Vantaggi
The benefits were truly amazing. Maternity leave, co-working allowance, and healthcare were top-notch offerings. And of course, we were spoiled by the remote work environment. Some people are kind. It's a geek-friendly culture. The Grand Meetup is very accommodating to introverts.
Svantaggi
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.