I would love people here to understand that @staff is really about 200 different people, divided in multiple teams and groups, that sometimes work together, sometimes barely knows what each other do. All that people have a high degree of autonomy and there is little centralisation, beyond sharing some general goals: make Tumblr grow, make the tumblrinas happy, and over everything else, make this site profitable so it's survival is assured. So not only every one of us is far from knowing what everyone else is doing or why, but it's not that there is a centralised decision making procedure: each group works towards the shared goals in the best possible way they can think of. On top of that, Automattic, the parent company, always have been a very decentralised organisation. The employee manual, quite literally, tell you it's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission: you are supposed to go forward with what you think it's a good move and not get blocked by bureaucracy, and the worst thing it can happen is that you may be asked to rollback what you did.
That means that everything "staff" do is actually the work of individual teams, or even persons. And not always everything is supported by everyone else. If I, let's say, hated color blue, I would only need to convince a couple of people on my team and, maybe, a designer ("for all the seven hells, Javi, remove whatever you want but shut the fuck up already") and bam, no blue text anymore. Would that mean "staff" is doing some 4D chess by removing a color? No, it only would mean I'm a little weird dude who hates blue and can be a pest to his co-workers is very convincing
And people sometimes see something and go "wtf, staff, you are horrible!", but it's not "staff being evil", it's usually someone screwing things up. I have been reckless and broken things a hundred times (hell, I've leaked by mistake the biggest change in years a month before it was going to actually was going to happen) and people reaction always had been "staff is incompetent"... But the fair thing to say in that case would be "Javi is incompetent", since my very competent coworkers are the ones who fix my fuckery.
My favorite example of this is people saying things like "now you can see people who work on Tumblr actually using Tumblr! Staff is trying hard to look more human to us". My brothers in Christ, do you really think me, or any of my coworkers who identify as staff here, do it because the company encourages us to do so?? I personally do it because, you know, I spend a third of my life at work, so yeah, I like to talk about what I do and about what it happens at "the office". And yeah, most of the people working for automattic actually does it for open source projects, so it's not the company has a solid culture of censoring any of us when talking about work in public.
So when something happens, we release this, or screw something up, or do whatever, there is always people saying "staff is trying to do this or that", or "staff pretends to be doing this but what they are trying to do is that"... And for all the fucks, "staff" is far from being able to be sneaky or try to trick you. Staff is a being whose left hand doesn't know what their right hand is doing: the left hand just trust it's something good for everyone, and viceversa.
So when someone says "staff is not your friend"... No shit: staff is not only not a person, it's barely an entity with a unified agency at all beyond "let's keep tumblr alive". Staff is not your friend. People in staff can be, though. And they can do things you agree with, things you don't, and everything in between... But "Staff", at large, is not trying to play 4D chess with y'all, folks, we at just trying to make this place, believe it or not, the best it could be.
janainaart
theartofmadeline
jacobvanloon
titsay
germansingergirl
gummygunk
dededos
