five or six podcast episodes about this, but you mentioned that there is a perception, and probably reality, that WordPress developers are just not paid as much as developers in other frameworks. That's something that I think obviously you can't wave a magic wand and change that, but I think companies in the WordPress space could change that over time. I don't think that there is really any justification for saying that being a really good PHP and WordPress developer is less difficult than being a really good React or View or Next.js or whatever else developer. I've learned probably 20 or 30 programming languages in my life and I think they're all basically the same after a certain point in terms of their level of challenge and skill required.

Rob Howard: That's something that companies can think about too is, "Are we inherently undervaluing our community and our software by undervaluing our employees?" Or saying, "Well, this is just PHP and just HTML." All these languages are basically the same thing when it really comes down to it. They're all basically offshoots of C from 20 or 30 years ago, so there's not that much of a learning curve or skill difference, but if we're seeing a 20 or 30% developer salary difference, then of course that's going to be a signal to people who are coming into the industry.

Nyasha Green: Oh yeah.

Rob Howard: I know we try to peg our prices to engineers in tech in general or peg our salaries, I should say. I don't really research the salaries of developers at other WordPress companies. I actually research well, what's the typical Denver technology salary? What's the typical Bay Area technology salary? And that's kind of where we peg our numbers to but it sounds like there is also a WordPress developer salary tier that perhaps is lower, and in my opinion, probably is lower for reasons that are not totally defensible in terms of the person's skill.

Nyasha Green: Yeah. I agree. I look around a little bit just at pay salary differences and on average it does seem like WordPress developers make a little less. I think one of the funniest tweets I've seen about it but that also made me think was someone said, "I just really love to see WordPress developers leaving WordPress because they're finally going to get paid what they're worth."

Nyasha Green: I was like, "What?" and that's what prompted me to go look into it. I was like ... Of course I want to defend WordPress so I was like, "Should I add him and say, 'What do you need? Send me some links.'" But I was like, "Let me do my own research." I was like, "Hmm, he's not exactly wrong."

Nyasha Green: Again, that's one of the things we don't want people to say, "Well, why should I join that community? I won't get paid enough on top of the other things we've listed like gatekeeping and a echo chamber and just a refusal to look at new ideas. Why would I go do that to myself and then not make as much money as I should?" These are all things we really, really, really need to work on as a community.

Rob Howard: Absolutely. If we're going to compete, I hesitate to use phrases like compete for the best talent because I think that is kind of a Silicon Valley mindset that is not totally healthy from a business owner standpoint, but to some degree you do have to make job offers that people accept.

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Howard: This is something that we do as a company and I think I would encourage other WordPress business owners to do is there's actually a significant gap between the actual value of a good custom WordPress developer, let's say a 80th percentile developer or something like that. There are probably a lot of those people who are at other companies that are not getting paid what they're worth and there's an opportunity there to say, "If you're going out and building a new company and you want to pay people more, then there's a significant opportunity to do that without getting to the point where you're quote unquote 'overpaying' them compared to what the market would bear."

Nyasha Green: Yes.

Rob Howard: Anytime you see that kind of discrepancy as a business owner, and obviously I'm subtly encouraging people to pay people more when they have the power to do so by saying this but any time you see that discrepancy, it's an opportunity as a business owner. This person is valued at X, their actual value to a company is Y, I can pay them somewhere between X and Y, and it's a win-win for everybody. That kind of thing is probably an opportunity for a company that wants to go there and do that sort of thing. But I think from a more communal standpoint, everybody should be getting paid what their worth period.

Nyasha Green: Yes.

Rob Howard: And if that's not happening in the WordPress community, that is probably a mixture of perception and just inertia and the status quo. That's something that I think companies and business owners who are making those salary decisions could change over time and it would probably be beneficial for ... It would obviously be beneficial for people who are getting paid more as employees, but also for business owners because they are going to make everything they're doing up here more valuable to outsiders.

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Howard: I think when it really comes down to it, what people are saying is WordPress developers are not a real developer and thus they're less valuable and thus they're getting paid less and there's all these spinoffs from there.

Nyasha Green: Yes. Just multiple things working against us and we're helping it.

Rob Howard: Yeah, and by not actively fighting against that perception, as you said, we're reinforcing it. We're helping that perception grow, we're allowing that perception to grow.

