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Automattic, thank you for the opportunity. Joining this team was a great experience, and I’m sure that I will come to value my experience there, as a part of my broader career journey in tech, even more as time goes on. It simply turned out not to be a good fit for me.
Deciding to part ways early into joining Automattic (parent company of WordPress.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and more) has undoubtedly been a difficult decision to make. Partly due to my prior decision to leave the team at Netlify that I’d helped form and grow for the past couple of years being an equally difficult transition. Throughout this transitionary stretch, I’ve learned to follow my gut more, to make more time for quiet and deliberate thinking, and to continually assess my areas of interest, my ambitions, and goals.
My intentions of this short post are to document. I’ve decided to remove Automattic from my LinkedIn profile, and I won’t be adding this stint to my portfolio. Not because I need to, but because it doesn’t reflect the impact and time that I’ve had at other organizations throughout my career in tech.
Throughout my professional career I haven’t been in the place that I was just in. That place of moving on after 3 months. That place of questioning, “What did I get myself into?”. It weighed on me. I was hard on myself. And I know that I could have made it work there in my role as Director of Growth Marketing for WordPress.com, and I was intentional and deliberate about making a lot of adjustment efforts, because I wanted to thrive. Yet I came to find that adjusting to their inner ways of working - the processes in how things are managed and seen through - was incredibly difficult at that exact moment, among other things.
And I lack passion in this space. Passion is consistently a motivating and driving factor for me.
With the way that things aligned, I am incredibly fortunate to have had inbound interest from other companies while I was going through this experience. This reaffirmed that my wide variety of experiences and skills are marketable, so I remained open and conversations started happening. I received 3 offers for equally great roles at equally great companies (a story for another time). I took my time in making that decision, my next steps became clear, and my mind was then made.
So I put in notice, resigned from Automattic, and we amicably parted ways. Again, my intentions of this post are to briefly document this as being a part of my career journey, and I don’t intend to go into more detail beyond this. In no way do I want my experience to reflect poorly on them as an employer, they were beyond good to me. These are my experiences reflected upon. Behind every great business is its people - and the Automatticians that I was fortunate enough to work with and come to know are all amazing!
I’m incredibly grateful for their understanding and generosity, for their belief in me, and I want to thank everyone at Automattic for this opportunity. I wish all of my former colleagues there the best of luck in their career now and into the future, and I look forward to watching their business continue to succeed.