Book Club: "The Year Without Pants" by Scott Berkun
The Year Without Pants
This book is a first person account of Scott Berkun’s 2 years working for Automattic (creators of wordpress) as a development team lead. Berkun is a qualified author and software manager, making this book a truly great insight into a company changing how we define what ‘working’ even is.
I won’t re-summarize the content of the book as it’s a fantastic story on it’s own. However I will talk a bit about the main thoughts that the book was trying to bring to light in the world of business building and technology.
One of the most radical things (there are several) about how Automattic is run is that the team is fully distributed, meaning everyone is scattered across the globe and collaborates remotely. While the current paradigm is still hung up offices and cubicles, there are firms getting a whole lot more done with remote teams. Some of the biggest benefits of remote teams include flexible schedules for your employees, the ability to recruit and hire anyone in the world and cut costs on office space and expenses. If you’re interested in the pro’s and con’s of remote teams, check out ‘Remote: No Office Required’ by Jason Fried and the team over at 37Signals (another fully remote operation). Its not just for software developers as you’ll read in the book, though if you are a software developer it’s even more important you look into it.
Wordpress is free and open source. It’s kind of mind boggling at first to think about a firm who’s main and only real ‘product’ is actually free to use and free to modify. Enter the fantastic world of open source software. For the uninitiated, open source basically means that anyone can download and rewrite code for a particular software package. They are then free to do with it what they like. CEO of Automattic, and someone you should really know, Matt Mullenweg is one of the most passionate entrepreneurs about open source out there today. He is fiercely committed to the Wordpress community and has grown it (with plenty of help) to incredible heights in popularity. I think as of today something like 20% of all websites run wordpress.
So clearly the philosophy over at Automattic is freedom freedom freedom. If you’re from a corporate environment you are probably saying to yourself ‘Well that’s great but how do they keep the employees producing if they’re so free??’ The elegance of companies like Automattic is due to their free and passionate existence they tend to attract amazing and passionate employees by the masses. Without performance reviews, paperwork and bureaucracy the employee is only left with his/her work. This creates a highly focused on results environment that doesn’t have the shotgun to head type approach most businesses take. And that is the real key to their success over at Automattic and Wordpress.org.
If you want to read more about an amazing company and really get a look under the hood of how they do business (and how freakishly happy these employees are with their jobs and lives) check out Berkun’s book, I highly recommend it.
The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
Oh and here is Jason Fried’s book on remote working. IF you’re interested in trying it out or are just curious it’s also worth a read. It’s quick and written in short little vignettes about various remote working topics, pretty cool.