Culture and benefits at Parse.ly

"Fully Distributed & Asynchronous" describes a new scaling model for teams, which is dramatically different from vertical scaling (one big office) or horizontal scaling (multiple offices across regions). The Fully Distributed model takes inspiration from how top-tier open source projects are run (e.g. Linux), wherein "the web is the office". People collaborate across geographies using digital tools that fit the job at hand. Parse.ly runs a fully distributed & asynchronous team. We took inspiration from Fog Creek Software, who, in the early 2000's, had an employee productivity model that respected autonomy, private offices, and mission-driven flow on high-impact projects. We now take inspiration from how the best open source projects are run, like Python and Linux. We believe distributed teams are somewhat like distributed systems -- their communication patterns are complex, and involve a series of trade-offs. Over time, we've learned that "eventually-coordinated" teams that ship frequently create just the right mix of communication, autonomy, and cadence. More pragmatically, we know that in order to retain humanity in a fully distributed team, we need to gather our team together for retreats at least once a year. We've done 10 all-company retreats to date, and many more smaller "mini-retreats", and they have created a tight social bond on the team, even though we primarily collaborate over the web. As of February 2021, we joined Automattic's SaaS division, WPVIP. Automattic is a company whose culture of democratized publishing, open source, & fully distributed teams is a scaled extension of ours. This means working at Parse.ly has the perks and stability of a 1,500-person successful company, but the daily cadence of a fast-growing 50-person startup. Join us! For a full list of Automattic employee benefits, see: - Core benefits: automattic.com/benefits - Benefits by country/location: automattic.com/benefits-by-location