Karen Arnold and Erica Varlese work on the Happiness Hiring team at Automattic, where they hire new Happiness Engineers who support users on WordPress.com and Automattic products. They met with the Brazilian WordPress community last week and wanted to share their experiences.
On August 29th, 2015, we traveled to Brazil to attend WordCamp Rio de Janeiro and meet the Brazilian WordPress community. At Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, we’re working on localizing our support to those who speak Brazilian Portuguese. Since both of us are part of our Happiness Hiring team, which focuses on hiring new support engineers, or “Happiness Engineers,” we decided to travel to the WordPress community in Brazil to share our new Happiness Engineer (BR-PT) role and talk about our experience with support.
Jetpack booth
At WordCamp Rio de Janeiro, we gave a talk on “Engineering happiness: bridging the gap between developers and customers.” Our talk, which will be translated to include subtitles, focused on tips and tricks from our experience on how to get into the right support mindset and how to use support to create loyal customers. The audience was wonderfully responsive and we had the opportunity to chat with many WordCamp attendees about their thoughts on support, Happiness Engineering, and how education is a part of their day-to-day work with WordPress.
We weren’t the only Automatticians at WordCamp Rio. Miguel Lezama joined us to talk about Jetpack, and the recently launched br.jetpack.me, at our booth. Additionally, Claudio Sanches, from the WooThemes team, was part of a panel on “Mercado de Trabalho do WordPress — Brasil e Mundo.”
Claudio’s panel
After the WordCamp, we got the chance to cowork at a startup incubator, Espaço NAVE, which is part of Universidade Estácio de Sá. Here, students compete to share their startup and product ideas over the course of a semester. We gave our talk to the community at Espaço NAVE, focusing on the importance of support for all products and companies, not just WordPress.
Espaço NAVE
Later in the week, we traveled to São Paulo to meet with the local tech community, including Marco Gomes, the founder of boo-box, and WordPress community members. At the São Paulo WordPress meetup, we saw the incredible community dynamic in action as members shared thoughts and ideas on new topics and talks to cover throughout the year. Anyssa Ferreira gave an excellent talk on women working with WordPress in the Brazilian community before allowing us to take the stage to chat about support and localization.
Our trip to Brazil was packed with tons of productive and fascinating conversations. We were welcomed by an incredibly warm and dynamic community. We’re excited to see the ongoing results of our conversations around localized support, women and children in WordPress, and the WordPress community in South America as a whole.
Are you fluent in Brazilian Portuguese and English and love supporting users? If so, you might be a great fit for our Happiness Engineer (BR-PT) role. We’re also hiring dozens of other roles globally! Join our team!
