I was interviewed about my experience with Automattic’s awesome parental leave policy for an article in th Los Angeles Times. Ended up not being too important to the article, but it’s still cool to see.
Why so few take paid parental leave by Natalie Kitroeff
A day after Alex Gustafson’s wife gave birth to their daughter in December, he officially began the 12 weeks of fully paid family leave offered by Automattic Inc., the San Francisco tech company where he works.
A couple points of clarification for my side of it…
Automattic is based out of San Francisco, but we’re fully distributed. You can work from anywhere you like. I live and work in Louisville, KY. We’re also hiring.
12 weeks of paid leave is also just what I took. The policy is more flexible that that. You could easily arrange more unpaid time, and potentially more paid time. You can spread that time out over more spurts instead of all in one go. All it takes is a bit of communication with your team lead and our lovely, helpful HR folks. We communicate all the time anyway so the whole process is easy. Having a new baby is hard enough.
The article is still worth a read, and isn’t really meant to be about Automattic. Natalie did a great job and it was pleasure to chat with her.
Alex Gustafson 