You may have noticed that my new Posts do not have a large, semi-relevant (at best) Hero image. I’ve decided to do away with them after Matt shared this post about the Website Obesity Crisis. Just doing my part.
Author: Simon
Working Remotely, Thinking Globally, and FOMO
You’ve heard of FOMO already, right?
This is for all of you folks at home who would never click that link to Wikipedia:
Fear of missing out or FoMO is “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent”.[2] This social angst [3] is characterized by “a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing”.[2] FoMO is also defined as a fear of regret,[4] which may lead to a compulsive concern that one might miss an opportunity for social interaction, a novel experience, profitable investment or other satisfying event.[5] In other words, FoMO perpetuates the fear of having made the wrong decision on how to spend time, as “you can imagine how things could be different”.[4]
Working as a team lead at Automattic, on our flagship product, WordPress.com, is a wild experience for a lot of reasons.
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Feasting and Flexible Work
Something you all may or may not know about me is that I am a big fan of Mexican food. Well, I say that but I suspect what I’m really a fan of is American Mexican food, which is probably a different thing.
Growing up we had your standard Family Taco Night fairly regularly – hard shelled tacos, ground beef, the quintessential starter taco.
I’m not ashamed to admit that Taco Bell introduced me to soft tacos. I had to learn about them somewhere, and I think at the end of the day Taco Bell as a gateway drug into new taco horizons is an acceptable origin story.
Communicating in 2016: Leave Good Messages
Subtitled; Never Just Say ‘Ping’
I was chatting with my friend Dan today, who works for one of the biggest publishing houses in the world. I’ve known Dan for a really long time. Here’s a picture of us from almost ten years ago:
Dan was telling me that his subsection of the company was starting to use Slack for communication at work. You know Slack right? We’ve been using Slack for a while at Automattic (for a time, the open source WordPress project was the biggest single group using Slack – or so I heard. Couldn’t tell you if that’s still true!).
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Work from Home but Still Eat with Friends
Working remotely has tons of advantages, and it’s one of the best features of being a Happiness Engineer at Automattic.
(In fairness, all positions at Automattic are fully remote!)
I’ve worked remotely for over two years, and I’ve learned a few tricks, a few tactics to do battle with the parts of working from home that can be challenging.
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Simon Ouderkirk 