How We Work

Automattic is a funny little company. Since we evolved out of an open source project, we’ve tried to apply some of the ideals of the open source world to the company.

Here are a few points about the company and culture that you might find interesting if you’re considering joining the team.

  • We’re completely distributed. Everyone works from their own work environment, and they’re spread out all over the world. (California, Texas, New York, Alabama, Canada, Ireland, England, Bulgaria, Australia …) We don’t have an office, but we do have a “lounge” in San Francisco where we can host meetings with potential partners and company events.
  • We coordinate about 70% of our projects on private P2-themed WordPress.com blogs, 25% on private IRC channels, 4% via email, and the rest on direct IM, usually AIM and Skype.
  • WordPress.com is synced with the WordPress.org trunk pretty much every weekday.
  • We’re strong believers in Open Source, and we try to open source everything we can. The company was structured to align the economic incentives as such.
  • We get the whole company together twice a year to brainstorm the broad strategy for the company for the coming months, and also just to hang out and enjoy the company of the people we work with all day. (And find out who’s the best at Wii Tennis.) So far we’ve done these “off-sites” in San Francisco; La Paz, Mexico; Oracle, Arizona; Breckenridge, Colorado; and Mont-Sainte-Anne, Quebec.
  • Once a year everyone is invited to come to San Francisco for WordCamp SF, an annual WordPress conference hosted by Automattic.
  • Everyone sets and works their own hours. What’s important is what gets done, not when or where it got done. Because of the geographical variance, there is activity on the IRC channel pretty much 24/7.
  • A good chunk of the company is from Texas so we tend to obsess about BBQ quite a bit. (Also Ryan makes the best steaks ever.)
  • We have a one-button deploy system for WordPress.com, and we push code to the site 5–20 times a day.
  • Everyone who joins, regardless of position, does support for their first three weeks.
  • For every feature we launch, we try to gather metrics about its usage, interaction, and growth, in addition to listening to the masses of feedback we get on our blog and through support. This helps us inform decisions about where things need to go. It’s not uncommon to launch a feature and then revise it several times over the following week.

That’s all we can think of for now. Have a question about how Automattic works? Send it in via our contact form.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are there benefits?

You mean beyond working on cool stuff with cool people? We do have full health coverage including vision and dental, coverage which extends to spouses and domestic partners and children. We fully cover travel and such for our get-togethers. Finally, we happily provide or reimburse hardware and software, and any books or conferences that promote continued learning.

Are you growing?

You could say that:

Quantcast traffic chart