B-san's Blog

Hi all! This week, I have been getting ready for the Trial. All of a sudden, mails from Automattic have increased and I am slowly getting closer and closer to the start date. Here are a few things I have been working on.

Security

As anyone would expect, Automattic deals with all different types of personal and sensitive information. They are a company with employees, so there would be some sort of database that at least the HR division would be able to access including employee information. They are always hiring, so there would be a recruiting team looking at potential applicants and storing their data. They sell services to customers, so they would have data relating to their customers. They have servers, internal systems, networks etc. and the list goes on.

In your average brick-and-mortar type company, many of these databases and services would be kept on premises with high security, preventing attackers from entering in and internal people from taking the info out. But as Automattic is fully distributed, this is obviously not the case. They have to have infrastructure in place to allow employees to access whatever information they need to work from anywhere in the world. Naturally, a Happiness Engineer in Japan would have to be able to access whatever database there is of the customers he interacts with from his home in Japan.

You can easily picture security is vital to Automatticians and their work. And since Trialmatticians are allowed to do the same work as full-time Automatticians, the security with their devices and networks must be just as secure. So, part of my pre-trial assignment this week has been getting security measures in place

Payment

Another thing is, as a Trialmattician, you get paid for the work you do. Again, as the company is distributed, it is not like someone is going to walk up to me at the end of the week and hand me an envelope with cash in it. One needs to set up a means to get paid. That is another thing I have been working on getting ready.

Learning

While there will no doubt be internal material provided to learn from once the trial starts, that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything for me to work on right now. WordPress.com is always evolving and it is probably impossible to ever know everything about it.

For example, in the last week or two, WordPress.com has increased its plans from 4 to 6. They are…

• Free ($0/mo)
• Blogger (NEW! $3/mo)
• Personal ($5/mo)
• Premium ($8/mo)
• Business ($25/mo)
• eCommerce (NEW! $45/mo)

That means there is more information (e.g. the differences between plans) a Happiness Engineer has to understand to serve customers. This has just increased recently! And this is just a small example. When Gutenberg was launched last year, that was something new they would have had to have learn, too. This reminds me of first line of The Automattic Creed… “I will never stop learning.“

Conclusion

So, I still have a bit over a week to go before my trial starts, but I still have plenty to do in the meantime.It’s as if the trial has already started! I will be evaluated periodically throughout the trial period. I want to be as best prepared for it as I possibly can before it finally starts.

Thanks for Reading!