It flew by without me even noticing, but in February I passed my fourth year working for Automattic. It is now the longest I’ve worked for any company and I hope to continue working there for many more years to come. It has been an amazing experience so far, and here’s some of the reasons why:

A Distributed Workplace

Being allowed to work from anywhere in the world is really freeing. In fact, shortly after I started at Automattic my family moved overseas to Scotland for two years. Without that freedom we would never have had so many European adventures. I’m quite jealous of my single coworkers that travel a lot more than I can!

As a Dad of young children, I also really appreciate that I can be at home and be more involved with my kids’ day-to-day upbringing. If I were in an office I would be away from them ~10 hours everyday, which just doesn’t seem like the way it should be. This week it has been especially handy as my dear wife has had a stomach bug, and I’ve been able to be flexible with my work schedule and care for the kiddos while she rests up.

Amazing People

The people at Automattic are so great to work with. The culture is very positive and upbeat. I’ve never seen a group of people so good at writing puns 😉

I’m continually blown away by the great work that Automatticians produce. My personal favorite at the moment is Cloudup, check it out!

Challenging Work

As a developer, it is an amazing place to work. There’s always new challenges to overcome and l still learn new things everyday (TIL!). We do code reviews for all pull requests, and I’ve really enjoyed learning from others on my team on how they would solve a problem in an alternative way.

Speaking of challenges, I recently joined a new team! I’ve joined up with team Simperium, which is the sync tech that powers Simplenote. I sync I’m excited for this new adventure!

Travel

Part of working for Automattic is traveling to meetups. My team typically did two of these per year, and the entire company meets once per year as well. The cool part is that you can pick anywhere in the world you want to meet as long as it has decent internet access. We work hard at meetups, but still take some time to see the surroundings and participate in fun activities during the week.

Since starting at Automattic I’ve been to Seaside (Florida), Milan, Austin, Edinburgh, Zaragoza (Spain), Budapest, Chicago, San Diego, Greece, San Francisco/Santa Cruz and Tokyo. In a few weeks, I will have a meetup with my new team in Aruba! Queue Beach Boys music.

Join Up

I was employee number fifty-something when I joined Automattic, and today we are over 250 people! We are actively hiring, so apply today if you think you’ve got what it takes to be an Automattician! Just make sure to practice up on your puns.

As for my ‘Achievement Unlocked’ post title, I get to pick up one of these bad boys now that I’ve hit the four year mark: