Pros: A real remote job with async communication.

Cons: I used to love this job, but in the past few months, everything has been falling apart. There’s constant confusion. Leadership changes direction every few days, and no one takes responsibility; it always ends up on the ICs. Collaboration with design and product teams is also completely broken.

Pros: Remote work, but remote and hybrid opportunities are everywhere still if you're looking beyond the largest few companies.

Cons: It's hard to properly communicate how career-limiting a long stint at Automattic can be for a software engineer. Automattic's tech stack was outdated 10 years ago, and there's been little movement since then. They're really good at running simplistic WordPress sites performantly, but anything beyond that is a hot mess. Good luck passing a system design interview when you're drawing on the experience of hacking some code into the WPCOM monolith, crossing your fingers, and hoping for the best (did I mention there's no test environment or system test capabilities?). And I'm not suggesting resume-driven design here. The tech stack and tooling has a real concrete impact on engineering velocity and innovation. Many product-level decisions died in ideation because we didn't have an immediate path forward and knew advocating it with Systems would be a job killer. The impact to the business and product quality is incalculable. As an aside, I'll mention that I have no problem with PHP. Plenty of companies value PHP, but Automattic is not using modern frameworks and rarely using good design patterns. Even many WordPress companies are doing better. The teams are facing some incredible engineering challenges. It's incredibly hard to create and scale features supporting millions of sites all running in their own environments alongside any number of custom plugins. Quality is almost impossible to control given the myriad of environments and poor access to critical metrics. I don't believe there is a profitable solution that allows continued growth. There's a reason the whole industry has moved to SaaS. Without crystal clear focus/strategy and strong leadership, it's an intractable problem. Unfortunately, Automattic fully lacks the necessary strategic and technical leadership to forge ahead successfully. Since there's almost no built-in career growth here, Automattic's handbook will tell you to "choose your own adventure" in your career here: choose wisely and skip Automattic all together. You cannot and will not do the best work of your career here.

Pros: Great group of engineers to work with. Remote-first culture distributed across the world. Great products to work on.

Cons: * A high-performance culture is leading to long hours and burnout of A8C's best engineers. * Leadership constantly shifts priorities and doesn't allow enough time to ship any features. * AI is being shoved down our throats and actively contributing to issues in shipped features. * Current leadership is comprised of decent engineers who are not good people managers and struggle with strategy. * The pay is not competitive with other tech companies.