Automattic is closing its San Francisco office as most employees work remotely
Had a party at the WordPress office a few years back and it&#x27;s a great space. There&#x27;s a lounge, kitchen, the bathrooms are nice, some room for bikes, and the rest of the space is setup to be multi-use. There&#x27;s a big stage area and the corners are  furnished to be pretty cozy.<p>Of my past work places--death star cube farms in old silicon valley to tiny rooms in sweltering Berkeley summers to shiny live&#x2F;work lofts to giant sprawling disneyland like campus to noisy hipster coffee shops--that WordPress office would be up there in terms of a good place to work at.<p>The real story is the upward trend that if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. If you offer telecommute, workers will not show up.<p>I&#x27;ve been freelancing and telecommuting the past five years. I&#x27;ve built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM.<p>I&#x27;ve built my lifestyle around that. As in I work around my life. Things just... get done without a direct measure of productivity anymore.<p>Sitting somewhere from 9 to 5 is like watching TV from the 2000&#x27;s, ordering Netflix DVDs when we live in the 2010&#x27;s with streaming Netflix.<p>And as one disappear, so does another and another. When you look around and realize no one else is there anymore it just becomes a ghost town while the virtual water cooler becomes more and more vibrant.<p>No ones goes to the office anymore, it&#x27;s too lonely.