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A day in the life of a Happiness Engineer: Monday

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Andrea Badgley: Happiness EngineerIn an effort to get to know each other’s work days better, and to share publicly what it is like to work for a distributed company where most of us work from home, some of us at Automattic will be publishing “A Day in the Life” posts on our personal blogs throughout this week. The posts will be tagged #a8cday if you’d like to follow along.

As for me, here is what my Monday looked like:

6:00: Wake up. Make coffee. Empty dishwasher and pack lunchboxes.

6:30: Snuggle into a cushy chair in our living room with coffee and laptop. Finish up this morning’s Day in the Life: Intro post; log on to Slack and say goodmorafternight to coworkers in the US, UK, Malaysia, Indonesia; catch up on internal P2s (blogs).

7:00: Move downstairs to desk. Log on to live chat. Read through training guidelines and gather resources for 11AM training session. Check in with buddy on Theme team who is helping Happiness in her support rotation this week. Provide support in chat and tickets for:

8:00: Log off to take kids to the bus stop, eat breakfast, shower, throw a load of laundry in the washer.

9:00: Log on to chat. Decipher phone message tickets. Troubleshoot with users:

10:45: Log off chat. Break for snack. Switch over laundry.

11:00: Train two incoming Happiness Engineer trials, along with a new Code Wrangler and a new Theme Wrangler who are starting their Automattic tenure, as all Automatticians do, with a three week Support rotation. Train in a channel in Slack using text chat.

12:30: Ten minute break from training. Drink a V8 and eat some almonds. Switch over more laundry.

12:40: Introduce trainees to how we work through tickets, where to find answers, where to ask for help, what kinds of tools we use. Hope I’m not overwhelming them!

2:10: Wrap up training, break for lunch. Guess what else? Yep. More laundry.

2:45: Log on to live chat. Talk writing with a teammate. Check in with Editorial about helping with Blogging U in November. Troubleshoot infinite scroll issue on test site. Help users:

  • set up slider on Stay theme; make a note that support doc needs to be updated
  • navigation bar on mobile site
  • custom menus

4:00: Log off of chat. Follow up with users on unresolved issues from morning chats. Finish up troubleshooting on test site and submit a bug report for infinite scroll issue.

4:45: Receive notification a bug reported of the weekend has been squashed. Receive feedback regarding infinite scroll issue. Make notes to follow up in the morning.

5:00: Write this post.

6:00: Convince the kids to fold all the laundry (by bribing them with extra screen time). Hang out with family and start thinking about making dinner. Mmmm, spaghetti…

Think this sounds awesome? Work with us!

7 thoughts on “A day in the life of a Happiness Engineer: Monday”

    1. Thanks Maureen! I’m learning about coworkers’ jobs and tools through the series, so it’s kind of awesome. I hope to post more than one day here, in an effort to show that there’s no such thing as a typical day 😉

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  4. Wow – busy day! I am ever so impressed at your disciplined use of time and how you get all your laundry done in your breaks. A definite benefit of working from home, I would say – I have a load drying on the range cooker as we speak! And it’s a nice contrast to sitting at the screen all day. Looking forward to your next day in the life post.

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