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?
I mostly played video games in between intense bursts of productivity to get work done.
Yes, I was doing this before remote work was a thing. You just have to be slick. I once set up a “lab” of three PCs to “test some new software” in a back room and then played Birth of the Federation on one of them while the other two ran perf counter output, for 3 months straight. This was an act of desperation to keep my mind busy. They had laid almost everyone off in the company so I didn’t have much to do, but it started a tradition that carried me all the way to retirement!
I am an IT technician, I get paid to solve problems.
A user can’t send emails? I’ll check the logs and error messges, find the problem and is I am allowed to, solved the problem.
Oh, we need to setup up a new firewall rule?
Ok, I’ll log on to the Palo Alto appliance and have a look at the logs.
We need to configure our systems so that we get our logo as the avatar of sent emails?
Ok, I have no idea on how to do that, so I’ll start googling, ah it is all BIMI, and shit, I need to speak with legal, and set up a new certificate vendor? Crap… Shit, our logo isn’t actually trademarked? What? Fuck, we need to do a DORA check on the certificate vendor? Crap…
I’m still not convinced the BIMI is all that useful as email security. Feels more like a marketing exercise to me but I am in an exclusively B2B org so it probaly doesn’t matter as much.
Oh I saw something where they demonstrated there’s zero security to BIMI, so it’s just a B2B scam to invent a new thing to charge their business customers for. I’ll see if I can find it
Edit: so on a quick skim Google’s fix was literally to require valid DKIM to use BIMI so BIMI is still pretty useless as a security tool, but probably can be effective at getting organizations to actually setup proper email security
Oh, I absolutely agree, but it is what the guys upstairs want…
Office work is largely paperwork, even if very little is on actual paper nowadays. Much of the work involves creating records or communicating with others to get things done. A salesperson will try to find clients for the product or service. They’ll typically create a record of customers or prospects with their contact information and notes about the negotiation. They’ll create a formal quotation or estimate for the customer and if the customer wants to move forward they’ll create an order confirmation. That document will trigger some other department to fulfill the order, either by providing a service or product to the customer. A work order might be provided to a service technician specifying what work is to be done and where. If a product needs to be delivered a picking slip might be created to tell someone in a warehouse where to get the product and how many to get. Once it’s been picked the product will go to the shipping department to be packed and shipped. An item fulfillment will be created saying what items were packed, how many, and what the tracking number is. Once the order is fulfilled an invoice will be created. If the customer paid in advance the payment will get applied to the invoice automatically or by someone in the accounting department. If the customer is on credit terms they’ll be sent the invoice with instructions on how to pay and when payment is due.
There are so many steps like this. The records help the business plan. They know how many parts and supplies to order. They can track if they’re selling more or less than forecast, if they need to place a rush order for more parts, ask people to work overtime or hire more employees. If something starts costing more they can look to see if they need to raise prices or redesign the product to use a different component, or find an alternate source. At the end of the day, it all comes down to accounting, making sure the company is generating enough income to pay the bills, suppliers, and employees, and hopefully make a profit.
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I can only give my experience and I think mine is a bit unusual but here goes.
Like the Office Space folks, I’m a dev in a large (admittedly, non profit and really good) organization. Since covid, I’ve worked remotely but my day to day hasn’t changed.
We have a help desk where people send questions/issues. Someone on our team generally splits those roughly based on workload, skills, knowledge etc. Our goal is about half our work should be those one off requests.
I also have client units within the organization. They usually come to me with wild, bold ideas that I help make a reality or explain (gently) why what they are asking for is insane. Some of thr projects are based on what folks have heard are best practices in our industry, others are about cutting down manual work/seeing what we can automate.
Any of those projects can take anywhere from a couple hours to a couple of months. Some require buy in from other units, so on those I end up on a lot of meetings and email threads answering questions, hearing suggestions etc. I then (usually) coordinate with my manager to make sure I’m not stepping on any toes or there aren’t considerations which I had yet to consider.
Today for example, I spent about half the day working on help desk tickets, about 1/3 of my time was clarifying “what the hell are you trying to say?” Or pointing out logical gaps etc (much easier to do this upfront than write a bunch of code and have someone realize they meant something else entirely… People are dumb.) The other 2/3 was coding.
On my major projects, I spent an annoying amount of time emailing around to get approvals so a project manager would accept that my clients were fine with something I built, even though it was a bit unorthodox. Then a couple hours actually working on another project.
Plus, y’know, Lemmy time, cat skritching time and a bit of cooking.
Admittedly, my experience is unusual. I’m hihhly skilled but slightly underpaid in a non profit, so folks compensate by giving a lot of leeway. So a nice work environment plus I think what I do makes the world a better place, I’m pretty happy. I understand most office jobs are not quite like that but I don’t think they’re far off.
The bulk of my day is reading other people‘s documentation to make sure it‘s at least reasonably up to standard.
You…. Are a saint.
