Distributed: Reinventing the Workplace

Post on 08-May-2015

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description

A company without offices? Employees from all around the world? Working without pants? This surely must be The Future, and Automattic - the company behind WordPress.com - has been living it since 2005. Learn how more than 140 employees from over 27 countries collaborate to make the web a better place. This talk was given at the Reversim Summit in February 2013, and covered communication tools and methods, hiring and onboarding process, continuous deployment, and the general awesomeness of the distributed company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH7foZ2WiwY CC-BY-NC

Transcript of Distributed: Reinventing the Workplace

DISTRIBUTEDreinventing the workplace

$ whoami

Yoav Farhi

Developer

blog.yoavfarhi.com

@yoavf

$ pwd

(geocoding fail)

• 143 employees

• 27 countries (Israel: 2)

• No offices*

What it’s likeWork / Development

CommunicationsHiring / Onboarding

Being Social

cc by-nc-nd suratlozowickhttp://flic.kr/p/7Nehy8

Happy

cc by-nc-nd anarosaphotographyhttp://yoav.fr/happy

Let’s get to work

cc-by galato901http://yoav.fr/towork

Team Structure

Designed to be able to iterate quickly without any barriers, blockers, or sign-offs

Team Structure

• 4-7 person team size, mostly devs• A designer• Support, business, or marketing

person as needed• Team lead included

A 6 month roadmap that articulates long

term goals and smaller two-to-four weeks steps to get there

Each team choses its own methods and tools

Build itGet it out there

Iterate

$ deploy

~30 seconds

2000 servers

~30 seconds

2000 servers

In 2012

Deployed new code every 26 minutes on average

(just WordPress.com)

cc by-nc-nd hannasteenhttp://yoav.fr/oxygen

Async

Open

Simple

(bad) email

Meetings

IRC

• Continuous chat, your presence is required - this is “coming to work”

• Lots of channels, plenty of bots (logging, error reporting, tools, etc)

• Logged, easily searchable and referenced

P2

• Hybrid blog/forum/micro-blogging

• We use it for everything - teams, projects, social

consumption• Web

• Email (read/write)

• Jabber (read/write)

• IRC

• Mobile

• Search

• ...

Similar commercial software

• Yammer

• Hall

• Socialcast

• Jive

• daPulse

MISC

P270%

IRC25%

cc by-nc-nd androidmanhttp://yoav.fr/pool

Not for everybody :(

The process

• Initial screening: CV, prior open source work, interview

• Code test

• (Paid) Trial project

We see how you work

You see how we work

Be social?

Stinton Beach, 2007San Francisco, 2006

Stinton Beach, 2007

Oracle, 2008

Breckenridge, 2008

Quebec, 2009

Seaside, 2010

Budapest, 2011

San Diego, 2012

Team VIP, Las Vegas 2013

Team VIP, Las Vegas 2013

The future is already here — it's just not very

evenly distributed.

William Gibson

questions ?

Yes, of course we’re hiring :)

automattic.com/work-with-us