Software engineer.

Morning meeting that’s supposed to just be “what you did yesterday, what you’ll do today, and if you need help”. People fuck that up and go off on tangents. What should be a ten minute meeting takes 30.

Product owners at some point told you what the features to work on this month will be. For example, we need to add the ability for some reasons to bulk delete appointments.

Chat with product and other engineers about what that entails. Product probably won’t give complete, clear, requirements so you need to pull it out of them. (Hard delete or soft delete? Do you need an audit log? Are you sure with no take-backs you don’t need an undo? Do you want to notify anyone when it’s deleted? One email per request or per event? Do you have designs for that email? No? Of course not. And what do you want the UI to look like? If I “just put a button somewhere” we both know you won’t like it. Give me details or that blank check in writing.)

At some point sit down and make code changes to do the thing. Change the backend server code to accept your new request. Write automated tests. Change the frontend to make the request. Write more tests. Manually bang on it. Probably realize some requirements were missed (you guys know there’s a permissions system, right? I hooked this up to the existing can-delete permission. What do you mean CS doesn’t use permissions? You made them all superusers??)

Manually bang on it a little. Deploy it to dev or some non-production environment. Have product and other stakeholders look at it and sign off. Probably get feedback and either implement it, or convince them to do it “later” (or: never, because they’ll forget and it’s not actually important).

Get code approval from other engineers. Make changes as needed.

Merge and deploy. Verify in production.

Meanwhile, do code reviews for other people’s work. Context switch. Feels bad. Other guy is working on a progress report tool that’s in a whole other part of the code, so every time you look at it it’s a shifting of brain gears.

Also look at dependabot for libraries that need updating. Read release notes. Make changes if needed. Test. Pray.

Also periodic meetings to go over work in the backlog. A meeting to discuss how the team is doing that usually doesn’t produce results, but can be a vent session.

I imagine from the product owner it’s something like:

Get a mess of contradictory ideas from leadership. Try to figure out what they actually want and in what order. Manage their emotions because they have all the power and don’t like being told no or otherwise feeling bad.

Talk to customers and other users. Try to figure out what they want. They say things like “make it go faster” or “can you make the map bigger?”. There’s no map on the website.

Talk to engineering. They ask so many questions. Why can’t they just do the thing? They’re always going on about stuff that doesn’t seem important (like security and permissions and maintainability). This needs to go out Friday because the CEO wants it out.

Write tickets (a short document describing work to be done). People don’t read them. Or maybe don’t finish writing them, and leave a vague “as a user I want to be notified about changes to my project”, without specifying any details. (Notified how, Ryan??)

I don’t know what else they do.

Startups are a mess. Anyone who says they want to run the government like a startup should be banished from the land.

Be engineer, draw pictures with numbers next to it that mean that your picture is important. Give picture to someone who agrees that your picture is important and presses on your picture with a stamp. Then give your picture to people that don’t work at desks to make a thing that looks like your important picture.

Most office workers move things from point A to B in the physical, digital, or financial world. Electricity, toys, real estate, insurance contracts, missiles, you name it. The office worker is a link in a chain of information that stretches from the beginning of causality to the final effects of human existence.

There’s a mine, somewhere in the world. In that mine is metal. A factory owner wants that metal. Office workers for that factory call or email the office for that mine, and ask for that metal. The two offices negotiate a deal.

This usually involves calls or emails to management, accounting, sales, legal - all different office workers doing different things - that ultimately boil down to:

1. agreeing to a price per unit of metal (+ applicable taxes) that can benefit both parties, and
2. logistics of when and how to deliver or pickup that metal, and how much those logistics cost.

From there, it’s pretty much the same deal. The factory isn’t making enough money. They want to sell a better product. Office workers for the factory contact other office workers at an engineering firm. Both parties make calls, send emails, design proof-of-concepts, and they negotiate a deal. Sometimes they logon to an hour-tracking software, so an office worker can bill the factory per hour another office worker spent working for that factory’s product.

A major importer wants the product that the factory made with that engineer’s designs and that mine’s metal. Office workers make calls, send emails, check tariff and tax regulations, contact representatives at the port or border, schedule times and dates, and negotiate a deal.

A major retailer wants the product that the importer purchased from the factory…

A consumer buys a product and dies. Their family hires a lawyer. That lawyer has his office workers make calls, send emails, logon to government websites, and schedule hearings and submit documents to prove that the product killed the consumer.

An insurance agency investigates the plaintiff that is suing the retailer. They google the person that died. They contact office workers that know about how people die or know about how products can kill, and they check the insurance company’s database for how often people die to that product, and they calculate the odds that the product will kill a person, and then insurance office workers renegotiate a contract with the retailer office workers for higher premiums.

An office worker in the government works for the court. They receive the lawsuit documents, they make and cancel appointments, make phone calls and send emails to other office workers, lawyers, or plaintiffs, they send data from one lawyer to another, etc.