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Howard: You obviously went through this process yourself. Several years back, you decided on a path that included WordPress. What was it for you, and you talked a bit about your mentors, but I'd love for you to go more into detail about what was it that made WordPress click for you and made you say, "This is something that I would rather focus on than the other 10 or 20 options that are out there"?

Nyasha Green: Honestly, it was a few things. My first WordPress was my first intro to technology, that's what I worked on first is developing and maintaining websites through WordPress for my mentor Shambi. At first I was like ... Honestly it made things easier. When you learn, you learn, I can't say the hard way, but you learn the basics so you can know how to use content management systems like WordPress. Just taking what I knew and jumping into WordPress, it was a breath of fresh air, it made things so much easier on me and it made me feel like I actually knew what I was doing versus coding everything from scratch, just for bonus points and trying to learn all the JavaScript frameworks there. We have languages that we use in WordPress that have been around a little while, so there's lots of help, not only on just the internet, even if somebody is not a WordPress developer it's a good chance they had to learn PHP at one point or because like you said earlier, PHP is so similar to JavaScript and other languages it was just so easy to get more help, to get more resources and to learn.

Nyasha Green: But I did have to dig for those and I'm not in a tech city so just having people beside me to do was a little harder, but just getting into it, learning, knowing where the resources were, it just made things so much easier and it made my work that I was doing, it made me so much more proud of what I was doing work-wise with websites. That's what made me jump into WordPress.

Rob Howard: Awesome. Yeah. I think to recap, one of the things that you called out was we really need more and better education. This is something that we're working on internally here at Master VP, that Courtney's working on at learn.wordpress.org with a bunch of other contributors. I think this is an area where it's clearly underserved or underutilized right now. There's opportunity to improve life for existing WordPress developers, but also this gets new people into the community. It's not like, "Oh, just go read the codex and you'll figure it out." That is not really feasible for a lot of people, especially when they're alternatives to go do a bootcamp where they learn everything about another JavaScript framework in a much more accessible way.

Rob Howard: More education, a more careful understanding of the perception around salary, and people getting into the industry, and a lot of that comes from companies who are making those decisions I think.

Rob Howard: I think the third thing that you touched on was really about making these mentorship connections was the biggest thing for you. That's something where more events, more online meetups, and more opportunities to get people into the industry is going to make a big difference and that common thread of we almost have to build a better marketing campaign than React and our other sort of major competitors.

Nyasha Green: Yeah.

Rob Howard: Obviously WordPress is incorporating React to some degree, but if we think about each software package has to make a pitch to a developer that it's worth it to learn this tool. I think right now we are getting outcompeted, WordPress is getting outcompeted on that, in that way, and that's a lot where this perception that we're not real developers is coming from and also we're losing people because they're not even making an attempt to learn WordPress because of that outside perception, if that makes sense.

Nyasha Green: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Howard: Those are all pretty big things, but I think that they're are things that individual community members, as well as companies could start working on and a year or two from now, we could actually make a lot of progress in all those things.

Nyasha Green: Yes, I agree, and I'm very excited.

Rob Howard: Excellent, me too. Well, it was great talking to you and we will be back soon for more Press the Issue Podcast.

Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press the Issue is a production of Master WP. It was produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted and mixed by Monet Davenport, and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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What is your first thought when you see WordPress spelled without the capital P in the middle? You may be surprised how much opinions vary. In fact some people may care a little too much about that one little letter. Nyasha Green and Rob Howard have noticed a problem with this and want to explore what this one letter says about the WordPress community.

Visit the original article here: https://masterwp.com/wordpress-with-a-lowercase-p-is-ok-with-me/

This podcast was sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. Create a course with LearnDash. Visit LearnDash.com.

Episode Transcript:

Monét Davenport: Welcome to Press the Issue, a podcast for Master WP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals.

Get show notes, transcripts and more information about the show at masterwp.com/presstheissue.

What is your first thought when you see WordPress spelled without the capital P in the middle? You may be surprised how much opinions vary. In fact, some people may care a little too much about that one little letter. Nyasha Green and Rob Howard have noticed a problem with this and want to explore what this one letter says about the WordPress community.

Nyasha Green: Hey Rob, how are you doing today?

Rob Howard: Hey, Nyasha. I'm great. How about you?

Nyasha Green: Doing well. Doing well. So today I wanted to talk to you about an article you wrote. Your article was about, well, the title was WordPress With a Lowercase P Is Okay With Me. And you got a little bit of pushback on this article. So I just want to start by asking you what inspired you to write this?

