All Wordpress San Francisco office staff started working remotely

Image of Automattic website

WordPress developer Automattic will no longer spend money on maintaining a San Francisco office, reports Business Insider.

The fact is that most staff members prefer to work at home, in a cafe or anywhere, except for the office itself. Therefore, the general director of the company, Matt Mühlenweg, made a decision on such cost optimization.
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Image of Automattic website

Company spokesman Mark Armstrong told the publication that this was not a surprise for the company. On the contrary, this was to be expected, since all the necessary conditions for working in the home office mode have already been created: the startup provides employees with “generous pay” for working at home, all meetings are held online, and business issues are discussed in chat rooms.

At the same time, the company provides employees with $ 250 per month in case they want to work in coworking. Also provides separate payments to those who wish to equip the office at home.

The Automattic company is ready to pay employees even air tickets if the need arises to hold face-to-face meetings. Moreover, the company also conducts all stages of the interview online.

In 2011, an office space of 1,157 square meters was purchased in San Francisco. However, gradually everything came to the fact that every day there were no more than five employees.

In addition, the company moved annual conferences from San Francisco to Philadelphia and Nashville. This, again, turned out to be cheaper. Thus, in recent years, the office has not been used even for official events.

Automattic has other offices, including the US state of Maine and Cape Town in South Africa. Currently, the company employs over 550 employees and only 30 people live in Silicon Valley. The rest of the staff lives and works in 50 countries of the world.

However, the company not only reduces costs, but also seeks new sources of income.
So, on May 16, the company entered the TV advertising market.

On May 15, Wordpress developers announced the launch of their own bug bounty program.

WordPress is one of the most popular CMS in the world, running about 28% of the ten million most visited sites in the world.