Daniel Danilov

This post is the fifth and last of a series of posts describing what we do on a daily basis. If you’re interested in reading more you can follow the tag #a8cday. If you want to join us, we’re hiring! Here’s my day as a Happiness Engineer.

When I applied for the job of a Happiness Engineer, besides falling in love with the title right away, I didn’t really know what I was expected to do. After the last few weeks (mostly during my trial, and about a week of full time employment), I realized that this title is so wide in what it encompasses, that it’s difficult to sum up. To help people who might want to work with us, Automattic employees will be casting their day’s of work in their personal blogs, under the tag #a8cday – you’re welcome to read up about it!

Generally speaking, Happiness Engineers help out in many ways, including writing Daily Post and Hot off the Press articles, speak at WordCamps, write up the support docs, answer questions in the public forums and private forums posts, as well as private Live Chat support. I’m assigned to the latter, and therefore most of my day involves around answering chats and helping WordPress.com users with whatever they need.

Friday

So today was quite interesting and unpredictable. As usual, I woke up, had my coffees, and got on to work. Started with reading some P2s and Slack, and then got onto Live Chat. Then, things got a little more interesting…

10:00 – Signed onto Slack / p2s and checked out my private emails.

10:20 – Signed onto Live Chat. Started taking chats.

13:00 – Lunch. Had some delicious Samosa and another cup of coffee.

14:00 – Signed back to Live Chat.

15:00 – Saw that we’re going to get a new trial to join the Live Chat team. Volunteered to give the training. Received the great opportunity to give training. Was massively surprised, since I’m only officially working for about 10 days. Excited, I was preparing for the training and taking chats in between.

17:40 – Training time. Lasted just less than one hour. Went over all the tools, language, resources, tips, and general Q&A.

18:45 – Feedback for training, plus a little talk with a colleague from the hiring team.

19:00 – More chats, plus reading P2s and catching up on material.

20:00 – Volunteered as a Support Rotation buddy. That’s what we call when one of our teams (this time, the Data time) is doing a “support rotation” for a week, whereby they work as Happiness Engineers for one week, and they’re paired up with one of the HEs in case they have questions or need help, plus to have someone to speak to about their rotation. This is done for two reasons: firstly, to help other teams interact with our users, and see the WordPress they way they do, and secondly, so that we could receive feedback on how we can improve the process for future trials. I buddy’d up with another colleague from Israel, since our timezones match, it seemed like a good fit 🙂 Can’t wait to test it out, my first buddying at Automattic.

So that was pretty much it for the day. It was very productive, besides normal work – a lot of reading and did my first training session, as well as signed up for being a Support Buddy for the upcoming week.

Overall, that’s the end of my #a8cday posts as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic. I’ve started my trial on the 21st of July, and completed my trial on the 28th of August. I received an offer few weeks later, and started full-time on the 28th of September. I’m happy to join this unique place of intelligent, witty and productive people – and like always, if you’re interested in doing the same, we’re hiring! You’re welcome to read more about our experiences with Automattic with the following days: #a8cday – for our personal days at Automattic, #a8cstory – stories about how we all learned about Automattic, and #a8ctrial – for our experiences during trial. You can see my trial experience here.