Rob Howard: Yeah. So I was reading about a company that had published basically their recommendations for developers who are applying for WordPress jobs. This is something I think a lot about, because I hire a lot of WordPress developers and I've developed a somewhat idiosyncratic or different system for doing it that I like to think works pretty well. But I was reading this because I was interested to see what other people are doing. And there were a few things that struck me in the article as being very different from how we do it. But the biggest thing that jumped out at me was that the author, who is a person who's hiring lots of WordPress developers, said, "if you don't write WordPress with an uppercase P, that is 'Word' is capitalized and then 'Press' is capitalized, then that person doesn't have a clue. It's something you could be shunned for. There's not much you could say in your defense."

Rob Howard: So obviously the word choice around shunning, there's not much you could say in your defense, was a little bit off putting to me. But the bigger picture was, is this really something that it even makes sense to be looking for in a job interview or on a resume? And I wrote the article basically explaining why I take pretty much the exact opposite approach. I see the capital P in WordPress as, first of all, confusing from an English language standpoint, but also just so frivolous and meaningless that it essentially amounts to being like a secret handshake. If you know this thing is capitalized, then it's almost like, well, you're in the community. And that's even what the original author said is like, this is an indication that you are involved in the community already.

Rob Howard: So there were people in the comments who said, "well, what if I want to hire a WordPress insider?" Okay, that's your prerogative. But when you're thinking about job applications, the stated goal should be to make your company as open as possible to everyone out there. And this, in many ways does the opposite. It's almost like saying, you have to already be in this sort of secret society to even be considered for this job. And if you make a mistake or typo, then we're going to throw your resume away, which just really strikes me as kind of the opposite of how I approach hiring and how I think hiring should be.

Nyasha Green: Okay. Great. And I definitely agree. It definitely was brought up some flags for me as well, especially someone who was interviewing into the community. And it's just, people don't sometimes, I guess they don't see how harmful this is. They're like, well, it's my role. It's something I like. It's something I'm passionate about. And me looking at that is, if you're that passionate about it, why don't you teach people? What is this, you know or you don't? No one treated you like that. If they did, I doubt you would be in tech. But how does that play into how we do our job applications in the process at our company?

Rob Howard: Great question. So what we do is, I actually have put a lot of time and effort over the years into removing barriers. I think one of the mistakes that other employers make, in my opinion at least, is they see their goal with the job application process as to they want to figure out ways to eliminate and narrow down the pool as quickly as possible. And they see this as a more efficient hiring process. You have to jump over all these hurdles. I should be eliminating 80% of applicants with the following hurdles that I've created. And then that sort of does make it more efficient from the employer's standpoint, but what it does from the employee's standpoint or the potential employee, is it makes people miserable and makes people disengage from a process that is basically annoying and cumbersome.

Rob Howard: And we spoke with somebody a few weeks ago, who I remember, she was telling us that she was applying for essentially an office administrator job at a Silicon Valley company. And she ended up having 15 interviews and then not getting the job. And it's like, these are the structures and hurdles that are set up to theoretically make the process easier for the hiring manager or the employer. But what they also do is they inappropriately eliminate a huge number of people who have extremely high potential to be great future employees. So I've tried to flip that script when we do our hiring and say, I actually want to remove the superficial barriers and seek out people who have extremely high potential for future success. Those people are often not going to the people who have the shiniest resumes and know how to capitalize the random fifth letter in the word.

Rob Howard: But you get the opportunity then to build a team that has people who really have the potential to be rock stars and they're just not rock stars yet, perhaps, because they haven't been given that opportunity to shine or been given the opportunity to really realize their potential. So in terms of the actual things that we do differently, there are some very obvious ones. We do not require a typical resume. If you want to send us your LinkedIn or your portfolio and a cover letter, that's fine. We want you to basically be flexible to present yourself as well as you can, but not necessarily say, if you don't deliver a one page resume, or if you have a resume gap or all these little, annoying things that hiring managers tend to look at and eliminate people on, we're not eliminating people on that basis, because I don't think that having the best resume is indicative of your future performance at the company.

