I am proud to say that I work remotely for a company called Automattic, a company that prides itself on being distributed across the globe. I love my work for many different reasons, but in a nutshell, because I get to do something I enjoy from essentially anywhere I want to do it from.
Working remotely
First, I’m off to Gdańsk, Poland for our Team Meetup. The idea of the meetup is for our entire team to come together, in person, at a location of our choosing. We do this once a year to help build team camaraderie, and give us the opportunity to see each other in person. More on how that goes in my next post!
If you wanted to learn more about remote work at Automattic, I would suggest watching our CEO Matt Mullenweg’s Ted Talk, reading Matt’s Economist interview, or the Distributed Podcast on building a fully distributed company.
Some people ask me, how do you stay on task while working at home? Do you not get bored and go crazy without human interaction?
Truth is I am not alone, it’s actually quite the opposite. I work on a team of 13 people and growing. I’m constantly chattering with my team of fellow Happiness Engineers. Typically, this communication is via Slack, but could also be through a Zoom video, or one of our numerous P2 posts. We’ve got watercooler channels the entire company participates in; we talk about everything you can think of, from sports to electronics to movies. Let’s just say, there’s always someone online to talk to.
There are 800 of us distributed across the globe. That means there is always somebody working and online. I have to actually try to keep my distance at times, as it is easy and tempting to open my laptop and engineer some happiness in my off-time. I appreciate that our company does a good job of discouraging that, and making sure we have ample personal time.