A day in the life of a Happiness Engineer: Introduction

When I applied for my job as a Happiness Engineer, I wasn’t entirely sure what the job would entail. The job title is unique, for sure, and when I wore my Happiness Engineer T-shirt on my way to the company’s Grand Meetup, three different people stopped me to ask “What’s a Happiness Engineer?” All three smiled when I told them.

Before I became an Automattician, I’d seen Happiness Engineers write Daily Post and Hot off the Press articles, speak at WordCamps, provide live support in Happiness Bars at WordCamps, answer questions in the public forums, and answer my own questions about my blog through email requests. Given that knowledge, I created the above Venn diagram for my résume when I applied.

Once I started working as a Happiness Engineer, though, I realized there need to be about 20 more fields in that diagram: Domain Dominator, Toy Tester, P2 Poster, Ticket Translator, User Empathizer, Live Chat Champion. Even now, I only know what my day looks like, and not what other HEs’ days look like.

Over the next week, many Happiness Engineers and other Automatticians, including myself, will be sharing “A Day in the Life” posts on our personal blogs. I’ve got a big day planned today – I’ll be training new Happiness trials for my first time – but I’ll try to keep notes so I can share with you when the day is done. If you have any questions or special requests for what you’d like to see in my post(s), please let me know in the comments below. And if you think you’d like to work with us but aren’t quite clear on what the job might entail, be sure to follow along! We will be using the tag #a8cday.