Rob Howard: And I would guess that you could probably collect data to support that. The most polished resume is nice. It's nice to have. But the reason resumes exist is almost because they are a artificial hurdle that is put up by hiring managers. So you're welcome to send us your resume, but I'm not going to needle, why did you have this six month gap? What is this? Why weren't you working during this time? Oh, there's a typo on line 17. These are things that in a lot of companies, they will say, yeah, we throw away resumes with typos. And they'll actually say that as if it's something to be proud of. And what I say is, you are actually eliminating potentially great employees by doing that, and you're making it harder for your company to hire good people by focusing on things that are essentially frivolous and unrelated to the job.

Rob Howard: And I think the capital P is another great example of that. It's effectively a typo. So to say you're going to eliminate people as a result of a typo here or there is ridiculous. In fact, a lot of people mentioned that their iPhones often will auto correct to a lowercase P, and it's like, there's all sorts of little things like that, where it's like, you don't even know that this person actually made that typo consciously. Or if somebody has auto correct to make it a capital P, are they really better and smarter and had more potential, or is it just literally an automation? So there's all sorts of stuff like that, where focusing on the minutia, especially early on in the process, I think it psychologically relieves the hiring manager of some of the more challenging decisions. And that feels good for the hiring manager, but is really bad for the long term results of your recruiting process, in my view.

Nyasha Green: I agree. Yeah. Just building a little bit or going a little bit more into that. So what do you think happens when people do favor those insiders? They want those people that already are supposed to know everything, basically doing the opposite of what we do at our company in a way. What do you think happens with that?

Rob Howard: Yeah. So I think there's a few different pieces of the puzzle there. So what we see in a lot of the conversation around Silicon Valley hiring is everybody wants to hire the person who they feel like they don't have to train. So companies see training as a cost. They see training as almost a waste of time that they want to avoid. And that's why you see so much job mobility within Silicon Valley, for example, because Facebook wants to just steal employees from Netflix, because they don't feel like they're going to have to train them because they're very similar companies. And that happens amongst companies, and it also happens when people are hiring in from sort of outside the inner Silicon Valley circle. They want to hire somebody in theory who already knows everything. That is, again, seems like the simplest path.

Rob Howard: Of course there are some negative results. One of the positive results is that you don't have to train that person as much. One of the negative results is that your company is now populated by a bunch of people who think they kind of know everything already. And there can actually be conflicts between those people that are hard to resolve because of that, because there's no really standard way that people are learning how to interact with clients, how to build websites, how to do all these things, because you're hiring people who are coming in. Not that you shouldn't hire somebody who is at a senior level, but you don't want to only hire people who already know everything, quote unquote. Obviously that's not true of anybody, but that's kind of the perception.

Rob Howard: So there's this idea that, we can only hire ninjas, which is kind of an annoying buzzword. But that's kind of the mentality here. I think the next negative is that you then inherit as a company, all of the pipeline problems that tech has had over the last few decades, that universities have had over the last few decades. People who are coming in with engineering and tech degrees, or who have 10 years of tech experience are invariably going to be mostly white men in the United States and Europe at least, because they are the people who are essentially the incumbent tech ninjas, if that makes sense. The incumbent experienced people. So if you're only hiring from that pipeline of already experienced people, then what's happening is you may have the most pro inclusion, pro diversity platform as a company, but the result is that you can only get people from the pipeline that you choose.

Rob Howard: So you end up with a much less diverse company because you are choosing to inherit other people's problems, the problems of these pipelines. So a lot of employers will say as sort of a, I'll call it an excuse, you could probably frame it slightly differently if you wanted to in a more positive light, but a lot of people will say, well, it's not really our fault because these are the people who are coming in with degrees from these particular universities that we like to hire from. And it's like, okay, but you could expand your hiring pipeline. It's kind of your choice to limit it to these certain traditional tech pathways, and those tech pathways have obvious diversity problems or have obvious problems with gender diversity, or even this idea of diversity of thought, which can sometimes be a little bit of a crutch when we're talking about diversity, but I think it's still, it is valuable as long as it's combined with actual racial and gender diversity.

Rob Howard: So when you think about that, you don't want to end up looking like a company where everybody kind of looks and thinks the same and grew up in basically the same suburb. I think that there's a lot of big negatives that come out of that, but that is essentially the natural result of a hiring process where you're limiting your pathways in, you are then creating what are effectively arbitrary hurdles. In addition to the typos, there's like, oh, you have to learn how to do an algorithm interview. You have to do an algorithm test during your interviews. You have to do all this stuff that really you'll never do in your job. And it's kind of forcing you to take the SATs. The SATs sort of indicate how smart you are, but they also sort of indicate how much you practice for the SATs.

