Ten years

Yes, I’m backdating this. Publishing just after the clock turned.

Ten. A nice round number that, unlike seven, I can’t claim any particular fondness for, beyond the fact I enjoy milestones. Which given my lack of blogging, and the content I have published, is evident.

Ten written years at Automattic

When I joined, I was the 474th (current at the time) Automattician. The internal stat that tracks the current metric has shifted a lot over the years. Today it reads: “You started on 2016-06-29. Of the 1,448 other a12s, 184 (12.71%) started before and 1,264 (87.29%) after you.”. Three years ago that same line had nearly 2,000 colleagues around me. There’s been ebbs and flows over the years but the longer I’m here, the less I’m focused on pure count and more on the people.

Since I’m a sucker for stats and numbers: somewhere in those ten years I’ve written 12,691 internal posts and comments (900,789 words, which is a frankly unhinged amount of typing) plus another ~154K Slack messages on top. Ignoring other tools we’ve used like Asana, Trello, and now Linear. At seven years it was around 8,500 posts and comments with 470K words, so evidently I’ve still found plenty to say and if anything it’s increased in the past few years. That’s also 3,653 sunrises clocked, as our internal homepage told me today.

I’ve told the origin story before, so I’ll be quick: I applied to be a Happiness Engineer, had my chat with Matt, got my contract, looked up my lead, found the words “Woo Team Accounts,” and cursed Matt out loud because I knew exactly one thing about Woo: that it turned a WordPress site into a shop. That was it. That was the extent of my knowledge of WooCommerce.

Ten years on I handle Payment Operations, I still bleed #7F54B3 #873eff, and the closest thing I have to a job description is the one I gave myself recently: payments air traffic control, a slight promotion on the Expert plumber it replaced, …and a fair distance from the Woo Jedi Apprentice I picked in my first week. Stripe renegotiations, Interchange and Network Costs, the health of an API, payment method strategies, revenue optimisation… they all come across my virtual desk, and the job is to keep them from hitting each other. Air traffic controller. Some days that’s challenging. Most days it’s also genuinely fun. I’m so very aware how lucky I am to be able to write those two things in the same sentence about a job, never mind the same one for a decade.

The person they’ll become

Allow me to indulge myself for a minute but I feel this in my bones even more today.

There’s a Jason Fried post from 2013 on SvN. It’s about hiring, and the idea that most people aren’t the perfect hire on paper: they’re a future perfect hire. Someone with the potential to become the right person for the role, if they’re handed the right opportunity instead of the mediocre one they’re stuck in.

“few things make me prouder than seeing someone excelling in a way that their resume/portfolio/references wouldn’t have suggested they could.”

I think about that line a lot, because I’m fairly sure I was one of those bets. Nothing on my 2016 CV said “this man will one day be the person you ping at midnight about a payments incident.” Automattic (and Matt, sticking me in Woo against my very loud but private objections) didn’t hire the finished article. They hired potential and then, crucially, gave me the room and the opportunities to grow into it. Over the years I’ve done two division rotations (shoutout Jetpack and Day One), applied and was rejected for two internal role switches, then in a switch out of Happiness, I joined Britni in a one-person outfit called “Payment Business Operations”, and as one of us said at the time, “made it a team.” None of that was a straight line. All of it was the company betting that I’d become someone, and then being patient enough to let me.

The part Fried’s post doesn’t dwell on, but that I’ve come to appreciate from this side of ten years, is what happens after you’re the one who got the chance. These days a decent chunk of my week is spent doing for other people what was done for me: handing out the kudos (486 given, 313 received), pointing folks at the opportunity instead of the obvious task, and trying to spot the future perfect person before their CV catches up with them. That turned out to be the best part of the whole thing. I didn’t see it coming in 2016. I applied to a8c purely because someone told me something along the lines of “the worst they can say is no”. I’d had my fair share of “Nos” at that point I really didn’t want another from a company I outwardly respected so much.

Still here, still glad

A lot has changed in ten years. I’ve been through more reorgs than I can neatly count, the headcount maths above tells its own story, and the work I do now would be unrecognisable to the bloke nervously refreshing his email in 2016. And yet, ten years in, I still pick up the occasional support ticket (11,113 tickets and 6,738 live chats deep since 2016, and counting). Once a Happiness Engineer, always a Happiness Engineer. What hasn’t changed is that I still want to be here. Still curious, still occasionally cursing Matt (affectionately!), still finding the work hard in the way that good work is meant to be hard. It’s something I’ve told the kids a few times, if you have a job you’re semi-good at and challenges you, you’re made.

The sabbatical maths is its own small comedy. Because my first one ran October to December 2021 (delayed because of the Sabbatigeddon, Woo Sabbatipocolypse? some punny term), the clock resets from the day you’re back rather than a strict five year cycle, so my number two doesn’t land until the 11th of January 2027, and my third can’t begin a day before the 10th of April 2032. Good Lord. 2032. That is a long way off. And yet, given what today is about, it’ll be here before I’ve finished deciding how to spend number 2 (considerably less of “that thing” that was around in 2021, considerably more of doing nothing).

Being a sucker for a milestone, here’s another: today, as I tick over ten years, my son is in his final week of Primary School. By the time I’m back from that second sabbatical he’ll be about to sit is final 6th year exams of high school! What is life. I say that but he was 18 months old when I was trialing at Automattic! We’re both starting a new “chapter” as July hits.

Everything else

This really has just been about numbers. I’ve not touched on anything else, the people, the places/meetups, the actual work, the memes, the drama. But anyway…

Thank you, Automattic. For the unknown bet, and for the decade. Here’s to seeing who we’ll both become next.