The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

by Scott Berkun

Making everyone work in support forces everyone to take customers seriously,

Months before I started at Automattic, some of the happiness engineers studied the kinds of requests that came in and realized that if they changed the user interface, they might get better information straightaway from customers. They decided to force customers to answer three good questions: What did you do? What did you see? What did you expect?

They'd invested heavily in tools and systems but put the onus on employees, even new ones like me, to decide how, when, and where to do their work. These attributes of culture didn't arrive by some technique sprinkled around the company years after it started. How did it happen, then?

This transparency planted an important seed in the culture. People behaved knowing that their actions would be visible to future contributors. And since there would be no face-to-face meetings, how well you expressed yourself in words was critical to earning a good reputation.

I will never stop learning. I won't just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there's no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I'll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.

I will communicate as much as possible, because it's the oxygen of a distributed company.

Picking projects of the right size to fit into two weeks is hard if you don't estimate, and schedules that short preclude estimates. The intent was to force us to work incrementally, shipping what we had, and doing another two-week cycle on the project if needed.

until there is no room to breathe. And nothing is real. There is no actual work being done. Instead it's all metawork, or discussions about future work. It's a sea of abstraction. The nonmakers are in charge of the makers and insist on spending the off-site not making anything.

But they forget the most important thing that location cannot change: the company culture.

me hizo acordar al secreto de sus ojos!