Rob Howard: You don't want to throw that away totally, but also you need to see it in the context of the full person. And I think these hiring shortcuts that hiring managers take prevent us from seeing the full person, they eliminate people incorrectly, in my opinion. But they also save time for hiring. So the flip side is you have to have a much more personalized hiring process that is more accommodating and more accessible to more people, and that will result in you being able to find people who are super high potential, but maybe are going unnoticed by your competitors. And that's kind of the approach that we take here. It's good for the company, it's good for employees. And it allows people to get into the system and then learn as opposed to simply hiring people who have already learned everything elsewhere.

Nyasha Green: I agree with you. And one thing I thought about when I read your article, which I love, was that I want these people to also know that they need to do some self-reflection. Or I think your article will bring that about, because one key thing I notice is, okay, you're declaring yourself the hiring manager or you're the owner, and you have these set up rules people must follow, and it's all just based on your experience and your way into tech. And like you said, that does bar a lot of people. But I just, I think some people just don't know how much that does. And they don't realize that if they were on the receiving end of that, they probably wouldn't get hired either.

Nyasha Green: Like me, for example, if you may be the hiring manager of the company and I got to set the rules of who would go on to talk to you, and one of my rules was, okay, finish this lyric for me, I'm a big BTS fan, finish this lyric for me, smooth like butter. And they don't know the rest because they're like, what? And I'm like, well, you're not cultured enough, I think to fit at this company. I don't think I want to let you in. It's like, they would think that was silly. But they get to go around and say, okay, if you don't know all this jargon, you can't come to the company, despite the fact that you might be an excellent coder. You might be excellent with customers and clients. You might be just someone who can train people, and just take in all this knowledge and just make the company so much better. But we're going to ignore all of that, that will help the job and the company, because you're not like me.

Nyasha Green: And again, what you were saying that just leads to all these pipeline and diversity problems, and it is. And I think people have good intentions. They're like, we want to be diverse. The excuse we always get is, we reach out to diverse people, but we don't get a lot of people, a lot of feedback. We don't get contacted back. And it's like, do you understand what these people have to do to even show up on your radar? So I think your article also made a lot of people think about what they're doing and how much is just internalized bias.

Rob Howard: Yeah, I hope so. And I think everyone that I've ever spoken to about this who's in a hiring position comes at it from the standpoint of, I want to build a more diverse company, but either it's not really working, or I don't know how, or I don't really know why it's not working.

Speaker 1: Thank you for listening up to this point. Press the Issue by Master WP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do, now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash, visit learndash.com. Now, back to the podcast.

Rob Howard: The most common situation is, I don't really know why this is not working. I'm putting out the job application and I'm getting 95% white men, which is not an exaggerated number for a lot of these job postings. Other than people who are sending us random hate mail at Master WP, I'm not hearing from people who are like, I don't want to do this. They're saying, I want to do it and I'm not really sure how to do it effectively. Or doing it effectively is, they sort of have ideas, but they're worried about costs. They're worried about various other things or kind of just looking bad optically for the people who are cutting the checks or writing the paychecks.

Rob Howard: So there's a lot of, as you said, good intentions. I think people get it from an intellectual standpoint as a hiring manager, what you should do. In practice what we see is there are a lot of companies that actually hire chief diversity officers and similar roles and stuff like that. And then those people who are in those roles are not empowered to actually make hiring decisions or help with hiring decisions. So you have sort of the optics person, and then you have the hiring manager, who's making all the same mistakes over and over again, and is almost separate from the diversity policy at the company. I would also add that we talk about this as a diversity issue, but it also benefits everyone, including white men to have a more streamlined and less minutia focused hiring process.

Rob Howard: There are lots of white men out there, including people who we've hired, who don't come from a traditional pipeline, who don't have a college degree, who maybe haven't written a resume in 15 years because they've been freelancing for so long. And we've had great experiences hiring people who fit that profile. The exact same thing helps candidates who are from groups that are underrepresented in tech, but it's not exclusively helpful to them or for that purpose. It is about opening doors to everyone in ways that are just very different from what tech traditionally does. And I think that's, for people who might be out there, and who are in a hiring manager position and who are kind of struggling to sell some of these changes to the higher ups, that can actually be an even more persuasive way of saying it.

