
Ask HN: What's your average day at work like? - adtac
I&#x27;ll be graduating in roughly a year :)
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jimmyRustler
Im a junior salesman at a mid level paper company. My day-to-day is pretty
standard. Ill meet a few clients maybe close a sale or two. I do have to stay
vigilant though because some of my coworkers are very unprofessional and like
to waste time on pranks. Fortunately though, my boss is a great guy, and my
personal mentor. Ever since he named me assistant to the regional manager, our
branch has dominated the northeastern regional paper market. All in all, it
not a bad gig. I have a 50 acre beat farm which I run together with my cousin,
so that keeps me busy and entertained.

~~~
mjolnirmkii
Thanks for reporting in Dwight!

~~~
jimmyRustler
my name is jimmy

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cuchoi
Not the typical Hacker News reader, but might be interesting for some. I used
to work (I am a graduate student now) at the Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL,
[http://www.povertyactionlab.org](http://www.povertyactionlab.org)) in Latin
America. It is a research center that fights poverty by building evidence on
which public policies and social programs work (and which do not work).

In my last role as "Policy Manager" it is difficult to define a typical day,
but it was mostly managing people, projects, reading papers to pick up
messages for policymakers, writing policy memos, some traveling, some
consulting for governments, making presentations, and managing upwards.

If you are interested take a look at a new Micromasters they launched along
with MIT on Data, Economics and Development:
[https://micromasters.mit.edu/dedp/?utm_source=odl&utm_campai...](https://micromasters.mit.edu/dedp/?utm_source=odl&utm_campaign=mitx&utm_medium=social&utm_content=mm-
dedp-launch-tw-1).

------
douche
8:30 AM - Rush into work to get on a screen-share with some customer that is
based out of India or Saudi Arabia or Australia, trying to chase the time
difference.

8:40 AM - Customer never joined conference call, grumble about the normal
morning pre-work routine that's been disrupted for no reason.

9:00 AM - Make the mistake of checking email. Realize some customer has had a
problem with our software. Details are sketchy at best. Compose an email
asking for more information, log files, screenshots, a coherent description of
the issue, anything.

10:00 AM - Boss rolls into work, starts checking his email. Torrent of emails
sent out about status of half a dozen disparate projects and evaluations.
Seizes upon possible customer issue, demands immediate all-hands meeting to
discuss the problem, even though the customer has yet to provide any
information.

10:30 AM - Pointless standup meeting.

11:00 AM - Customer with the problem proves themselves once more incapable of
following directions, sends completely unrelated set of log files and
screenshots. Still no description of what the problem was. Query for the
correct information.

12:00 - Flee for lunch.

1:00 - Post-lunch coma.

1:30 - Try to actually knock out some tickets and get something done.

1:35 - Customer finally sends decent bug report with information that can be
analyzed. Except they are running an ancient version and refuse to update.
Pull down old version of software to cross-check logging information and
reproduce issue. Realize issue was fixed a year and three point releases ago.
Tell customer to upgrade, which will take three to six weeks to percolate
through their lab, staging and finally production environments, amassing
copious amounts of red tape along the way and requiring sign-off by no fewer
than seven different groups. Prepare temporary work-around to quiet down the
issue in the meantime. Get ambushed with three other issues that have been
occurring for weeks but were never brought to attention.

4:00 - Free once more to try to squeak out some forward progress for the day.
Get pulled into hall-way conversation about some terrible idea for a feature
that somebody who was given a demo of the product idly asked for, and sales
interpreted as a show-stopping, must-have, stop-the-sale, not-going-to-make-
my-quota blocker.

4:55 - Fuggit, it's time to go home.

