This post is the fourth 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.

Thursday

I had to wake up earlier today since I’m going for a dinner tonight, and wanted to get as much work and reading done before signing off. Generally, today’s day looks like this:

7:00 – Wake up, have my morning coffee with some delicious breakfast. Best part of the day.

8:00 – Chill around with some Two and a Half Men running in the background, while reading up my personal and work emails, as well as catch up on all the P2 posts that I’ve missed.

9:00 – Have my second cup of coffee, and get ready to sign on Live Chat. Checked for answered tickets and emails.

10:00 – Signed up to Slack / Chat, started taking chats. Had quite a few interesting ones today, one notably being about Portfolios.

13:00 – Time for lunch. Had a delicious leftover-everything-that’s-in-the-fridge, plus another coffee and a piece of cake for dessert. Yum.

14:00 – Back on chat + Slack. It’s gotten a little quiet here, so I went around and started reading others’ chats so I could learn up a bit more stuff.

16:00 – Signed off of chat for now, and continued reading our P2’s, plus wrote up a recommendation myself for the Live Chat pop-up. I also drank an energy drink (which makes me realize now I had way too much caffeine today).

17:00 – Started writing this post. I’m also thinking about the weekly-update that I will need to write tonight in our Team’s P2, as well as the general updates P2. Thursday-Updates is what we call them: when most Automatticians write up about their whereabouts and doings throughout the week.

So it’s been a pretty chill day, learned a few little things. Found a way to “hack” the No-Google-Analytics-on-WordPress.com, since I’ve been getting a lot of questions about it lately, so I figured I’d do some research. It’s not very safe or recommended, but you never know what might make one happy.

Besides that, I also started creating my WorkFlowy list, which came about from a fellow Automattician’s #a8cday post – see how much we learn from one another? It’s pretty neat and helps organize one’s thoughts and tasks and whatnot you keep at the back of your mind. With Automatticians – it’s quite a lot, I came to realize.

So I’m finishing up for the day, I will probably sign on again for half an hour or so just to write up my weekly updates, and perhaps do a little bit more reading.