Automattic’s Cate Huston on Building Distributed Engineering Teams

Read more about Cate Huston in “How to Build and Strengthen Distributed Engineering Teams.”

Cate Huston is the Head of Developer Experience at Automattic, where her team is responsible for hiring, onboarding, and retaining some of the best software engineers in the world. In this episode, Cate talks with Matt about what kinds of people thrive on distributed engineering teams, and how team leads can keep their engineers happy, productive, and connected to their colleagues. 

The full episode transcript is below.

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MATT MULLENWEG: There are all sorts of approaches to distributed work. Some people work from home or at a café in their neighborhood. Others are digital nomads. I’m Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress, and I travel around 300 days out of the year. I appreciate that I get to spend time with my family in Texas, but I love life on the road too, and being able to hang out with friends and colleagues all over the world, and meet WordPress users wherever they might be. One of the nice things about running a fully-distributed company is that even the CEO gets to be just as remote as everyone else. 

Today’s guest is Cate Huston, who is a true digital nomad. All she needs is a cup of tea and a place to set up her laptop and she’s ready to go. Her home base is the city of Cork, in Ireland, but you’re just as likely to find her in any other corner of the globe.

Just because Cate is always moving doesn’t mean she has trouble staying connected. Her role at Automattic requires her to be in close contact with her team, and it’s her job to help make sure that all of her fellow engineers stay connected, too. 

After leading several engineering teams at places like Google and others, Cate became the Head of Developer Experience at Automattic, a team responsible for helping all our engineers at Automattic stay engaged, productive, and professionally fulfilled. 

I knew we had to talk to Cate on this podcast because she lives out the distributed model so fully. She also has a comprehensive point of view on what kinds of engineers excel in distributed environments, and how companies can create the conditions that help engineers thrive.

Alrighty, let’s get started with Cate. 

MATT: Hello Cate, thanks for joining today.

CATE HUSTON: Hi Matt. I’m ready for a one-on-one.

MATT: [laughs] Ahh I forgot to tell you we’re recording it. 

CATE: [laughs] You should warn people about these things.

MATT: For the audience, can you catch us up a little bit on some of your experience that led you to Automattic?

CATE: I worked at Google as a software developer and then spent a year roaming the world and doing my own thing, and then joined a startup and was a questionably-legal migrant in Colombia for a while, and then that startup kind of imploded. And around that time, you sent me a GIF of a raccoon being adorable and I was like, “Okay, he can be my new boss.”

MATT: [laughs] You joined to lead the Mobile Team at Automattic.

CATE: Yeah.

MATT: But that has grown. So talk a little bit about that. 

CATE: I joined towards the end of 2017 to lead the Mobile team, which was amazing. And then after about 18 months I went on rotation to the Jetpack Engineering team, which was also super interesting because, as you know, I’ve been using Jetpack for a long time too. But when that came to an end it was clear that I was more needed elsewhere. So I didn’t back to the Mobile team, and I got to work with you, and rolling out Gutenberg. And now I lead our Developer Experience team. So we work to support our entire developer organization, and that includes owning the engineering-hiring process. 

MATT: What is developer experience at Automattic? I’ve heard of user experience but what does developer experience mean?

CATE: I mean: “What does it mean to be a developer at Automattic, what are the challenges of development at Automattic, what are the challenges of development in a distributed, remote context, how can developers learn from other developers, how can they have the support that they need to chart out their own career path?”

We have a lot of autonomy at Automattic, which I think is amazing, but that autonomy can be a bit overwhelming. So can we turn it for people [from] “Write your own MadLib,” into “Choose your own adventure,” [giving] people that kind of support. Also a critical part of the developer experience is the hiring experience going through into the onboarding experience. So how do we give people in our hiring process a good experience so that they can see if this is the right fit for them and we can see if they are the right fit for us, and how do we carry that through into them joining their team and becoming successful?

So one of the ways that we think about developer experience is — our engineering organization is quite big and we’re only so many people. So what we talk about is, “How do we find the pivot points for individuals in teams so that we can be present at those pivot points and try and make them accelerants where possible?” An example of that is when the team gets a new lead, that’s a pivot point. So we want to be there supporting that new lead, bringing them into the kind of support that we have for dev leads, helping them develop and iterate on their process so that that new lead can take that team to new levels. 

MATT: There are probably some engineers listening right now who would love to be hired at Automattic or another distributed company. What advice would you give to them?

CATE: The first thing I would say is, “Be patient, because I think all distributed hiring processes take a little longer.” I think people feel — I don’t know if it’s true — that they get a stronger signal in a day of face-to-face interviews but I think people feel like they have a stronger signal in a day of face-to-face interviews. 

And distributed companies, you can’t tell really if someone doesn’t show up to work. I mean, you can eventually tell, but it’s much easier to disappear. The level of trust required is much higher. And so there is a portion of the process that is earning that trust. We really believe that people can be successful and we’re looking to make people successful. There is no “prove it again” after you get hired. I think that’s really important.

So the first thing is patience and just understanding that the processes take longer. The other thing is that these jobs tend to be more competitive, especially for more specialist roles. There’s not always as many of them as you might want. So you want to craft what you’re doing a little better. Tell a good story in your cover letter, get excited about that company specifically, not just remote work in general. I’m sure all remote companies get a lot of the kind of applications that we get, which is like “Yeah, I just want a remote job so that I can travel around the world.” And it’s like, “Okay, it’s cool to travel around the world, I do it, you do it, but it’s not easy to do that on top of a full time job.”

MATT: So what’s the key for maintaining high performance, as you do, in all these far-flung locations?

CATE: I get pretty rigid about certain things. Like breakfast, I’m very rigid about. So every morning there’s breakfast and then I – 

MATT: That’s very British.

CATE: [laughs] Very British. British being rigid or breakfast being important?

MATT: I think breakfast.

CATE: [laughs] So I try and carve my day into two four-hour blocks. And I just don’t expect to do anything fun during the week, so I do my tourist-ing on the weekends. I really just go and spend a month in a place and try to live there. And honestly I live like that most of the time. When I’m in Cork, because I live in Cork, I try to do things on the weekend, get away from the computer, go out and see things. So if I’m doing that in a different place, it’s fine.

I have my certain needs, which are pretty minimal, like breakfast and some form of exercise and that’s it. And so I just orient myself on “This is breakfast and here is a place to work, there is tea, and this is how I’m going to get regular exercise,” and then, honestly, that’s fine, that’s all I need. 

I’ve probably paired down these needs over time. I don’t know if I started that way, and it is quite hard if you need more stuff. I think sometimes people want peace and quiet, for example, or they need more social contact or whatever, and things that take more time to build, but for me, a laptop, a pair of headphones, a good amount of tea, everything’s fine.

MATT: When you’re hiring engineers, what are you looking for as part of this process besides obviously some base technical-level skill?

CATE: Probably two really big things. One is the ability to work with the kind of code base that we have. WordPress has been around for a long time, there’s probably still code you wrote floating around in it, and that’s quite hard. Not everybody has the experience, the desire to work with truly legacy code. 

And it is a very complex system. It’s not just about technical capability but it’s also being able to grok the complexity of what we had. And this is something that we saw in the mobile apps as well. We wou