Doc’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you.
On episode #101 of The Stack Overflow Podcast, Matt Mullenweg discusses the possibility of shutting down Automattic’s beautiful office in San Francisco. According to this listing, it sounds like the Automattic “Lounge” hit the market on April 8th for about $1,000,000 a year.
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On the hunt for a new office in San Francisco? It sounds like Automattic’s office on 140 Hawthorne will be hitting the market soon.
The building was originally built in 1948 and was recently renovated in 2013, the year that Automattic took over the space. It’s a beautiful building with a huge event space. In fact, if you live in the Bay Area you’ve probably been to one or two WordPress meetups there.
Automattic, who run Akismet, Woocommerce, and WordPress.com, pride themselves on having a distributed-employment culture, with 548 employees working in over 50 countries. So when you’d visit the SF office, you might have noticed it was usually pretty empty.
Automattic has made a lot of headlines for it’s remote employee workplace, it was even the subject of a 2013 book called “The Year Without Pants”, and the local meetups have been happening more and more in other venues, so it’s not that big of a surprise to see Automattic closing it’s headquarters and, seemingly, only office space. There’s no news on when the office will close down, but it appears like they’ve already taken down the event request form from their site.
What do you think about the office closing? Is it important for a company to even have a physical headquarters anymore or is that a thing of the past? Let us know in the comments and be sure to follow @thetorquemag for the latest in WordPress news.
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