It seems like only yesterday I sent an email to the hiring team at WooThemes and joined the WooCommerce support team after chats with the support leader Mike Krapf and a panel interview with a few team members.
I never thought I’d have the opportunity to join them. I sent my application thinking, “What could happen? The worst is they won’t accept me. Let’s try.” Instead it seems that they think I’m pretty good at what I do, and it’s one year today that I celebrate working with awesome people at an awesome company!
Technically, I could say I’ve worked for WooThemes for one year and one month, as I started bugging them via internal chat from September — though my official start date was 1st October — just to get to know everyone and be sure that people knew me. I even got a kudo before starting full time!
What happened next?
Team Enterprise and Woo Support
I began my career as a WooCommerce Support Ninja on Team Enterprise at WooThemes. We support premium extensions, such as WooCommerce Subscriptions, WooCommerce Bookings and WooCommerce Memberships, in addition to WooCommerce core.
Michael Tieso was our team leader at the time, and I appreciate what he did for me. He was awesome and taught me a lot about how to manage tricky tickets, where to find what in the WooWorld and improved my morale during weekly 1-on-1 chats.
Time passed, and people naturally want to learn more and evolve, so Michael moved to a different team and my team buddy Mindy Postoff was promoted to Enterprise Team Lead! Woo! What awesome news! She’s still doing an awesome job as our team leader, and also organized the first WooCommerce Support Team meetup in Montreal that we attended last week.
In the meantime, I keep growing, learning new things by being in contact with some of the most awesome developers and support technicians in the world, improving my coding skills with suggestions from Mike Jolley and improving my English with the help of the team, especially Magnus, Maria, Marina and Mindy.
And then one day, Mark and Magnus wrote in chat:
Hey guys, we will be part of Automattic!
That’s not exactly what they said. They were way more detailed and careful in announcing it, but that was the point.
That was awesome news but scary at the same time! I was going to be part of Automattic. I’m only 24 and a complete noob compared to the “monsters” that have worked at Automattic for many years, and I’m joining them!
Note: Monsters here means that they are very good in what they do. It’s definitely a positive thing and it’s used a lot this way in Italy.
When that happened, I was scared at the beginning. It was a big deal to me, and then I realized that in a matter of five years — from the time I developed my first website to the WooThemes acquisition — I would be part of one of the most important companies in the world.
Along with this awesome news came bad news as well. Not all WooThemes team members joined Automattic. That was sad, as we were not only losing some great co-workers, but also friends. I’ve never considered my co-workers to only be co-workers. We are more like family, we help each other, we improve together, we do the most and best work we can as a team, not as individuals. Because of this, you’re quickly and closely connected with each team member.
After the acquisition I was asked to cover a different position on the WooCommerce support team. I’m still part of the Team Enterprise, but I’m not only a WooCommerce Support Ninja now, I’m also an Internal Support Ninja (that’s the title I chose for my role for now). What do I do as Internal Support Ninja?
I help support teams with tricky tickets. When there’s a problem with a ticket, when someone needs help, they can ping me to get assistance.
Everyone keeps saying that I’m doing well, but I always feel that I’m not doing enough and could do better.
To Infinity and Beyond
And that’s what happened from 1st October 2014 to now. I’ll keep doing my job and never stop learning or growing, side by side with all ~400 Automatticians spread around the world.
I’m so proud of everything and everyone, and I would do it all again and again. I talk about my job with people who don’t know us and as soon as I finish telling our story, the first question I hear is, “How can I join your company?”
Yeah, I talk a lot about WooThemes and Automattic, about what I do every day. I love doing it. You can ask my dance partner, and she’ll probably say that I’m dead boring and always talk about the same stuff.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering how to join our team, we are hiring: https://automattic.com/work-with-us/
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