For the last 10 years I've been firting with remote work on and off. In that time I've been fortunate enough to have great employers that have allowed me to work remote for a couple of months in winter so that we could go to somewhere pleasant in Latin America. We've spent winters working in Montevideo, Uruguay and in Oaxaca, Mexico. We both love it! My wife Addi has worked remote for over 13 years, and she has been on the first wave of fully distributed tech companies.
I've been curious to make the jump to a fully distributed company and when I saw that Automattic was hiring and that WordPress chops were not required (I have a whole bag of Drupal chops and no WordPress chops whatsoever), I applied for a job as a Code Wrangler. It sounded like a really cool place to work and while I was gathering some confidence to send an application, I read the book A Year Without Pants by Scott Berkun. That book gave me a pretty hard crush on Automattic, so I'm stoked to say: I got the job!
I'm going to miss my good collegues at Reload, but just like last time I moved on from there, I'll drop by for a Friday beer every now and then.
This year has been a pretty crazy year for just about anyone on the planet. When I applied for the job I had no idea that not much later we would be rushing home from Mexico and that I would be working remotely just like everybody else in Reload. It's safe to say that remote work has been trending this year. I'm excited to see what it's like to do it full time year round though. I start mid-July and just like everybody else we have no travel plans at the moment, but I'm excited to take advantage of the work-from-everywhere freedom that I'll have with Automattic.