One year ago today I started working for Automattic

It was a Friday, the very first day after my notice period. It threw the HR a bit into confusion, because who the hell starts on a Friday?

Downward spiral

A couple of years ago my work situation was dreadful.

I was broke after putting all my money and my efforts in a small web dev studio with two friends. We were good at our jobs, but none of us had any entrepreneurial attitude whatsoever, which in hindsight seems something quite useful to have when starting a business.

We started too young (maybe), without a clear plan laid out (definitely), and we burned out (inevitably).

Can’t say for my friends, but it put me in some dark places, and it took me quite a lot of strength—and a lot of support from my SO—to climb out.

Facing the job market—the Italian job market, that is—again after so many years was tiring and depressing.

I’ve replied to pretty much every IT ad I could find, except for gambling companies, my only self-imposed limit to avoid definitively compromising my principles.

While waiting for answers, I was really broke.

My scooter needed servicing and I got fined because of that, leaving me with the grand total of 40€ in my bank account.

That’s why I eventually accepted the first offer I got, no questions asked.

Fun fact: my scooter broke down when I was going back home after signing the contract.

I got hired as an external contractor to work at Accenture, the big bad corporate I’ve been trying to avoid all my life.

My Accenture experience wasn’t so bad as others would paint it, likely because I was an external resource: the bosses didn’t have enough leverage to make me do infinite overtimes, and I was outside the “career spiral” that draws out the worst in people.

The pay was ok, but the job was boring me out of my mind.

Usually, when people think about IT offices, they think of a herd of possibly smelly nerds, talking about D&D, or the last Nvidia GPU, or how tabs are totally better than spaces.

Most programmers working at Accenture had any love for programming. They graduated in CS because it gave them better odds at finding a good-enough paying job.

It was bad for me, though. I started sending out my résumé again after several months, because I couldn’t bear it anymore.

At some point, my good friend Stef, who started working for Automattic some months before, reminded me that, well, I’ve been a WordPress developer for the best part of my work life, and why don’t I apply with Automattic myself?

Eventually Stef saved me, and I couldn’t be more grateful to her, but it took several more months.

Matt himself bounced me right away for I wasn’t the right fit for Automattic.

Oh well, it was a long shot anyway. Or was it?

One month later, totally out of the blue, they asked me to schedule an interview.

I was like: wtf? And then: WTF!

I got interviewed on Slack, and apparently I did a good impression (even though I had one of the worst answers ever on JS race conditions) because I got on to the following step, a week-long code test, and then finally to the several-months-long trial (also interrupted by my wedding and honeymoon) on a real project that I would have finally deployed months later.

I’ve never experienced a similar hiring process, and I can vouch for it as the best possible for both the company and the applicant.

Working in a completely remote environment is not easy, and probably most people wouldn’t thrive in it, so it’s awesome that Automattic gives you a taste of it right during the hiring process.

Eventually Matt asked me when I wanted to start. I run the numbers for a split second and answered with the first date possible after the notice. Which was a Friday. It threw HR a bit into confusion, because who the hell starts—

Automattic, at last

The first three weeks as an Automattician are spent on customer support rotation: learning all about WordPress.com and its inner workings, answering tickets, attending the support chat.

These three weeks blew my mind. I knew already the reasoning behind them, but I couldn’t imagine how helpful they’ve been for me to understand so many things about Automattic in the first place. 10x better than any technical-only onboardings.

After that, and again on a Friday, I finally started working on team Lannister—something that makes me super proud because House Lannister is objectively the best House.

With some real luck, I got there right on time for the team meetup, in Buenos Aires.

Team meetups are the Automattic approach to team building: once or twice a year, a week abroad all together working on a small project and visiting a far away city.

Anxious and shy as I am, I was freaking out. I mean, I love travelling, but the idea that my teammates would meet me and judge my work IRL… yeah, I was freaking out.

But instead it was amazing.

Since then, people from Lannister moved on to different teams, and other people joined it. But those I met at my first meetup, well, they were my first teammates and I’ll always miss them when we won’t be in the same team anymore.

Just to give a sense of the kind of travel that working for Automattic entails, during this first year, I’ve been to: Buenos Aires, Edinburgh, London, San Diego, and Vancouver.

And I loved it.

I’ve also moved from Rome to Brighton, in UK.

It was something I’ve always wanted to do, but never had the courage nor the possibility.

My wife gave me the first, Automattic the second.

Working without pants

A fully remote job is pretty much the dream of a lifetime for a socially awkward person like me.

I occasionally miss the IRL water cooler banter, but to be honest, rarely in my previous experiences I got the chance to meet likeminded coworkers.

In Italy, the sheer amount of inappropriateness that goes on in the workplace is baffling, and being finally out of that feels awesome.

To be fair though, it helped being assigned to a team of awesome folks: finally I can argue about which is the best Doctor with somebody who actually knows what I’m talking about (even though, I’m pretty sure Rodrigo has seen all the classic series too, so I’m no one compared to him!).

The need for socialization is alleviated by numerous video chats: usually with the team, sometimes with the entire company. And of course there are the team meetups and the yearly Grand Meetup, which is an incredible—and tiring—experience, and I can’t wait for the next one.

Working from home always is extremely different to doing it just occasionally. It forces you to self-impose a routine and it quickly loses its novelty aura: staying at home once in a while feels like a day off, and the productivity is heavily affected; staying at home always is the norm, and being able to work at your own rhythm means that your productivity is often at peak.

There is a downside, though: you have to be very strict with your own schedule, or you end up working for way too many hours every day.

When this happens—and it will happen—it is the worst, and before you notice it, it starts affecting the people around you.

I still struggle with this, and I try every day to not check Slack or GitHub on my phone when I’m not working, and to stop for dinner at a sane hour.

In Automattic I’ve found some crazy good developers. Like, miles ahead of me.

It’s no secret that I have the utmost respect for my kinda-former teammate Dennis, but to be honest, I was terrified by him at first.

Suffering a bit (or a lot) from impostor syndrome is perfectly fine, but starting a new job in the same team as Dennis? Hell no. I didn’t understand half of what he said (I still don’t, to be perfectly fair!), and all his code reviews seemed on a completely different level than mine.

Again, I still feel as terrified from him as I did the first day, but all the same, I can’t thank him any more for how much he always pushed me to write better and more thought-out code.

My second year as an Automattician

When I signed the contract, my parents had a hard time backing me on it. For them it was too good to be true, especially because they had never heard of Automattic before.

I think after seeing me so much happier and relaxed over this year, I can safely say they are now perfectly fine with my career choice.

Also, it’s apparently a very good career choice, because in the last few months I’ve been receiving quite a bit of unsolicited job offers. If any of you recruiters are reading this: thanks, but no thanks! I’m perfectly fine where I am right now, and to be honest, I’m totally not done yet with all the free WordPress t-shirts and random swag.

Every now and then my team leads ask me what my plan for the near future are, and my answer is pretty much always this: I don’t know what to say, I’m still in the honeymoon phase.

It’s sincerely true, even though over this year I got to see that it’s not always a bed of roses, but nothing major, and always with a positive outlook.

So yeah, here it is to my second year as an Automattician!