Not all days are like this, but when you get into a stretch of them, whoo boy.

~~~
re_todd
Where I work, we definitely get too many customer recommendations that are
treated as show-stopping by someone in our business side. Often the customer
will only vaguely remember making the recommendation a few months later, and
it turned out to not be that important. Gee, thanks business people, for
wasting 3 weeks of software engineer's time and lots of the owner's money!

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mjolnirmkii
I am a senior cloud engineer at a midsized software company. We provide a
product that customers can choose to host internally or use via our cloud
service.

A typical day for me varies greatly depending on if any customers are having
issues. If so, I work to help solve the problems and get things working again.
Otherwise, my time is spent maintaining our cloud systems, performing
maintenance activities, and working on projects to improve our internal
monitoring and automation tools across our cloud infrastructure and customer
portal site.

My email inbox can be around 1000 messages any given morning that I have to go
through before even looking at our internal support queue system and any items
flagged in our monitoring system that need attention.

It can be pretty busy, so at least once a week I miss eating lunch due to
workload, meetings, or customer issues. But overall not bad compared to other
roles I have heard about.

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banku_brougham
i really like this question because i'm not too old to remember my first civil
engineering job, and my complete lack of preparation for working in a
corporate environment with meetings and lots of boring boring work. so:

at a large company i am a senior data scientist supporting a business org. i
have a lot of experience at this point in business management, and i'm valued
for my combination of business competence and sql coding. i've developed a
level of trust with my management org, and i've attained the highest non-
manager level available. i am not at immediate risk of being dumped, so that
stress is gone although with the next management rotation things can change
quickly.

i show up at work around 10ish. if i don't open email i can be productive for
an hour or so before someone bothers me with an irrelevant line of inquiry.
usually i play 2 to 3 games of ping pong before the afternoon rush on the
table on our floor. i always fit in an hour of study during the day, these
days i'm trying to get past the grievous irritations of tableau or learning
new joys of julialang. i was studying statistics, but i got an intern to
manage so now my time is crimped. by the afternoon (after an hour lunch -
burger and beer) i am focused on my self-managed issues panel, and try to
knock out some sprint items. these are typically datawarehouse extracts with
some analysis and tables of sort/filter variety. quitting time always comes
too fast, but with a newborn at home i dont stay late any more. no one seems
to notice or care, as long as i am able to grind when the chips are down (and
they are at a loss to explain sone financial results in the monthly P&L
review).

basically, on average its pretty great.

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geoffreyhale
Probably those with non-average "average days" are more likely to respond so
I'll balance it out by stating the useless and the obvious:

Average days are average. Average is boring.

My average day: * 9 AM arrive * 10 AM standup * code until lunch * code all
afternoon * 6 PM leave

Corporate system pressures you to be average, but your boredom will pressure
you otherwise. Always find new things to work on, meet new people, don't burn
any bridges, stay sharp.

