Making the web a better place

Lifelong Learning

I will never stop learning.

The first and most important line of the creed means that you’re never finished. There is always more to learn. Your list of unread books is always going to be longer than the ones you’ve read.

The enemy of this is thinking you’re right, putting too much weight on your experience, or passing up an opportunity to understand someone’s point of view.

Thoughtful Impact

I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me.

The full potential and creativity of any Automattician won’t be completely reflected in their assigned tasks or OKRs, or documented in the issue or task tracker a team might use. It’s possible to survive by doing just what’s asked of you, but to truly thrive involves bringing something above and beyond to your work and making sure everything you leave your mark on is something you’re proud of.

Of course, the subtext and assumption is you’ve already done what you were assigned!

Curiosity & Innovation

I know there’s no such thing as a status quo.

We should never do something just because that’s the way it’s been done before. Decisions in the past were (hopefully) made with the best information available at the time, but if we’re always learning then our future selves will be infinitely better suited to discern and decide a course of action. (Corollaries: If you are not embarrassed by your old code, you’re not learning enough. If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version, you waited too long.)

Work from first principles, and make sure you understand (really understand) what came before you.

Customer-Driven

I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers.

Collaboration

I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague.

It doesn’t matter who you report to or what division you’re in. If you’re an Automattician, every other Automattician is your colleague. A culture where we always try to help one another is the one we all want to work in.

Taken more broadly, “colleague” is all those in the same role in the world. Can you write a blog post or give a talk that will help everyone who is exposed to it?

Part of helping someone is communicating clearly. This doesn’t mean saying “yes” to every request. The distance between saying you’ll help someone and actually helping them is a gap often created with the best intentions. But when we don’t bridge that gap, accountability suffers throughout the organization. Our desire to help might make it tempting to tell someone we’ll do something, but we should always be impeccable with our word.

Impact at Scale

I am more motivated by impact than money and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.

Money is totally fine, and it’s completely necessary in our current socioeconomic system for everything we want to accomplish as a company — and for many things individually. A good attitude is summed up in this Walt Disney quote, which Facebook bogarted in Zuck’s letter in their S-1:

"We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies."

Making money is okay — in fact, it’s one of the freedoms enabled by the GPL, and no one should feel embarrassed about discussing compensation with HR. But we work for more than just a paycheck.

Conscious Communication

I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company

This is probably true in all relationships, but especially in the long-distance ones we’re in during most of the year at Automattic. This is one of the areas where we differ from the late, great Douglas Adams who wrote of the Babel fish:

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

Repeatedly in our work, we find the opposite: poor communication (and understanding) is at the root of every disagreement, conflict, and poorly managed project. When people understand each other, difficulties melt away. (Most true conflict in a work environment is imagined.)

The reference to oxygen is not accidental: too much oxygen can be fatal as well. As a group scales past the level where it’s most efficient for everyone to keep up with everything, it’s important to invest time from an editorial mindset making sure that the right information isn’t just published, but it’s heard and understood by those who need to.

Persistence

I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day.

But it’s still a race.

Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

The key here is “given time.” Much of the work that we do is hard. It’s easier to put everyone in the same database. It’s easier to put everyone on the same domain, and you look much better on comScore rather than being dark matter. Open source eventually dominates every market it enters, but sometimes “eventually” can take a while. For online publishing and content management systems, WordPress helped it happen quickly. “Linux on the desktop” is perpetually a few years away.

We have to be comfortable swimming upstream, with most of the world considering us wrong for long periods of time. This is uncomfortable. Sometimes it means we’ll be ostracized. More often people, “Silicon Valley,” or the market will consider us parochial, unambitious, or just plain stupid. They’ll be right unless our success proves differently.