Automattic Reviews

Where do I start? So many ridiculous inefficiencies! Frustrating (But Mandatory) Time as Happiness Engineers (aka Customer Service) It was rough being forced to do the mandatory stint in customer service as a new hire, even if your role has nothing to do with customer service. It's a highly technical product, and we ended up spending more time pinging people for help than actually helping customers. We were wasting the time of experienced Happiness Engineers. They also refused to update to a better contact center system, so ticketing and chat was siloed terribly. Unmanageable Project Management System The P2 project management system was awful. We were asked to post our project updates in a team P2, which is essentially a blog for your team. Like a blog, it gets pushed down the moment someone else posts another thing. There is no proper system of keeping projects visible and up to date. So bizzare for a remote-first environment. Good Ole Boys Club New folks were basically at the whim of those who had been at the company for a while. It's remarkably hard to bring in new ideas unless you've decided it's okay that you're the only one to execute them. It was near-impossible to do organized, efficient teamwork. People just do what they want to do, with no overarching direction to the work. It's overrun by poor people managers, mostly people who've been around for a while. For a time, I had a wretched manager who thought mentorship and leadership was sending links of her past accomplishments. I had 3 managers during a stint of approximately one year, so internally it was very unstable. It was surprising, since Automattic is an older startup. Poor User Experience I was mortified to learn that I couldn't recommend WordPress.com to anyone I know. I thought I'd be proud of working for such an iconic brand, but instead I found myself recommending competitors to loved ones because of the difficulty in learning WordPress.com. I had to field off complaints from people close to me who used the platform, much to my embarrassment. Philosophy Finally, the worst part of working for Automattic was the "bazaar" philosophy. If you read "A Year Without Pants," a book about working at WordPress.com, you get what I mean. It's the idea that contrasts a "cathedral" mindset. Basically, a bazaar mentality highlights people constantly adding features based on whim or opinion -- cobbling together their own priorities. A cathedral mindset is the centralized pursuit of a grand vision of what a product should be. Automattic lived and breathed the bazaar mindset. Features were added then abandoned. No one managed Stats, which completely boggled my mind! There were so many dead projects drifting listlessly in the P2 system, abandoned before they were given life due to lack of resources.

- Some employees are more equal than others. Automattic used to have a lot of pride in its diversity and inclusion policies when hiring, but that has changed substantially in the last years when benefits and hiring shifted more and more towards US-based employees. Also, treatment varies a lot. US employees are treated with more leniency, whereas remote contractors are more... expendable. - There is absolutely no Engineering Practice You can choose your own tools, which is great. But there's absolutely no regard for who's coming next. There is no technical direction other than "open source is the best idea of our generation". Also, there are very poor and unhealthy metrics. - "Leadership" is incredibly inconsistent. Your happiness as an "automattician" depends greatly on how much overworked is your team lead. Because team leads are also required to not only manage people and projects, but also have regular output. Some leaders manage to concentrate on the first two, but even then, it depends on the projects. It's sad when leaders have to ignore the people side in favour of managing projects or writing code to meet a deadline. If that's your leader inclination, you can expect to have an awful time. - Communication is oxygen, except when it's not. No matter how openly and honestly you communicate, if your leader has too much pressure on the technical side, or is too inexperienced as a leader, brace yourself. You could easily be terminated if you have a bad time. But as I said before, there's more leniency towards US-based employees. - Projects are not finished, they are abandoned. There is no project management practice. Neither agile nor waterfall. Work is estimated based on which way the wind blows. Tracking of progress is non-existent and deadlines are set based on management "feeling" how difficult implementation is. That leads to deadlines not being met, priorities shifting and projects deployed to users with incomplete features. - Forget about having a career path. Automattic is a company that does not believe in titles. That in itself is not a bad idea. But a side effect of that is that as an automattician you have no goals for career development. You are encouraged to learn, but not provided with direction. So, in most cases, you'll pursue things that will either make your work easier or help you realize that your future is elsewhere.