~~~
AznHisoka
How is coding not staying sharp?

~~~
jetti
Depends on what sharp means to somebody as well as what their job entails. I'm
unfortunately doing SSIS/ETL work which I don't want to do. I stay sharp with
the technologies I want to use by doing work with them outside of work.

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tbihl
Not sure whether I should call it a work day: I get paid and it's exhausting,
but it's also school. An extended job training, perhaps.

My average day: 4:15 -- Get up, make breakfast, pack lunch, drive to work

5:00 -- Study for two hours at school before classes begin

7:00 -- Class for two hours

9:00 -- Study for one hour

10:00 - Class for two hours

12:00 - lunch hour: half hour eat, half hour study

1:00 -- Class for two hours

3:00 -- Study for two hours

5:00 -- Go out to my car, read on my phone or work on my computer on my own
projects for 30-60 minutes until traffic improves somewhat.

Sometimes I leave by 4; more often I'll keep studying until 6.

It's slightly similar to college, but the people are all pretty much on the
same page (and diligent), and I'm constantly slammed with so much material
that I have to be less mechanical about my studying (triage rather than just
learning everything). At least it's interesting stuff. And it's nice to be
'done for the day' when I leave, which obviously isn't too common in college.

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user5994461
10:00 start working...

10:30 or more likely, come in late to the office :D

10:30-11:00 free breakfast with a variety of drinks and patisserie. sync with
other people

11:00-12:00 check emails & messages & chat & more sync

12:00-13:00 fix or improve whatever just broke, if anything. take a preemptive
look at my hundreds of services. find stuff to do that is not too long because
there is lunch soon.

13:00-14:00 free catered lunch

14:00-18:30 get stuff done... but nothing too major because it's peak traffic,
hard changes in production should be in the morning.

18:30 leave early

18:30-19:xx or most likely, start reading HN and forget to leave early.

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Toly
Im a vp of growth at a enterprise api startup. day-to-day usually starts with
an early call between 7-8 with an int'l client or prospect. work from the
office in SF 2-3 times per week, in SV once every other week or so, work from
home the rest of the time. Get into the office between 9-930. catchup on
emails, 2-3 calls/demos before lunch. afternoon is some team chats, a couple
more calls/demos and call it a day round 6. at night is when the fun begins:
working on side projects ;)

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kyloren
Doctor here 7 am comes to ward check up on all the patients

8 am review all newly admitted patients and patients who came for
investigations

9 am ward round with the consultant

10 am write discharge cards of all the patients that the consultant discharged

12 pm lunch

1 pm review all the new admissions that came during this time

2 pm review all the new complaints of patients who are at the ward

3 pm write and discharge patients who are supposed to be discharged by 5

4 pm go home have a wash

6 pm come back and review all patients at the ward

7 pm evening ward round with consultant

8 pm go home if there is no emergency or patients that need my attention

Repeat

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zhte415
A wonderful opportunity to collaborate with a large variety of people doing a
large amount of varied work.

I'm not strictly tech, more banking-tech-BPO cross-over.

Best moments, at the start: Playing with data and discovering fascinating
stuff. Best moments now, 15 years later: mentoring and helping others grow,
and in the process, doing so myself.

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TurboHaskal
09:00 Arrive to work and fetch coffee

09:10 Stand-up meeting

10:00 Agile meeting with all departments

11:30 Personal status meeting

12:00 Lunch break

12:30 Browse HN

13:00 Coding / code reviews

14:00 Priority meeting, turns out what was planned at 11:30 is no longer valid

14:30 Coding / code reviews

17:00 Another status meeting meeting

18:00 Leave

Sometimes I may have more status meetings (avg=3) but you get the picture.

I don't get much done tbh.

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dagw
08:30 Arrive at office, log in, check emails, make sure everything look OK

09:00 Status meeting (~2 times a week)

09:30 Coffee break, chatting with colleagues

10:00 stare at screen, press keys on keyboard

12:00 lunch

13:00 stare at screen, press keys on keyboard

15:30-19:30 (depending on day/mood) head home.

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sriram_iyengar
avg time spent 8-9hrs (weekly avg below)

\- coding 5hrs

\- emails 1hr

\- discussions, huddles, meetings 1hr

\- lunch, coffee , walking around 1hr

\- reading, browsing, hacker news 1hr

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probinso
I've been out of school for about five years, and had several different jobs.
Think the most surprising thing was that as a student I have a strong belief
in what I wanted and work. I found this belief to be incorrect.

At my first job I was hired on to a team that was in my Focus topics. The
majority of my days were scrum Style. I was the first developer on this team,
and it took about four months for the company to staff everybody correctly.
This created a moving Target for our release goals. I was working in a very
large code base, on an isolated feature . We still needed several developers
in order to complete our task . The majority of conversations that our team
had ,including during our scrum meetings , was on addressing these moving
targets. We did all of our scrum and project planning using the traditional
sticky note meetings. Although I believe I learned a lot of this company, and
none of it had to do with the domain I thought I would.

My second job out of school, the projects were much smaller. I had a principal
investigator who would Drive the project and act as a resource to me as I
needed. The principal investigator was in charge of highly technical content,
the team leader was in charge of reporting and optimizing on our
workflows/progress. Every small team in the company used a different
technology in order to report to their team lead. I used Basecamp for one
team, and jira for another . For any software I felt we needed to complete our
task, I was in charge of making the engineering and Design decisions.
Everybody's schedule at the company was open access, and I could add myself to
any meeting, or create a new one to gain appropriate advice.

My third job was remote contract work. I worked about 20 hours a week. Here,
my tasks started by moving their technology stack to the cloud, in order to
better facilitate remote work for everybody at the company. I would also hold
regular conference video calls with Junior developers to grow them in several
programming languages, and ides, and walk through code reviews / debug
sessions . When working with mid to senior-level Developers, there was a very
similar workflow to my second employer. When working with Junior developers,
or with the business management side of the company, I was in charge of
translating our discussions into tickets and appropriately handling them.

During this time, I also began volunteering for a project where I drove around
the United States Gathering raw data by photographing Street lamps. Here I
wrote a support software, as the primary developer. I moved towards using as
much free and simple software as possible period off and making decisions
based on whether or not a novice contributor would be able to extend my work
at any given time. I would also hold sessions for scientists in our group,
without prior programming background, to grow their knowledge in the domain.

At my fourth job out of school, I served as a ticket processing machine. I was
at a very large company, and I would show up every day, check a ticket list,
and select one to work on. This was a company where human interaction did not
contribute to business success. Once a week we would talk about what our
blockers were. The rest of the time we would clock an 8 hour day following a
ticket. Much of my work here, was in replicating data storage environments in
order to address bugs.

While working here, in the evenings , I taught at a boot camp. This meant that
most of my weekend was spent developing curriculum.

