Tag: distributedlife

A week in Cannes

May 2nd, 2022

For nearly two years, I’ve worked with teammates I’ve never shared space with in real life. We’ve “met” through video calls, and we know each other well via our constant text chatter at work, through longer-form internal blog posts, and most importantly, through an ongoing banter of GIFs, memes, and emoji reactions in our team Slack channel.

We are 11 teammates across seven countries, six time zones, and three continents. Last week, we finally got to meet in real life. On the first day, when we each gave a 3-4 minute flash talk on a topic of our choosing, I laughed until my face hurt. We drank wine, we ate cheese, we walked for croissants, baguettes, French meals, and fresh oysters. We worked on a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. We talked together, strategized together, listened to music together, made coffee and lunch and dinner together. We shopped at the Cannes market for a team-made dinner on our last night together. A cyclist took our photo on the Cannes film festival red carpet. We bonded.

I am so grateful for my team and for Automattic.

Our home and work base for the week

Roses at the Cannes market

Our lunchtime view at the villa

Garden across from our villa

Beach at Cannes

From the top terrace where we worked every day

The market florist stripping leaves and thorns before wrapping flowers

Hilltop view of Cannes

Our neighbors

We did not go hungry.
So far, so good: my first days at Support Driven

March 21st, 2018

I had to laugh Monday on my first day of work at my new job. I wore my exact same workout clothes, in my exact same office, in my exact same surroundings: our home. Like my former employer, Support Driven is a distributed company. To my family, my work life looks exactly the same: me in our house on my computer.

This was kind of weird to me at first. I wanted something external to be different. I was starting a new job! If I wasn’t going to a new office, and my current office is too small to rearrange, the best thing I could come up with was to change my routine. I didn’t like exercising first thing in the morning before — I was always having to choose between exercising and writing — so I figured this was a good place to start. I’m the only east coast SD employee, so I adjusted my daily schedule to work in the morning when it’s quiet, extend my mid-day break to include exercise, shower, and lunch, then work a little later in my day to maximize overlap with my coworkers on the west coast. I like this so far — I feel like it gives me a little more open space.

While not much has changed to my family, who still sees me working on my computer from a spot in the living room or from my office downstairs, the work itself is quite different, and I am gleeful about it. I get to focus on communication! Also, unlike other new jobs, when I started this one, rather than feeling lost, wondering what I should work on, and how long it would take me to get up to speed, I actually felt useful.

The week prior, I asked Scott, the company owner, to make a worry list. To dump all his fears and concerns about current projects into a document that we could go over together. Identifying those worries helped us identify gaps, and showed me where to focus my attention (and where he should focus his). From that list, we divided up the worries, so that I could take some of them from him, relieving him from carrying the entire burden himself, and freeing him to focus on the work that he is best suited to do.

What was super exciting to me is that many of the items on the list, and that I need to prioritize, are my strengths: communication, the website, and keeping an eye on the big picture. Also, apparently, HR.

So here, as I head into my third day of work, I’ve helped Scott feel better about where to focus his attention, helped clarify our roles, helped determine the benefits package we’ll be offering employees, and have created an editorial calendar for updates about our upcoming conference, the Support Driven Expo, in Portland, Oregon.

My to-do list is as long as my arm, and I have two more big things I want to complete this week, and I am loving every minute of it.
Saying goodbye at a distributed company: my final week at Automattic

March 16th, 2018

How do you say goodbye to your coworkers of 3.5 years when you’re scattered all over the globe and none of you is in the same physical location? Last week, I sent a text to my husband, “My co-leads are going to have going away happy hour (via video) in the evening on Wednesday March 14. I imagine it could go for a while. Will that work for you?”

He replied, “Of course that’s fine. Weird… But fine 😉”

It’s times like these that being distributed is hard. We can’t get together in a pub, with the ambient sounds of end-of-workday chatter, mugs thunking on a bartop, chairs scraping across the floor, laughter at the other end of the table. We can’t sit next to each other and clink glasses as we raise a toast. We can’t hug each other when it’s all over.

But we make do. On Wednesday evening, about 15 of my fellow Happiness team leads made our own drinks in our own kitchens, fired up our Zoom software, and joined each other in front of our screens for a last hoorah together. Some of us moved to a different part of the house than we usually work — from the desk to the couch, or from the office chair to the floor. Some were travelling on meetup and were in a completely different time zone than they’d normally be, 10:30 at night for a couple of folks who’d normally be at 2:30pm. Others had to hoist beverages mid-afternoon instead of after 5pm. #sorrynotsorry.

We laughed and shared memories, and thoroughly-martini-ed, I ~~probably~~ said stupid stuff. I’m going to miss these folks.

The next day, a teammate pinged me on Slack and asked, “Do you have some free time today at 3pm your time today?”

