Do you enjoy waking up in the morning without an alarm? Maybe go out for a run or a gym session, without having to think about how long it’ll take you before you get back? Or have you ever found yourself needing to run some errands, and simply finding the best time of the day to avoid long lines to get them done? This is what my life looks like now, every day.
Full disclosure: I’m not rich, I’m not on a permanent vacation, and I am not unemployed. Although, even before the pandemic hit, I was seriously considering quitting my job. I’d grown extremely tired of my expensive commute, only to go work in an uncomfortable open-floor office full of distractions. Besides, at home I was able to focus more intently on the big, complex parts of my projects more than I ever could in the office.
There, at home, I had bigger and better monitors that made a significant difference to my workflow. I wasn’t constantly bothered by lower back pain thanks to my superbly comfortable office chair. Then there was my standing desk for whenever I felt like I needed a stretch. What was the point of going to an office, when I had the perfect working environment at home?
This lifestyle is possible thanks to a company that’s pioneered working from home, asynchronously, since 2005. That company, where I find myself gainfully employed, is called Automattic. My first three months working here have been an eye-opening experience.
Onboarding
You can notice the difference when a company implicitly trusts you from the start. You are given instructions for how to order your new work laptop; they expect you to decide for yourself what machine makes the most sense for your line of work. When my first day arrived, aside from a few welcoming messages from my team and HR, no one checked in on me during my training. That role fell to an automated Slack integration which would ping me at different intervals with the material I should be focusing on at that moment. I found myself trying to catch up due to the density of information, but I was grateful to not feel like I was being judged for completing these tasks at a slower pace. Yes it meant that I had to work for a few extra hours, but I was given the independence to decide that.
Support Rotation
Every “newmattician” has to complete a bought of Support Rotation. The company strongly believes in this process because it forces us to familiarize ourselves with the issues our customers are facing. It also helps someone like me, who has never worked with WordPress before, learn my way around the available tools and features. This inexperience made me very nervous when I had to start providing live chat support, but without pressure there wouldn’t be any diamonds right? I actually found that to be the most rewarding and enjoyable part of the rotation. Our customers are generally very gracious and thankful, and chasing that positive feedback sort of became addictive.
Newspack
The team I interviewed for is called Newspack, a start-up like initiative within Automattic. They offer a homonymous product meant to provide news and publishing organizations with all the technical tools they’d need to run their outfits online. I received a warm welcome from everyone on the team despite not having personally met any of them. This welcoming allowed me to feel comfortable enough to offer up opinions and feedback almost immediately. While this occurred in the form of impromptu conversations at the start-up I was previously at, at Newspack and Automattic, the emphasis and encouragement to do so, as well as the transparency with which it is performed, was both surprising and refreshing.
I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. — Automattic Creed
There were many growing pains I witnessed working at my previous start-up. We would rarely use the latest PHP versions or packages because it would’ve meant having to dedicate resources to (manual) regression testing or refactoring. There was little focus directed towards automation or deployment tools. These were some of the big reasons I decided I needed to work at a mature tech company, and boy… Automattic does not disappoint! PHPUnit testing, CircleCI integration for GitHub Pull Requests, Slack code review solicitation notifications; those are just a few of the developer-focused automations/integrations I’ve seen so far. Auto-updates are the norm here, and if something accidentally breaks, rollbacks are a breeze. This degree of streamlining isn’t something I’m used to, but amazing to see in action!
Working Asynchronously
Another amazing thing to see in action is the act of working asynchronously. At Automattic, you aren’t expected to respond to emails or Slack messages immediately. This is because we are a global workforce, and the colleague you’re trying to reach might be hours ahead or behind of you. You’re actually encouraged to make use of Slack’s notification schedule. In case of an emergency, like a service being down, you are expected to keep your company profile up-to-date with any telephone number you’d be reachable. Culminating the experience, is the use of a tool called P2 for internal communications. This is used for all sorts of things, including how-to’s, asking for feedback from the team, and even posting your planned vacation. These P2 posts are searchable by anyone at the company; this implicitly encourages you to try to create the best well written post that you can in my opinion. More importantly though, it fosters an environment of transparent communication; I’ve seen instances of a communication that occurred in a Slack DM get transferred over to a P2 post. It also allows for the conversation to continue as our colleagues around the world are able to read and respond to your post.
Three months in, and I’m happy to report that I am not suffering from buyer’s remorse. I’m really glad that I don’t have to worry about returning to an office. The only thing that could make this job better, when the pandemic is finally over and safe to do so, is a return to travel for meetups at the team and company level. For now, the comfort of my home office will have to make do.
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