A company without offices? Employees from all around the world? Working without pants? This surely must be The Future, and Automattic - the company behind WordPress.com - has been living it since 2005. Learn how more than 140 employees from over 27 countries collaborate to make the web a better place. This talk was given at the Reversim Summit in February 2013, and covered communication tools and methods, hiring and onboarding process, continuous deployment, and the general awesomeness of the distributed company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH7foZ2WiwY CC-BY-NC

1. DISTRIBUTED
reinventing the workplace

2. $ whoami

3. Yoav Farhi
Developer
blog.yoavfarhi.com
@yoavf

4. $ pwd

7. • 143 employees
• 27 countries (Israel: 2)
• No offices *
(geocoding fail)

8. cc by-sa opensourceway
http://flic.kr/p/aZbzuH

9. What it’s like
Work / Development
Communications
Hiring / Onboarding
Being Social

10. cc by-nc-sa stuckincustoms
http://flic.kr/p/5AXtkS

11. 9-5
cc by joi
cc by joi
http://flic.kr/p/EcvN8
http://flic.kr/p/EcvN8

13. cc by-nc-nd suratlozowick
http://flic.kr/p/7Nehy8

14. cc by-sa saeru
http://flic.kr/p/v7X91

15. cc by-nc-nd jiscinfonet
http://flic.kr/p/dYoLx

19. cc by-nc-sa Pandiyan
http://flic.kr/p/7sGu7Z

20. cc by-nc-nd anarosaphotography
http://yoav.fr/happy
Happy

21. Let’s get to work
cc-by galato901
http://yoav.fr/towork

22. Team Structure
Designed to be able to iterate
quickly without any barriers,
blockers, or sign-offs

23. Team Structure
• 4-7 person team size, mostly devs
• A designer
• Support, business, or marketing
person as needed
• Team lead included

24. A 6 month roadmap
that articulates long
term goals and smaller
two-to-four weeks
steps to get there

25. Each team choses its
own methods and tools

26. Build it
Get it out there
Iterate

27. $ deploy

29. ~
30 seconds
2000 servers

30. ~
30 seconds
2000 servers

31. In 2012
Deployed new code every
26 minutes on average
(just WordPress.com)

32. cc by-nc-nd hannasteen
http://yoav.fr/oxygen

33. Async

34. Open

35. Simple

36. (bad) email

37. Meetings

38. IRC
• Continuous chat, your presence is
required - this is “coming to work”
• Lots of channels, plenty of bots
(logging, error reporting, tools, etc)
• Logged, easily searchable and
referenced

39. P2
• Hybrid blog/forum/micro-blogging
• We use it for everything - teams,
projects, social

44. consumption
• Web
• Email (read/write)
• Jabber (read/write)
• IRC
• Mobile
• Search
• ...

45. Similar commercial
software
• Yammer
• Hall
• Socialcast
• Jive
• daPulse

46. MISC
IRC
P2 25%
70%

47. cc by-nc-sa thewmatt
http://flic.kr/p/3QMH8y

48. cc by-nc-nd androidman
http://yoav.fr/pool

49. cc-by thatsabigif
http://yoav.fr/world

50. Not for everybody :(

51. The process
• Initial screening: CV, prior open
source work, interview
• Code test
• (Paid) Trial project

52. We see how you work
You see how we work

54. Be social?

55. San Francisco, 2007
Stinton Beach, 2006

56. Stinton Beach, 2007

57. Oracle, 2008

58. Breckenridge, 2008

59. Quebec, 2009

60. Seaside, 2010

61. Budapest, 2011

62. San Diego, 2012

64. Team VIP, Las Vegas 2013

65. Team VIP, Las Vegas 2013

67. The future is already
here — it's just not very
evenly distributed.
William Gibson

68. questions ?

69. Yes, of course
we’re hiring :)
automattic.com/work-with-us