Automattic: 11 year anniversary

While I have another year at Automattic to be grateful for and dig into, I want to call out my former colleagues who are still looking for a job after a workforce reduction in April of this year. If you can do anything to support them (make connections, hire them, send jobs their way, etc), know I’ll be personally grateful.

I woke up this morning at 5:30am, snoozed my alarm until 5:50am before rolling out of bed, putting my glasses on rather than my contacts, and grabbing my computer. After WCUS last week, my introverted soul feels especially tired and vulnerable (being visible can bring up big feels of vulnerability for me) so even a few extra minutes of sleep felt precious. I got a new role as an Architecture Wrangler right before my second sabbatical and that means a weekly 6am call with our engineering leadership from around the world. I feel a need to let that sentence rest for a moment. A second sabbatical. A new job. Working with people around the world. I feel profoundly grateful to have a real chance to work long term on big, hard problems and want to do what I can to pay it forward.

I continue to feel a shift in what it means to work somewhere so long–a bigger responsibility to the collective, a specific kind of exhaustion when a long debated problems return, an increasing ability to see and create momentum, a cyclical pattern of imposter syndrome that feels now like an old friend. I’m on support rotation this week, an annual ask everyone in the company answers, and chose to do it in Jetpack, the area I used to work in as a happiness engineer when I started at Automattic (to be exact, I started working on VaultPress). There’s something fitting about doing my support rotation during the week of my 11th anniversary. I have loved the headspace of solving a problem 1on1 yet zooming out to think about the system at the same time that makes a person have to even reach out. My brain lit up with ideas, some old and some new, in the face of old and new problems.

A month into my sabbatical this last year, I was shocked when I suddenly felt a growing sense of being ready to return to work. It felt similar to what happens when I can’t work out for whatever reason and suddenly I’m itching to get back into the flow of the intensity of being present with my body in that way. I think I missed the intensity of being present with my brain and with my colleagues in this way. It’s also a testament to the ways Automattic has built in structure to pace out the work, provide support, and let you design how you best work. The tricky part is knowing how you best work and then following through with that of course. I feel fortunate I had a few years of working remotely before Automattic to find my bearings.

Of all of my years at Automattic, this has been the most tumultuous and challenging by far with rapid, large changes and emotional heaviness. It reminds me of a favorite quote by W. Somerset Maugham: “We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love.” I am not the same person I was this year as last. Too much has happened and there’s too much yet left to do to heal, to come back together, to show up for others, to build the open web, to bring the next generation in, and to simply last. It’s only made me more dedicated to having hard conversations, giving honest feedback, asking difficult questions, doing hard work, and always returning to the collective in conflict. I’m always amazed how clarifying hard times can be in terms of doubling down on values and what really matters. I feel that living clarity as I write this.

What I do know remains the same is my gratitude for the chance given to me to work somewhere on problems and in ways that have so expanded my world (what I care about, who I care about, how I get to show my care). My partner has chronic vestibular migraines and every single time I get to show up for her in our daily lives I think about how incredible it is to have this ability at all. It was very important to me that she meet my parents this year and so much of working for Automattic made that possible and accessible: my salary, unlimited vacation, ability to work from wherever. The featured image of this post is from the time we all spent together. Last fall, I was able to do a grief recovery program offered and paid for by Automattic that provided a needed space for me to process the sudden death of a brother I barely knew. At a time when I didn’t have the capacity to find a therapist, an incredibly rare benefit of working at Automattic came at the perfect time. I have endless stories of incredible life events and opportunities that shouldn’t have happened made possible by how we work and what we have access to. Every single year I work here, the privileges and opportunities to live life deeply add up. My gratitude grows. I cannot believe this gets to be my life. May I find endless ways to pay it forward.