I answered, “Yep!” and all day wondered if something was wrong. Did something happen that she needed advice for? Did she just want one last 1:1 together?

When I joined the Zoom call, my team was there :-). I did not expect that at all — a surprise going-away party! — and it was wonderful. Not everyone could join the call, but gosh did it make me feel special. We laughed a ton, made fun of each other as is necessary, and then spent about half the call trying to set up this shot, with me in the middle, and everyone waving in the right direction:

So that’s how we say goodbye at a distributed company :-).

Thank you to all my Eshu teammates in the shot above for the fun, laughs, challenges, lessons, and for helping me grow — Cátia, Rafa, Edu, Samantha, Jay, Mindy, and Sam — and to my peeps not shown, Amy, Nello, Charlie, and Jen.
A day in the life of a live chat Happiness Engineer

March 5th, 2017
I lead a WordPress.com live chat team at Automattic, and as we expand our live chat offering into the weekends, I work a couple of weekend days each month. Today is one of those weekend workdays for me.

On weekends I do more customer-facing-support and less team-lead stuff than I do during the week, and I’m excited to share my experiences in direct support to help folks who are looking to become Happiness Engineers see what the day-to-day job is like. If you are one of these prospective Happiness Engineers, be sure to check out posts tagged A8Cday in the WordPress.com Reader for more stories from support pros at Automattic.

Sunday, March 5

I woke at 6AM today while everyone but the cats was still sleeping. The house was silent until I ran the NutriBullet to make my breakfast (sorry, family!), and I started the day by plopping down on the couch with my smoothie. I propped my feet up on the coffee table and starting skimming through the 80 or so email notifications about the goings-on at work from Friday while I was taking my flex day.

My email inbox does not include emails from real people who I need to respond to — all of the communication I do with co-workers is via internal blogs and a messaging tool called Slack. Instead, I use email to triage WordPress notifications for communications that happen via our internal blogs, or P2s. In my inbox were a few mentions from meetings and conversations I was involved in (delete), several posts about various products, teams, and business and marketing updates (save for later), and discussion threads I’m following about live chat tips, help desk tools, and product flows (skim then delete).

After triaging my work email, I made some tea, and shifted to an email system where I do actually respond to real people: our customers. Before my live chat shift started at 8AM, I sent a handful of emails to Business customers about questions that spanned the following types of issues:
- Please don’t show my email address on my site’s contact form (Not to worry! It pre-fills with the information of logged in users who visit the form; when I visit the form, it fills with my information, not yours. Visitors will see their own email address, not the site-owner’s.)
- Why are my SEO options deactivated? (They appear to be working on my end — can you tell me more about the trouble you’re running into? Please provide the steps you’re taking, what you expect to happen, what happens differently from what you expect, and any error messages you receive.)
- I added an email to my domain but haven’t received my activation email (the domain is not hosted here at WordPress.com, so there will be some preliminary steps if you’d like to use that domain with WordPress.com and then add email)
- I just signed up! Where do I start? (Awesome! Welcome! I recommend starting here.)
- How can I install the MailChimp plugin? (MailChimp integration is built-in on WordPress.com, so you don’t need a plugin. Instead you can follow the steps on this support page to get your MailChimp pop-up configured)
- I need to add MX records to my DNS so I can use my email — can you help? (Thanks for providing those records — yep, I’ll show you how to add them)
At 8 AM I put my teacup in the dishwasher, got a glass of ice water, went downstairs to my office, and put my walking shoes on. I fired up my tread desk, logged into chat on our new internally-built, homegrown chat tool, and started chatting with customers. Midway through my first chat I got a text from my Mom:

Are you working today? I have a WordPress question. If I get in live chat can I ask for you?

My colleagues got a kick out of that when I mentioned on Slack — “My mom is about to get on live chat and ask for me 😀 Please send her if you get her.”

That’s pretty adorable. HI MOM

If my mom ever comes to live chat, I will /transfer Andrea

I spent a little over three hours in live chat with customers before breaking for lunch:
- answering questions about WordAds
- helping my mom with the WordPress mobile app
- helping folks get set up with the right installation of WordPress for their needs
- changing colors in the Customizer
- finding themes that fit their design needs
- pasting content copied from an email into the HTML editor instead of the Visual editor (when pasting from word processors or email, the formatting can get messy)
- setting up photo galleries
- adjusting widgets so they appear on some pages but not other using widget visibility
- determining why a map is appearing on a contact page but not in the contact widget (it needs a Google API key in the widget)
- and various other questions.
When chat was slow, I also helped colleagues in Slack and answered Business customers’ questions in the email queue. In the first of the morning hours we were well-staffed on chat and I was generally helping 2-3 customers at a time; we got a little busier in the third hour, and I was often handling 4 simultaneous chats before it was time to break for lunch. With one French-speaking customer, we were having trouble crossing the language barrier, until it occurred to me to change my WordPress.com interface to French so I could tell her the steps using the language she uses in her dashboard. I forgot to switch mine back to English, and my phone’s WordPress notifications were coming through in French on my lunch break 😂. She was super grateful, and super excited for the help, and that is what I love about this job: the lightbulb moments, the “OMG THANK YOU” moments, the “Wow, I didn’t know I could do that!” moments of empowerment.

