I’m starting a new job tomorrow as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic

I’ve accepted a new job offer.

Starting tomorrow I will be a Happiness Engineer at Automattic 🙂

Isn’t that the best job title in the world?

Every day I’ll be working at making the web a better place. The job is a unique mix of tech support, bug reporting, feature testing, training, and documentation for Automattic’s products and services, including WordPress.com. Every day there is something new and challenging to learn and work on.

How do I know? Because I’ve been quietly doing a trial with the company for the last 6 weeks so we could feel each other out, and see if I was a good fit.

I have to say, this is the first job I’ve had in years that finally feels like it clicks.

The company is a distributed company, so everyone works from anywhere they want, anywhere in the world. All the employees are smart, passionate, and have a love of learning. In fact, there is an Automattic creed that requires such traits that is included in our contracts:

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

Along with the biggest perk of having a satisfying career, I’ll be doing some new things, like travelling! Once a year the company gets together somewhere in the world for a week, and there are smaller meet-ups throughout the year for individuals teams and projects. I’ve never left the continent before, so I’m really excited 🙂