📕 Book Review – WordPress – The Year Without Pants

I’m obviously a fan of WordPress. So are millions of other people. But, long before many of us started to work remotely, WordPress was ahead of the curve. They’ve been remote since their inception. It’s about finding the right people regardless of where they’re located.

The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work details how WordPress is able to perform Continuous Integration and release new features on a daily, even hourly basis.

This was more than a decade ago, long before Slack and Zoom. Using tools like IRC, Skype, WordPress blogs themselves and the ever faithful email, WordPress as a company was able to work with engineers across the world, not just the US.

It’s a compelling narrative of how to break projects down into manageable chunks. How to be concise and clear in your requirements. How spending all day in meetings so you can discuss what’s going to happen in the next meeting is a complete waste of time. How working remotely thwarts turf wars that usually break out when ego is allowed to run rampant.

It further shows that if you need to micromanage, you’ve hired the wrong people. Or, just as importantly, you are the wrong kind of manager.

Hire the right kind of people that are motivated by the product, that are driven by results not titles, and those who have a passion that drives them forward, not a manager looking over their shoulder.

There is a lot that modern day managers and companies can take away from WordPress. We claim to live in the digital age, we should act like it.

If you’ve come as an elf, see it through as an elf.
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