I’ve never had an office job and I’ve always wondered what it is a typical cubicle worker actually does in their day-to-day. When your boss assigns you a “project”, what kind of stuff might it entail? Is it usually putting together some kind of report or presentation? I hear it’s a lot of responding to emails and attending meetings, but emails and meetings about what, finances?

I know it’ll probably be largely dependent on what department you work in and that there are specific office jobs like data-entry where you’re inputting information into a computer system all day long, HR handles internal affairs, and managers are supposed to delegate tasks and ensure they’re being completed on time. But if your job is basically what we see in Office Space, what does that actually look like hour-by-hour?

  • Nyanix@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    23 hours ago

    In my case, I work IT for a healthcare company. Current major projects of mine include trying to migrate servers from our data centers to the cloud and setting up Disaster Recovery options. These are 2 of my 22 current projects.

    On the day to day, I’ll determine what it takes for an application to run and how does it communicate to find the most optimal way we can build it within vendor and enterprise specifications. An example might be…

    • Application is a hosted Web Page
    • It stores all of its data a SQL Database
    • Is used by locations outside of our network, so this will require
      • A Public Endpoint to be accessible outside of our network
      • DMZ’d Network Security Group or Application Security Group to manage exactly what and be accessed from where
    • Is a low-tier application that does not require low latencies

    In this case, I can decide to use a PaaS Web Server and PaaS SQL Server, so that I don’t have to manage security and updates of the Operating System in the future. After deciding this, I might diagram how everything will connect and communicate, then build the infrastructure to fulfill this design. Lets say that means going to Azure (the cloud provider), building the Web Server and SQL Server, creating the DMZ rules (443 inbound from anywhere to WebServer and 1433 only from WebServer to SQLserver) I set up a backup system for both of these to take daily backups in case anything goes sour, then determine what steps are necessary to make sure that I can minimize the downtime for the migration, since it will take time to restore a backup from the data center’s version into the Azure version.

    I’m trying to keep things simple-ish for this example because there’s a wide variety of tools, environments, and processes that come into play for any one of these builds. Most of the time is spent not in actively moving things, but in determining best courses of action and minimizing downtime, especially being a healthcare environment where an application could be actively impacting a patient’s care.

    Of course there’s all the other stuff you might expect, like emails about a server not working right and meetings about how management wants to use more AI while needing to cut costs to the organization because we’re “not currently economically sustainable.”

    While by no means a comprehensive view into the work, I hope it grants some insight into the role!