DHH writes at 37signals Stop whining and start hiring remote workers. Automattic does the same, except we use P2 for our projects and virtual water coolers, IRC for our chat, Skype and Google+ Hangouts for calls and screensharing, and pretty much never email. When people read these things about 37signals their first criticism is always “does it scale?” For Automattic it has to a hundred people and growing.
Happy 100+ people!
Keep walking!
I’m going to take a deeper look at the P2 theme straight away 🙂
I fully agree. As long as the virtual organization is built of small and self-reliant teams, it scales great.
The challenge is finding people who want to work from home and do a good job at it – but that’s always true. Without the right kind of people, any business is in trouble.
I would love to be hired for this type of job…
We’re hiring right now:
http://wpml.org/home/contact-us/
I’ve never understood why people even ask questions like that. How could having a building with offices and desks and chairs and bandwidth and phones and and and and… scale any better than letting the same people work in an environment where they are comfortable and is setup to make them as productive as possible. Sure, not everyone is built to be a WFH employee, but it seems to me that it would scale much better as long as you have the right people.
Congrats to all your staff Matt and Happy New Year to all of you!
Stay blessed and All the best in 2012! 🙂
aRVee
I’ll have to take a closer look as well at P2 as well. I tried it out a while back a ago and liked it. Thanks!
There’s Mozilla, too. Not sure of the numbers, but I’d say most of us employees are remote. We get along pretty well, and I’m completely spoiled by the work conditions.
I worked for one of the major bankers over 3 years ago as a systems programmer. I had earned 3 days a week telecommuting from home, avoiding a 2+ hourly commute per day; this was due to my demonstration of commitment by working production oncall up to 24 hours straight.
After back surgery, I attempted to return to my preexisting schedule, only to be denied. As the surgery revealed degenerative disc disease, I could no longer drive the distance and ended up on long term disability. I was forcefully retired 24 months after surgery, never having the opportunity to return to active employment.
It would be awesome to learn a little bit more about how you guys specifically use P2. My team is using it, but we’re using Basecamp as well (for project management, task tracking, etc.). We enjoy Basecamp, but it’s overkill more often than not. Are there some clues the Automattic team can share about tracking tasks with P2?
You can do some conventional things, like keeping a list of major todos in a text widget in the sidebar. A few teams use plugins to track status on posts, I’ll see if any can be posted here.
Thanks, Matt. I look forward to anything you might be able to share!
I’m here in Indonesia also running this kind of office environment, which I believe will safe me a lot in daily expenses and monthly office space rent. Also like Matt, I can hire a lot of good talents without worrying a lot where in the soil they resides. Good choice nowadays. And we are planning to go public in the next 2-3 years from now, all without any physical office.