Nikolay Bachiyski is the lecturer.
Automattic, one of the companies associated with WordPress.
The good, the bad, and other things about remote companies.
The best thing about working from home is communication. You have no meetings, you do what you want, you don't waste time in absolutely pointless meetings. The absence of a boss over your head. Nobody is hanging over you watching. The only important thing is whether you've finished your work. How does communication happen? From time to time Skype, but it's becoming less and less. An IRC channel is used, where most of the communication happens. Email is used much less. Obviously we use a blog where we write longer things. But in recent months something else is used. P2 It's like Twitter. Comments are visible automatically under the post. One of the best things is that it updates automatically. New things appear and are colored differently. This is the main way of communication and is almost sufficient communication. Another way, which is ideal for programmers, is commit messages. This way you can understand who did what, what happened in the code, etc. There is a bug tracking system, which is an ideal way to communicate.
No matter how much you communicate on the internet, meetings are inevitable, usually once or twice a year. Besides the fact that communication is the strongest thing, it is also the most terrible. A good way is to have lunch with colleagues.
The most important thing is people, and motivated people. The other thing that helps people is the almost complete absence of hierarchy, no org chart. When nobody is stamping their foot in your face, you perceive your boss differently. You need to build trust with your employees. This is the only way a person can live in a distributed company and manage the people in it. Basically, trust is expressed in the fact that people do their work and you don't keep score. Trust is also expressed in the fact that if a person is reasonable, they can buy flowers, go to conferences, buy equipment. This shows that your employees are not seen as children. Don't look for an accounting of the personal professional interests of employees.
The main things are three. Do something really cool. Have motivation for people. Have trust in people. This is valid for any business.
What are the problems in such a group? It doesn't suit every person. Some people can't motivate themselves, they don't always finish all the work. The solution is to initially have a trial period.
Can any of the companies from the old model transition to this new model? And can larger companies do it? The largest company is MySQL, about 500 people on this model, but they reached the org chart and things got messy. Large companies cannot work with this model. But very large companies are trying to move in this direction. IBM is trying to have people work from home several days a week.
This type of communication requires a huge amount of information that floods you. With so many people with different personalities, how do you manage without moderating this blog? How does it work? There's no need for moderation. IRC logs from the previous day are usually not read. About 50 messages are collected a day, about 30-40 commits. Not everything requires huge attention, not everything affects you directly. As for the blog, longer things are written there. Personal blogs of people don't go there.
Who decides in what way about the payment? Who decides who to hire and who to fire? Although there is no strictly defined hierarchy, it's clear who is at the top. These are the owners of the company.
How do they handle so much information when not everything is addressed to the right people? The information is not that much. Separate groups of people who work on something specific have their own separate channels.
And what exactly do you do? The main product is WordPress.