<story><title>Automattic is closing its San Francisco office as most employees work remotely</title><url>https://qz.com/1002655/the-company-behind-wordpress-is-closing-its-gorgeous-san-francisco-office-because-its-employees-never-show-up/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alaskamiller</author><text>Had a party at the WordPress office a few years back and it&amp;#x27;s a great space. There&amp;#x27;s a lounge, kitchen, the bathrooms are nice, some room for bikes, and the rest of the space is setup to be multi-use. There&amp;#x27;s a big stage area and the corners are  furnished to be pretty cozy.&lt;p&gt;Of my past work places--death star cube farms in old silicon valley to tiny rooms in sweltering Berkeley summers to shiny live&amp;#x2F;work lofts to giant sprawling disneyland like campus to noisy hipster coffee shops--that WordPress office would be up there in terms of a good place to work at.&lt;p&gt;The real story is the upward trend that if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. If you offer telecommute, workers will not show up.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been freelancing and telecommuting the past five years. I&amp;#x27;ve built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve built my lifestyle around that. As in I work around my life. Things just... get done without a direct measure of productivity anymore.&lt;p&gt;Sitting somewhere from 9 to 5 is like watching TV from the 2000&amp;#x27;s, ordering Netflix DVDs when we live in the 2010&amp;#x27;s with streaming Netflix.&lt;p&gt;And as one disappear, so does another and another. When you look around and realize no one else is there anymore it just becomes a ghost town while the virtual water cooler becomes more and more vibrant.&lt;p&gt;No ones goes to the office anymore, it&amp;#x27;s too lonely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavel_lishin</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The real story is the upward trend that if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. If you offer telecommute, workers will not show up.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Isn&amp;#x27;t that the employer offering a foot, and the employees gladly taking them up on the offer, to the mutual benefit of both? It&amp;#x27;s not like they&amp;#x27;re helping themselves to a pocketful of pens and a spare monitor on their way home.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m glad that&amp;#x27;s working out for you, but the only things expecting anything from me at 2am should be my child, and Pagerduty if I&amp;#x27;m on-call that week.</text></comment>
<story><title>Automattic is closing its San Francisco office as most employees work remotely</title><url>https://qz.com/1002655/the-company-behind-wordpress-is-closing-its-gorgeous-san-francisco-office-because-its-employees-never-show-up/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alaskamiller</author><text>Had a party at the WordPress office a few years back and it&amp;#x27;s a great space. There&amp;#x27;s a lounge, kitchen, the bathrooms are nice, some room for bikes, and the rest of the space is setup to be multi-use. There&amp;#x27;s a big stage area and the corners are  furnished to be pretty cozy.&lt;p&gt;Of my past work places--death star cube farms in old silicon valley to tiny rooms in sweltering Berkeley summers to shiny live&amp;#x2F;work lofts to giant sprawling disneyland like campus to noisy hipster coffee shops--that WordPress office would be up there in terms of a good place to work at.&lt;p&gt;The real story is the upward trend that if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. If you offer telecommute, workers will not show up.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been freelancing and telecommuting the past five years. I&amp;#x27;ve built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve built my lifestyle around that. As in I work around my life. Things just... get done without a direct measure of productivity anymore.&lt;p&gt;Sitting somewhere from 9 to 5 is like watching TV from the 2000&amp;#x27;s, ordering Netflix DVDs when we live in the 2010&amp;#x27;s with streaming Netflix.&lt;p&gt;And as one disappear, so does another and another. When you look around and realize no one else is there anymore it just becomes a ghost town while the virtual water cooler becomes more and more vibrant.&lt;p&gt;No ones goes to the office anymore, it&amp;#x27;s too lonely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andygcook</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think this is WordPress employees taking a mile when given an inch by working remotely all the time. I believe WordPress encourages employees &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; to regularly go to the office. The reason being is they don&amp;#x27;t want a small faction of the company to become essentially collocated while the rest of the company is distributed, thus breaking their communication flows. Remote works for WordPress because almost all communication gets archived in Slack, email or p2 (their internal social network built on WordPress). Anyone can see what&amp;#x27;s going on or get caught up asynchronously. It&amp;#x27;s pretty much guaranteed that in a collocated environment some of that communication would happen offline IRL, and others would miss out on it.</text></comment>