High Five

On the 9th of January this year, I turned 5 years at Automattic. This is the longest time I’ve ever been working for the same company, the previous one standing at 4.5 years.

I remember talking to my friend who referred me to work at Automattic (further in the text A8c). At one point he said, “This company will spoil you (in a good way)! You will see!”. I was skeptical, naturally, “Sure, sure, it’s just another company, I work only to get paid and that’s it”, but turned out I was wrong.

Benefits

So how can a company spoil its employees? Well, first of all, working at A8c comes with a lot of benefits! One such benefit is that they will purchase a laptop for you, with specifications of your choice, and a custom branded one (you choose the logo)! This laptop will be owned by you and you never have to return it back. But regardless of this 4th-year anniversary award, A8c purchases laptops for all of their employees (from day 1), which they can replace every 18 months.

The other benefit is sabbatical! Mine is scheduled to start in June and last until September. This will be a completely new experience for me, as ever since I started working in the IT industry professionally, back in 2010, I’ve never had a break longer than two weeks. I don’t know how this long break will affect me (hopefully positively!), as I keep fearing about losing grip to programming, or FOMO 🙂 Hopefully, it won’t be that bad!

On the day my application got accepted, I remember thinking about the sabbatical “whoa, that’s a really nice perk to have but it’s so far away so not even thinking about it”. It seems like this thought was yesterday. Time flew!

Purchasing books for self-improvement, gadgets, desks, monitors, online courses, etc. are also part of the benefits.

Another benefit which I really like is travel (at least 3 travels per year, 1 week each, any place in the world). Prior to COVID, we used to travel a lot. I blogged in the past about one grand meetup and another team meetup. Due to COVID, we haven’t been traveling much recently, but we have a (hybrid) team meetup scheduled in March, allowing people to either work from home or some destination they choose, and A8c will cover hotel/travel/food costs.

Choose your growth path

Benefits aside, you don’t just work for a company to wait and hit 5 years and then enjoy your sabbatical. You also want to enjoy your time spent there.

In the first days when I got hired, I started working on a product team, delivering new features and bug fixes while working closely with Happiness Engineers and other Code Wranglers.

After a while, I decided to try something new and I moved to another team that does hiring engineers. I’ve never done any hiring work before, but this was completely fine as A8c was ready to onboard anyone new coming to the team! Nowadays I work with potential new Automatticians (Newmatticians), reviewing their code, discussing their solutions, trade-offs, etc.

I still do coding (we have a lot of tooling in our team!), but the new thing for me was I had to learn the processes around how hiring works and what we expect from candidates. After learning the processes, you start thinking about ways to improve them, and this is actually something that I found interesting, especially with our amazing team which is always open to ideas and suggestions from everyone. The work we’re doing is closely related to formal systems, one of my favorite topics, i.e. formalizing bits and pieces in our processes while still keeping some stuff informal as to maintain the human aspect of it.

In any case, what was amazing to me is the support that A8c gives to its employees, depending on the employee’s chosen growth path. I mean, you read this as a benefit and are like “ok cool”, but actually doing it and feeling it in practice (i.e. actually seeing yourself learn new stuff) is really cool. You have no experience in hiring? No problem, we’ll teach you. You want to be a lead but have no leadership experience? No problem, we’ll teach you! There are a lot of roles and teams to switch to and do something else, should you get bored from your daily work 🙂 And if you want to stay in product development, that’s also fine, as A8c has tons of products.

Well, I think that’s a wrap. Here’s to another 5 years 🙂

In case this sounds interesting to you, Automattic is hiring!