Daniel Danilov

This post is the first 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. 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.

Monday

Generally, today I did a total of 38 chats and a few forum answers, as well as following up on some FRs (emails to which I received responses from users). Also made a bug report for a small loading issue, and following up on its resolution. Internally, Automatticians use different P2s, you can read up about it here. The last ~2 hours are going towards updating myself on all the P2 posts and following up on the team updates, including all the different new tags being used, and tasks that we’ll be responsible for. Right now the Live Chat team is also migrating towards being responsible for Mobile Support as well, so I’m learning up about that as well as other Happiness Engineer skills.

Throughout the day, there were a lot of topics ranging from domain cancellations, renewals, refunds, and all the usual that are seen throughout the day. There were also plenty of questions about stats, categories: how to display them as pages including the relevant posts and add them to the menu list.Quite a few CSS questions as well, for adjusting text/image widths to suit better to the theme. Publishing: using Microsoft Word as an editor. Of course there were many more but listing all of them is overkill.

In general, today’s day was pretty straight forward.

7:00 – I woke up, screaming for coffee and some delicious breakfast. I then moved towards reading my emails and watching some TV in the background, ’til the coffee reaches my brain and shakes it up a little bit.

8:00 – I had to exercise today, since I haven’t done that in a little while. I did some Power Wheel exercises and a little bit of stretches to get the blood flowing. I then went to shower.

9:15 – Second cup of coffee. Yep. I then started reading our P2s and see if there are any emails or follow ups of reported bugs/issues that I need to follow up on.

10:00 – Logged onto Olark Chat system – which is what we use to chat to our users.

12:00 – Started checking Kayako tickets as well – for any missed chats.

13:00 – Lunch time. Had a delicious combination of Spaghetti, dumplings, and meat, all cooked up together with some yummy Italian sauce.

14:15 – Logged back on chat, while communicating with the team through Slack about other updates. I’ll be starting to help around on the Phone App support as well.

16:00 – Logged off of chat, and started reading up P2s about any other news. Also tested our Helpshift (used for Phone App support) since I’m not too familiar with it.

17:00 – Writing this post, and logging everything off. I still check it on my phone later, anyways.

So this was Monday for me.