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    The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
    The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
    The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

    Written by Scott Berkun

    Narrated by Chris Kayser

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Nearly 50 million websites, or 20% of the entire web, use WordPress to power their web presence. The force behind WordPress is a company called Automattic, Inc. With just 104 employees, they have a fraction of the resources of similarly influential companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Yet Automattic has quietly positioned itself as a powerhouse for the future of the web. How is this possible? What's different about how they work and what can other companies learn from their methods? Scott Berkun decided to find out. From 2010 to 2012 he worked as a manager at WordPress.com, leading a team of programmers to make WordPress better. In THE YEAR WITHOUT PANTS, Berkun shares the lessons he learned, including insights on: How their decentralized workplace (104 employees in 70 different cities) is incredibly creative and productive How they successfully transcended the horrors of email, and use blogs, chat and Skype instead  What managers everywhere can learn and emulate from their culture of freedom and experimentation THE YEAR WITHOUT PANTS delves deep into what made WordPress's phenomenal success possible. And Berkun shares what every organization can learn from his story of discovery in applying the world changing ideas for the future of work at the heart of Automattics success.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAscent Audio
    Release dateOct 8, 2020
    ISBN9781663702494

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    Reviews for The Year Without Pants

    3.5/5

    42 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The book is an easy reading with a pack of good experiences and observations about working in a chaotic and creative start up (wordpress).
    • 3/5
      Sold me on Automattic as a company, pointed out many of the things I worry about with Continuous Deployment, but no solutions. Esp uncomfortable with how he characterized his time on happiness - he didn't like the metrics, but no ideas for solutions? blah
    • 2/5
      Pleasant read but I have a problem following his logic
    • 4/5
      This book could have been titled "Microserfs, twenty years later". Scott Berkun, a former Microsoftie himself, tells the story of his year working at Wordpress/Automattic, a successful software as a service startup run by the prodigy Matt Mullenweg. While Berkun's fawning over Mullenweg becomes grating rather quickly, the story about Berkun's entry into this virtual global company is told with aplomb. Much of the internal communication relies on a stream of team and company blogs as well as IRC and Skype. Given the video capabilities of Skype, though the company is composed mostly of males, I doubt whether the titular claim of "The Year Without Pants" is even partially true.Mullenweg requested Berkun's service to create the first level of middle managers/team leaders at Automattic, up to then run by direct interaction with the founder. This meant that issues not focused on by Mullenweg were allowed to drift (e.g. Wordpress did not fix a broken LinkedIn connection for many months). Creating areas of responsibilities and fixed teams helped transform the startup company into a more stable business. Like so many accounts (and also novels), a lot of the book is spent on getting to know the people and forming the team. Unfortunately, the reader is not told a single management decision where a difficult trade-off had to be made. It's all about being captain in mild and beautiful weather. The necessity for the middle management layer (and its effectiveness) is thus not demonstrated. An additional 50 pages treating management issues is sadly missing from this book. Hasta la vista comes all too soon.
    • 4/5
      Berkun chronicles his experience working for Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com. In the process, he talks about how this extraordinarily successful company breaks all of the rules about how to run a successful company. I run a WordPress theme development company, with remote employees, so I was looking forward to reading this and gaining some insights into how to best manage my employees. I did learn some very useful things... but one of the strengths of this book is also a frustration to people trying to learn how to build a successful business on Automattic's model. Berkun stresses that you can't just read a book of business advice and copy it to run a successful business. Every business is different, and just mimicking what works for one business won't work for another. Automattic's success is largely contingent on the company culture, which is largely contingent on the personality of one of the co-founders, Matt Mullenweg. So in some ways, the big takeaway from the book is, "you can't be like Automattic because you aren't Automattic."That's a really sensible takeaway, and Berkun repeatedly makes the point that just copying what works for one company won't work for another, which is some of the smartest business advice I've read.But if you're looking for business advice, that's rather anti-climactic. So some of the useful takeaways are about how to treat your employees: trust them, treat them like adults, give them independence (but also guidance), and make them happy. So many of the trappings of business - career ladders, meetings, managers - really just get in the way of doing what the company is supposed to do. The people doing the actual work - in this case, developers and support staff - should be given all the support they need to do what they need to do.
    • 4/5
      A fresh look at organizational culture, project management and communications based on Berkun's experience leading a team at Wordpress