I work in an office as a network administrator. Largely my day to day is a meeting every morning to go over what everyone is doing for the day, then looking through and responding to all the alerts that came up from all the servers I manage(things like failing backups, unexpected reboots, stopped services, strange login behavior, etc)
Then, if I still have time in the day, I put time towards some of the long term projects I have which largely consists of finding things that can be automated and scripting up solutions to that
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Depends who’s looking
Engineer here. You’re salaried but treated like an hourly employee. You get paid to work 40 hours a week but get “told” that working less than 45-50 hours a week makes you a slacker. Your exempt which means you don’t get a mandatory 30 minute unpaid lunch or a paid 15 minute break every 4 hours. Vacation time is normally unlimited but requires manager approval so if you get the old “boomer” type that drank the corporate cool aid, good luck getting any more than 2 weeks worth approved regardless of years at company.
Sorry I digress, My job starts at 8:00 but I slide in to the daily standup at around 8:10. No one notices or cares. Afterwards, I get a cup of coffee, catch up on vital correspondence and questions from overseas coworkers. It’s sometime between 8:30 and 9:45 That I realize the Bangalore Software team sent out an emergency meeting at 11PM last night for 5AM This morning. “Oh well” I think to myself and sip on my coffee catching up on what I missed. Turns out one of them forgot to plug in a machine. They crack me up.
From 9:45 to 10:00, I have conditioned my body to take a shit. I time it for exactly 10 minutes. My second one is precisely times for between 4:00PM and 4:15PM. I figure those two times are freebies to my 9.5 hour forced work schedule. Upon returning, from my “break” I begin to actually work.
I design things using CAD software cool stuff. I am content by 10:10AM I have my headphones on, I am doing what I actually went to school for. I begin to think this is entirely worth all the other stuff I put up with. I get in the zone and time flies.
Its, 10:25AM. There was an emergency on the production floor. They tell me its a problem they have never seen before. They assure me they have taken all the proper diagnostic steps have been taken and I need to look at whats wrong to prevent a line stop.
I think, “its go time” I follow the techs down to the line and start diagnosing the problem. In no time at all, I find that they never checked the test wiring despite that being like in the first 5 steps of diagnosing a problem. I head back to my desk. Its 2PM by now, I microwave my lunch and work through it. Distractions happen maybe I get an accumulated total of an hour or two of design work done before its 6PM and I head home.
Yup…… You could tell me to switch jobs but every company I work for in my line of work is just like this.
Well, I generally come in about 15 minutes late. I use the side door; that way, my boss can’t see me. And after that, I just sorta spaced out for about an hour. I 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 15 minutes of real, actual work.
I’m a chemical engineer at a plastics company. When I’m in the office I’m looking at data and making decisions based on that, like whether to stop or increase production rates, whether to shut something down for maintenance, or finding what piece of equipment is broken and causing a problem. I also design improvements to the process like finding better ways to run the machinery, new equipment that gets us more capacity, or new ways to control the equipment. I would say about 80% of my time is in the office and 20% is in the manufacturing area.
I was until a few years ago, a machine operator in plastic extrusion. All but one of our engineers were useless. Did they do work? Sure. Was it productive to the line? Occasionally…
We paid $20,000 for a new mil thickness tester, made by young engineers at the local university.
They held a whole “class” to show us how it worked, presented not by the ones who built it, but by our engineers.
It failed during presentation. So we all learned how to measure manually instead. It never worked. They ended up installing the old one back, which hardly worked.
Then for the next year it sat broken, and unless the old thickness tester was in a good mood, we had to do it manually, which was so utterly time consuming and difficult.
While I think engineers are important- so many just fuck around, least where I worked.
The idea of letting young engineers at a university design production equipment is WILD to me. Universities make PROTOTYPES. The gap between prototype and reliable production equipment is so big you could drive a bus through it.
A good production engineer is worth their weight in gold but when you have shitty ones you’re better off letting the workers run the ship. At least they know what’s happening and where the hangups are. You’ll know a good engineer because they’re down talking to the lead hands on the shop floor because they want to understand what’s actually happening and run ideas through the shop before they fuck with things.
I’m a pet product specialist for a pet food manufacturer. I respond to customer emails, calls, and chats about our products. This could mean assisting pet owners in selecting products based on their pets’ unique medical or physiological needs, answering nutritional questions, handling complaints, and more. In my downtime I work on reference materials for the rest of the team, continuing education on animal nutrition (my last class was on avian flu in pet foods), and prepare promotional materials for expos and trade shows.
On light days we do a lot of sharing memes, shit talking in group chat, dicking around on the Internet, and finding other creative ways to fuck off.
I do IT governance. When someone builds a server or a firewall rule or a database in a way that could leak patient data to somewhere it shouldn’t be I find it and make them fix it. Generally people don’t want to redo something that they’ve done so there is a whole process around who you tell so that everyone know the problem and who has to fix it.
I help our customers make their business processes less stupid, time consuming and riddled with errors. Practically speaking it means I go to meetings, documentation process changes, build out business process automations, and attempt to convince an unwilling workforce that no, 17 spreadsheets is not the only or best way to run a business (change management).
