Two Weeks In

It has been two weeks since I started working in Automattic. Overall, it has been a great journey so far, and I am looking forward to the opportunities that I will experience in the upcoming days, weeks, and months.

Home Office Upgrade

One of the nice perks that I utilized is that the company gives an allowance for us to set up our personal home office. Since I and my wife moved to our new house, we haven’t really got a chance to set up a proper home office for us to use for our daily working activities (both I and my wife are working from home most of the time).

My previous working setup consists of putting anything to be used as a working table. Most of the time I utilized an empty box (from a food processor that we have) and put a laptop on top of it. Sometimes, I also use my wife’s breastfeeding pillow (surprisingly, the pillow feels nice).

I can finally say that the new working space that we have is proper enough to support our daily working activities. The full setup that I and my wife use are mostly covered by the allowance that Automattic gives (it mostly covers my working equipment). By the way, a suggestion, if you folks have enough money to buy it, a Herman Miller chair is a game-changer (I use a Mirra 2 chair).

Support Rotation

Every new joiner at Automattic, regardless of the role, will start their first two weeks in a Support Rotation. In the Support Rotation, we are effectively acting as a Happiness Engineer, helping customers from all around the world with their problems.

In the day-to-day activities of being in the Support Rotation, we either answer support tickets that the customers send out or being standby to answer them in live chat settings. One good thing that I’m glad that Automattic has is that the documentation that they have is rock solid, it effectively helps me in doing my role in the support rotation.

In my opinion, the Support Rotation is acting as a unique onboarding experience for the new joiner in the company. Not only does it allow us to have a full two weeks to gather as much information related to the products that Automattic has, but also it acts as a tool for us to understand the customer’s frustrations and pain points when using the said products.