Hi all! I’m now on my fourth week as a Happiness Engineer. Time is flying, but most enjoyably! I thought I would briefly rehash my first few weeks on the job and see what has happened.
Meeting my Team
As the Happiness Engineer division is huge at Automattic, it would be impossible to work effectively as a team if we didn’t have smaller divisions. Upon acceptance into the job, every HE is assigned to a specific team. Each of teams consist of around a dozen members who work in similar time zones. My team, Patronus, is one of the larger teams with members from the far-east time zones in the Asia-Pacific region. Actually, Paulo, one of my team members, wrote a post about the team getting together earlier this year. Checkout my great team on Team Meetups — How We Create Productive Face-To-Face Time!!
While every interaction before getting hired was done strictly through chat (text and emoji only), I have had a few occasions to meet/speak with my teammates over video calls since. And, in more ways than one, they are a great team! The way they interact with customers, the contribution they give to internal systems, materials, teaching etc., the every-day chatter and the warm welcome they gave me have shown me what an enthusiastic and pleasant-to-be-with bunch of people they are! I throw all sorts of questions at them regarding work, pretty much every day at the moment. They have all been quick to answer and help me find my place.
So, here’s a big THANK YOU to my team!
Learning
Automattic has a creed – a fundamental philosophy – from which every other decision in the company will stem from. This creed is made public and you can check it out here: The Automattic Creed. In fact, it is one company document we are expected to go over and over before & during the Trial.
The first line says…
I will never stop learning.
Simple, yet quite profound. The learning journey doesn’t quit at any particular point in our career. Within the one month between my Trial ending an my employment starting, there were numerous updates/changes to Automattic’s products and internal tools. It took me a while just to catch up on everything that had happened during that time.
For my first few weeks, I have been assigned fewer hours for core support work and more hours for self-study and getting used to the work environment as a whole. Following another line in the creed…
I am in a marathon, not a sprint.
Automattic gives its new hires a bit of time to slowly get used to the work. One thing my team has been big about is setting up productivity tools that help with daily tasks and common workflows. Slowly but surely getting used to these tools now should help me function more effectively once I am fully immersed in the core support work. It’s taken me these few weeks, but I feel I have finally come to a comfortable spot with my initial work setup and am ready to move to the next step!
Conclusion
I hope this post has given a bit of insight into what my initial few weeks on the job have been like. If you found the job or work environment described here interesting, go and checkout the Automattic web site. And guess what? We’re hiring!