Matt Mullenweg - Harvard Business Review: Automattic employs 225 people. We’re located all over the world, in 190 different cities. We have a headquarters in San Francisco and it operates similar to a co-working space. For those who live in the Bay Area, they can work from the office, if they’d like. But in general, the majority of our employees work somewhere other than our home base.
3 comments:
This is a very interesting article.. and more interesting is to consider the potential application to the world of drama (that's why we're blogging, right??). I know this is the approach many drama schools take when auditioning prospective performance students– the overall prioritization of one's performance before his/her resume. Talent is talent, and everyone has enough to learn, or something like that. That said, how much can you really learn about a performer and his/her potential to grow in only a fifteen minute interview? And how much more investment/auditioning can be practical? Of course this is just for schooling, and from what I've heard about this "Real World," it seems an even less romantic process for casting/enrollment/hiring.. where resumes matter a significant amount, where a name like Carnegie Mellon holds a lot of weight, to the tragic disadvantage of the equally talented. How much, realistically, can the process Automattic pioneered be applied to the "Real World" of drama?
This is a brilliant method of hiring people and one of the first alternatives to interviews that I've heard of that I actually agree with. Having a trial period is really the only way to tell whether a person would work well in your company, and the only way that they would be able to tell if they'd really enjoy working for you as well. Especially in an odd working environment like the article describes, this is an important consideration. I'm sure it also cuts down on the number of applicants and weeds out all but the most committed people- doing extra work on the weekends and at night is a commitment that only someone who really wants the job would do.
It seems like more people should be utilizing these kinds of strategies to find the right fit when hiring. Obviously it would not necessarily work for all businesses, but those who can should, since the best way to see if a person "fits" is to let them do some work -- it's better for not only the company but the potential employee can also see what it would be like to work there.
The idea of the output being the most important consideration in working also makes a lot of sense -- the standard "nine to five" work schedule makes it easy to manage people, but absolutely doesn't let everyone do their best work. I do suspect that this is more true in creative settings, however.
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