Rob Howard: You might say, well, we have a candidate who is a military veteran. He's in his 50s. He's been freelancing for a decade and he's not really that person coming from that traditional pipeline. Even though he's not technically in an underrepresented group, he's still going to benefit from a better system or a more inclusive system. So there's all sorts of stuff like that, where this is really about opening the doors to more people, period. It's not purely about a gender diversity or racial diversity approach. It actually just helps everybody. So that's, I think a nice way to frame it. But when a particular group is already disproportionately affected by the negative stuff, then the improvements are going to help them disproportionately too. And you could go down that rabbit hole kind of forever, but the idea is basically to making it easier to hire people with good potential at your company who might not have perfect resumes is going to benefit the employer and everybody in the system, and just set up a culture that is more welcoming and more relaxed.

Rob Howard: And those things really do kind of spiral into more productivity. Rigidity, and it has to be my way, it has to be kind of the traditional Silicon Valley university pipeline way. Those things actually eventually stifle creativity, I think. But I want to touch on one other thought from your last question before I kind of go down a separate tangent or rabbit hole. And that is that people are saying, well, I'm trying to hire in a better way, but it's not working. We're putting out the applications, but we're not getting applications from a diverse group of candidates, however I want to define that. And I think what people don't realize as company owners or hiring managers, or perhaps they do realize it, but they just don't really want to think about it too much because it's a hard problem, is that your potential employees are interviewing you too. The article that I am kind of riffing off of with the capital P stuff is written as, I'm going to interview you, here's how to succeed in my interview.

Rob Howard: But I think what they're missing is that your potential employee is interviewing you and researching your company before they even submit that application. And you're actually losing people, because they never bother to send in the application because they've eliminated you from their list of potential employers, because they're seeing these ridiculous hurdles, they're looking at your about us page and seeing that it's nine white men and one white woman, or whatever that dynamic is at the typical company. And they're saying, well, am I really going to enjoy my time here? Am I really going to fit in here? Obviously that's to some degree subjective. And you could probably argue that your company's really awesome for everybody, despite what may be less than ideal optics.

Rob Howard: But as a hiring manager, as a CEO or owner, you're about page is way more important than your job listing or where you publish that job listing, because people are going to show up at your website, they're going to look you up on Glassdoor and they're going to assess you privately before you even know they exist, before they even raise their hand to try to work with you. And what we've seen is we've been very actively working on all this stuff for probably six or seven years, if not a little bit more. And what we see now is that there's actually a network effect. When you present as a company that obviously is welcoming and inclusive and you can sort of show the results of that work or that different process over many years, then the whole issue of, I put up a job description and I didn't get any diverse candidates, goes away, because you do get those candidates, they are not eliminating you from contention.

Rob Howard: And in many ways, that actually makes the company much more competitive on the recruiting front, because a lot of companies don't even realize how many great high potential candidates never apply to them because they appear to be basically stodgy and not diverse. So if it were me, I'd be worried that this article about how you need to capitalize the P or I'm not going to hire you, that's great. If you want to eliminate people for that, again, you're in charge of that decision. But also recognize that a lot of people are reading this stuff and they're like, well, I'm not even going to talk to this guy or talk to this company because that's not the kind of place that I want to work. Nobody wants to have that experience day in and day out.

Rob Howard: And when it really comes down to it, as a company, everything that you do is a reflection of your culture, your values as a company, and people are actually using those as data points or decision making pieces when they're deciding whether or not to even apply for that job. And you're probably losing good people if you're not presenting a welcoming face to the world in all your interactions.

Nyasha Green: Awesome. I totally agree. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today, Rob. I really enjoyed our chat. And I'm just really excited for our future chats, and the new things we're going to talk about and just how we're going to implement these ideas going forward.

Rob Howard: Same here. Great talking to you and looking forward to next time.

Monét Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press the Issue is a production of Master WP. It was produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted and mixed by Monet Davenport, and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

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Welcome to Press the Issue, a podcast from Master WP. In this show, we will be taking a look at questions, issues, and problems that face the WordPress community and ecosystem. In this new podcast, you can expect a fresh and unique approach to WordPress news. Our mini-episodes, dropping weekly, will feature candid discussions from our team as they explore questions from the Master WP newsletter. Once a month, look out for a full length episode which takes you on a deep dive into issues that affect WordPress, open-source, and beyond.

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