The whole system builds and builds until you have office workers talking to office workers talking to office workers about the movement of imaginary assets that never actually move, or the buying and selling of personal data for targetting ads that everyone hates, or software engineers building cryptocurrencies designed to fail or call centers that exist only to convince you to pay them money, or tax filing software companies that only exist because they pay the government to make tax filing hard…

And there, everywhere, in everything - you have the modern day office worker.

TL;DR: Reading emails. Sending emails. Checking data. Making data. Moving data. Making phone calls. Signing contracts. Approving decisions. Buying, selling, loaning, stealing, hiring, firing, murdering, perjuring, harassing, gassing, lying, crying, building, destroying - all pixels on a screen and voices on a phone, text in an email and words in a voicemail, all the world’s wealth and all the world’s future moving piece by little intricate piece from one human to the next in an impossibly vast network of causality that nobody really understands or controls but nonetheless keeps rolling forward one dollar at a time.

(Edit - oh, and don’t even get me started on websites, apps, and spreadsheets that they use to interface with the data. There are infinite monkeys at infinite computers making the most randomized bespoke solutions to every little business niche, and every office worker has to swap between 2-6 of them on the daily)

I just check email all day. Like that’s 80% of my job. My entire job could be done from anywhere. I don’t do as single thing that isn’t in my laptop. But I still sit at a stupid cubicle.

I’m actuarie, I work in the reporting department, that means we prepare reports and databases to be sent monthly to our regulatory agency. My day to day functions are writing python programs to prepare and validate the reports and bases, sometimes my boss is finding mismatchs between bases (like the accounting base is saying we paid 10 on claims, but the actuarial base say we paid 9) and she ask me to find what base is the correct one and why it’s had an error.

Getting emails faster than you can read and respond to them, and they are all urgent exceptions.

Meetings that could have been emails, wasting your time while the real emails continue to stack up.

Askng important questions (via email) and getting ignored, or only some of the questions addressed.

Visits from the newest suit talking about how great their new ideas will be, just like the last one who said the same thing and was replaced after 6 months.

It is a lot like the movie Office Space, except in current times instead of one job you’re doing the work of 2.5 people and making less than Peter did in 1999.

An office is usually divided in different departments that have different functions.

In no particular order, not exhaustive, and skipping management and IT, typical functions could be:

Customer service. Pick up the main phone line and check the official mail box, talk to customers, redirect calls to other departments.

Sales coordinators. Receive orders from customers, through sales representatives or by web etc. They basically ensure that all incoming orders have the proper data to be processed. Keeps track of order confirmations and maybe send data back to the customers.

Logistics. Arrange shipments from suppliers, to customers and between stock locations. Files all documents for toll and tariffs.

Debtor controllers. Keeps track of customer payments, outgoing invoices, payment plans, sending reminders and debt collection.

Creditor controllers. Register incoming invoices. Get approvals from whoever ordered it and pays the bills on time or whenever it makes most sense for discounts and such.

Finance controllers. Keeps track of the entire balance sheet. Bank reconciliations, cash flow, investments, files and pays taxes. General bookkeeping that doesn’t fit in the other departments. Does the financial statements, reporting, monthly, quarterly or annually.

Purchasing, HR/Payroll and PR/marketing are self-explanatory I think.

All of these administrative functions are necessary in most companies, but in smaller companies it all could very well be done by a single person, while in large companies they might have several people in each department.

Many companies have several subsidiaries or other constructions, so tasks or functions can also be spread out like that. For instance, I can be the creditor department in one company while also doing finance in another or payroll in a third. So while the functions are somewhat strictly defined by the tasks, it’s only in very large companies that someone does just one function.

All office functions are constantly being made more efficient. A lot of it is truly boring, so it’s in everyone’s interest to automate as much as possible. I don’t feel sorry for someone losing their office job to an algorithm, no, I’m happy for them not having to do it anymore.

It’s not a stupid question. When I was interviewing for my first office job back in 2001, I literally asked if they could show me what I had to do.

Seing someone who entered data into a program, I asked if that’s it? You really want me to just enter data into that program? OK, I can do that. And so I was hired to put numbers into boxes on the screen and have been doing that ever since. Not the same program of course. I’ve been around all departments by now and spend most of my work time working on avoiding typing numbers into boxes.