When I went upstairs at 11:30AM, most of the family was still in PJs. My daughter showed me the slime she just made (amazing, sweetie), my husband and son checked to see if it was ok for them to take the new canoe out for its maiden voyage without me (yes, that’s fine), and the cats jumped in my lap while I ate (no, you can’t have my salmon). I came back down for one more hour of chat, to finish up some more Business emails, and to hit 5 walking hours on my treadmill. When I looked out my office window a few minutes ago, my husband and son were returning the canoe to its storage place — our trailer is not equipped to carry it. Bummer. I guess we’ll need a roof rack.

Now that my walking is done, I’m headed back upstairs to make a cup of coffee and finish out my workday by the living room window. In my final couple of hours of work, I’ll set my mug in the windowsill and test a new feature while cats curl on my lap. Oh, and I need to do some prep work for my team meetup in Playa del Carmen that’s coming up in a little over a week!

¡Gracias por leyendo!

If you love helping people and customer support is totally your bag, check us out — we’re hiring. Also, I stole the laptop photo idea from my co-worker Julia Amosova — thanks Julia! She and many others have posted about a typical Automattic day (a8cday) if you’d like to read through more stories.
Goodbye, Vienna

June 27th, 2016

I’m on the train to the Vienna airport. It’s time to go. My mind is a jumble of WordCamp Europe, Viennese architecture, flower boxes, Wiener schnitzel, dancing at the WCEU ball, showing our hotel bartender how to make a proper martini, and laughing and talking long into the night with coworkers.

The company I work for, Automattic, is a distributed company. We don’t have an office: there is no headquarters where we all go to work. Instead, 470 of us work from wherever we want, whether that’s a home office in Australia, a coworking space in Seattle, an Airbnb in Prague, or a cafè in Vienna. What this means is we must communicate an immense amount online in order to get our work done. We “talk” constantly (thousands of messages per week) via Slack (a messaging tool), P2s (internal blogs), and video hangouts.

Talking to each other via text gives tremendous insight into our colleagues’ personalities — do they use emoji and GIFs? Are they succinct, direct, contemplative, punny? Which watercooler P2s do they engage with: music, fitness, homeownership, books?

Communicating via text allows people who refrain from speaking up in a physical space, where extroverts may jump in faster and louder, to have more of a voice: they can compose their thoughts in writing, without interruption, before sharing them.

What this amazing distributed life also means is that we rarely see each other in real life. Some of my favorite people on earth are my colleagues, who I have become very close to through our online communications.

I work with them every day but only see them once or twice per year.

So when we get together, we squeeze every second of together time out of it. We breakfast, explore, lunch, sightsee, work, drink, dine, talk, laugh, talk deep into the night, and sometimes even stay up until sunrise together. As one of my coworkers said last night, “This is the first place I’ve worked where I like everyone I work with. I actually want to be with my coworkers.”

I’m now at the gate, waiting to board my flight from Vienna to Paris, reflecting on the amazing time I spent at WordCamp Europe. I have memories of getting on stage in front of 300+ European WordPress enthusiasts; ambling the streets of Vienna on long walks with my colleagues; hanging out after dark on a giant grass covered water-mattress outside the children’s museum; and most of all, conversations and laughter.

Goodbye, Vienna, goodbye, friends, and thank you, Automattic.

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My office today

May 30th, 2016

Working from a screened porch on the coast of Georgia.

For the first time in over a year and a half at Automattic, I am taking full advantage of the fact that I can work from anywhere. This summer, my husband and I grappled with how to get our kids from Virginia to Georgia and Florida so they could spend time with their grandparents in each state.

We talked about meeting one set of grandparents halfway, then those grandparents meeting the other grandparents halfway again, then sending the kids home from Florida to Virginia unaccompanied on an airplane.

That would have worked, except that it would have cost us more money than we wanted to spend, and it would have created a lot of driving for the grandparents. Plus, my husband and I wanted the chance to see our parents, but neither of us could justify taking two weeks off to visit everyone, plus another week for our own family vacation in August.

Then one day it hit me. Duh. I can work from anywhere. As long as I have my laptop and wifi, I’m all set. I can be the ultimate mom taxi: drive the kids to the grandparents 7 and 15 hours away and get to hang out with everyone in the evenings when my workday is done

So this morning, I worked from my parents’ screened porch on the coast of Georgia. And as a bonus, I got to use my mom’s laptop to test software on a different operating system and browser configuration than I usually use.

I could get used to this.