This post is part of a series describing what Automatticians do on a daily basis. You can read more posts like this by following the tag #a8cday on WordPress.com and Twitter.
Sharing that you are a Happiness Engineer with other people always generates a conversation. Usually it results in “What is that?” or “What do you do?” with some strange looks lol.
I love my title and I love that I get to help people all over the world create their web presence.
Every Happiness Engineer has a different type of day, schedule, tasks, etc. That’s what I love so much about my position… I work when it is best for me, have lots of opportunities to be involved in different areas and always have the opportunity to learn something new.
Personally I choose to work weekends and take weekdays off. We are homeschooling our kids this year, so it works best for us to be available to help them on weekdays. I also choose to start my work day between 5am – 6am. I like to get a few hours in before the kids wake up to start their day. I also really enjoy being able to work with co-workers in OceanAsia, Europe/Africa and the Americas. This schedule has helped me to create some great relationships with Happiness Engineers all over the world.
On Saturdays & Sundays I work with our customers helping them to create their websites, blogs, online stores, etc. Sometimes these customers have lots of WordPress experience and have just a couple of questions about their site. Other times they may be a new customer who is building their very first website. I love the challenge and am always excited to teach a new user how to use WordPress.
Each day we are in support we are supporting customers in a mix of live chat and email support. I choose to work a condensed schedule, so I work all of my 6 hours in support in a row. Other people choose to break up their day or ask for breaks in between their live chat or ticket shifts.
On weekdays I bounce between being a Scheduler, being a Buddy Core member (helping to pair up new hires and trials with buddies) and reviewing interactions to offer feedback to co-workers as part of our Localized Support (Support we offer in other languages).
I have been a Scheduler for almost 3 years now and really enjoy the role. You may ask why we need Schedulers if everyone just picks when they work. How it works is that I pick the hours and days of the week I am available and then a Scheduler comes along and assigns tasks. So for example today I had Live Chat for my first hour of support. Then I moved to tickets for an hour, then back to chat for a bit, ending my day in tickets. Being scheduled for tasks allows us to always have Happiness Engineers available to chat with our customers and to reply to their emails. Personally I think our support is the best out there!
Having a larger family makes flexibility so important to me. I really like that I can work my schedule around my life. It makes taking the kids to appointments, travelling and other activities hassle free! Working from home is amazing.
I mean who can beat waking up and not having to get dressed before your work day starts. I often start each day in my pj’s wrapped up in my blanket. Especially in the Winter I am beyond thankful that my commute is downstairs to my laptop. 🙂
You can never be lonely either since we communicate through a program called Slack and you always have co-workers to reach out to to talk about your day, your life, ask questions to, etc. And the amount you will learn about other cultures is endless! Did I mention you can work from anywhere? All you need is your laptop and the internet. 🙂
Does this sound like a position you would love? Sandy wrote a blog a few years back that really can take you through what you need to know / do to become a Happiness Engineer. Check it out!
We are hiring right now, so take a look at some more info on becoming a Happiness Engineer!
I Dream of Summer 
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