As of September 15th, I have been at Automatic for 9 weeks! The first three weeks were spent on support rotation and the last six weeks have been spent actually working on Team Mercury.
The annual Grand Meetup is also currently happening, during my 10th week, and it’s been great to play paintball, learn some Android development, experiment with the Dvorak keyboard, and much more with my coworkers. I’ve added a coworker selfie with fellow Automatticians that played paintball as the featured image for this post.
I’d like to share my thoughts about Automattic after actually being with the company and on my team for a small period of time.
I Will Never Stop Learning
This is currently the first statement of the Automattic creed. I believe that work at Automattic embodies this concept very much.
For starters, we work on very exciting projects and are always pushing to make better software. Not only that,but there are so many different projects at our company that use exciting tools/frameworks/languages, that any person can truly learn whatever they want. In short, there is no shortage of things to learn.
Further, the fact that Automattic allows employees to do rotations and temporarily work on other teams is great because it allows Automatticians to expand their knowledge as well as determine if they are on the correct them for themselves.
I Will Never Pass Up an Opportunity to Help Out a Colleague
Automatticians are generally very happy and helpful people. To all of the Happiness Engineers that answered my questions when getting familiar with the various support interfaces – Thank you for much for your help.
To Team Mercury who has been so helpful, thanks for putting up with my general lack of knowledge in all things JavaScript.
Enjoying the Hard Stuff
My Mom often praises me for how “smart” I am, even though that I believe I am of average intelligence. That being said, I do think the one thing that sets me apart from many others is my general fearlessness in regards learning new things.
I feel that the best opportunities for growth and learning are in doing the hard tasks.
At Automattic, I feel that our company does a great job of embracing hard tasks. For example, taking P2 and making it better with O2 and Backbone. Or, the new Tinker team whose goal is to build new and exciting things (per my understanding).
I also feel that Automatticians generally try to get things “right” as opposed to just getting things “working”. This is a key paradigm shift from working at a design agency where it was more important to just getting things working.
Dream Job
Overall,Automattic is a dream job and I enjoy working here!
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