I’ve never really had a “desk job” where my job was to sit at a desk 9 to 5. But a few of my past occupations included at least some desk time, such as:

• Flight instructor. Most of my day was spent either in the classroom briefing/instructing, or in the plane instructing/overseeing. I spent a significant portion at a desk creating lesson plans, updating logbooks, communicating with students, grading assignments, communicating with other instructors, communicating with our Designated Pilot Examiner, filling out FAA paperwork, that sort of thing.
• Aviation mechanic. This is more of an administrative job than the posters at your local trade school would lead you to believe. An owner/operator/pilot/plane haver guy brings you a plane for an annual inspection, now you have a research project. What exact make and model is this thing? What modifications has it had during the 50 years it’s existed? Under what authority were those modifications made? Is it still in original or correctly modified condition? Are there any manufacturer service bulletins or FAA airworthiness directives issued for this aircraft, and I mean THIS aircraft, or its components? Like, they’ll call out ranges of hull numbers in these things. Then there’s recording all the shit YOU did to the plane while it’s here.
• Project manager of a short-run job shop. First up: Meet with the customer and massage the idea they have out of their brain. 3 times out of 10 tell them which aisle in Wal-Mart they can find what they want, 1 time out of 10 explain why what they want isn’t physically or technologically possible. Once I’ve got a good idea of what the customer wants, it’s time to do some preliminary design work, research materials and prepare an estimate, deliver this to the customer. 7 in 10 times we hear back from that, get the okay to build, now it’s time to order materials, do any of the design work which may include CAD design, electrical design, computer programming, whatever. Scheduling and directing my team, contracting with any talent I don’t have in-house, the all important staring at a wall visualizing fourteen different variations on some little yet pivotal detail, and then I’d end up in the shop running laser cutters or lathes or table saws or whatever to get it built. Then the most important part: Invoicing the customer.

Just look up the movie “Office Space” it pretty well summarizes it all.

As a manufacturing engineer, I’m mostly in an office when I’m not actively dicking about on the production floor or talking with my production operators. Most of my desk time is

1. Answering questions from people who aren’t me about my manufacturing lines: specifications, output, inputs, could I do experiment XYZ if they sent me info. Subject Matter Expert is the term the company uses. Debatable if it’s accurate, but it’s the expectation.
2. Answering stupid questions for people who could absolutely open an app or walk and look in person but would rather be handed the info.
3. Collaboration with other employees: be it Quality as to what hoops I need to jump through to do something, providing process data relevant to a manufacturing defect they were alerted to, pestering other engineers to see if they’ve done anything like what I’m up to because it’s a good shortcut, or trying to work out how to use a system I’m unfamiliar with.
4. Tracking output metrics: Management loves the same numbers tracked 5 different ways and having them reported to them constantly.
5. Meeting prep: either making a slideshow, crunching data to present, updating a project tracker (see above), or reading all the relevant emails associated with the meeting because earlier I super just skimmed them for anything I was required to do urgently. 7: Tinkering on things at my desk: familiarizing myself with new equipment/parts, testing an idea out of scraps/easily sourced parts before I ask our Tool and Die team to draw up a design for something sturdier/more expensive, or rooting through boxes for things I inherited relevant to that manufacturing line when I was assigned to it.
6. Messaging folks on teams: lunch plans, thoughts on recent events, or even just sending memes, gifs, ASCII middle fingers to people I like. General screwing around.

Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late. I use the side door, that way my boss can’t see me. Uh, and after that, I just sorta space out for about an hour. I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I’d probably, say, in a given week, I probably do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.

The thing is, it’s not that I’m lazy. It’s just that I just don’t care. It’s a problem of motivation, all right? Now, if I work my ass off and the company ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime. So where’s the motivation? And here’s another thing,I have eight different bosses right now!

So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my real motivation - is not to be hassled. That and the fear of losing my job, but y’know, it will only make someone work hard enough not to get fired.

Now they are trying to offer me some kind of stock option and equity sharing program? I have a meeting tomorrow where I am probably going to be laid off.

I work for a consulting firm, so a project is whatever our client has contracted us to do, for the objectives and timeline we’ve agreed to in the contract. We do workforce readiness, largely. So the client might be adopting a new software and wants us to create the employee training on it.

We contract with them for training to help their leaders deliver workshops, maybe some e-learning modules and assessments, and to have it done in a certain number of weeks. That’s an example of a project, and typically we’ll have a small team on the deliverables for it: the modules and the workshops. Meetings are to check in on progress, fix any issues, meet with the client or their subject matter experts. So that’s my office job, though luckily it’s been remote for me since covid.

I work in data refinement. I stare at numbers until I find some that feel scary. Than I put those in a bin.

Here’s my office work:

Since 2005 I worked as a TV news producer. We started the day with a morning meeting where reporters pitched stories and it was decided what they covered that day. Then as a producer I organized the stories in the newscast and found other stories which I was responsible for. That ranges from finding a worthwhile press release to interviewing people myself (usually by phone, and someone’s video chat,) or just finding info by going through data. I would write those, then decide what visuals, audio elements, camera shots, graphics, and anchor reads went with it.

Then during the live newscast I timed it, and made adjustments on the fly when necessary. (Killing stories, finding ones to insert, and adding breaking news.)

I let my contract end almost two months ago, choosing not to stay in news. I’ve been applying to mostly other non-TV news office jobs. That’s including producing other video projects, but also technical writing and marketing positions.

I rapid-fire solve technical problems all day.

I also place orders. But that’s the easy stuff.