<story><title>Ask HN: What&apos;s your working day like?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m curious about the details of the usual working day for different professions&amp;#x2F;positions (not necessary technical).&lt;p&gt;Examples of professions&amp;#x2F;positions: UI Designer, CEO, Sales, CTO, Welder, Trader (online&amp;#x2F;offline), Recruiter, System developer&amp;#x2F;administrator, Web developer, Civil Engineer, Quality Assurance Engineer, Teacher, Professor, Astronaut... Anything.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll start:&lt;p&gt;Profession&amp;#x2F;position: Web developer - full time, remote - &amp;lt;50 employees organization.&lt;p&gt;Workday:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    - Wake up &amp;amp; prepare myself.

    - Join a 10~15min call with my team (3 Developers, 1 Manager, 1 Designer).

    - Start working on assigned issues, usually for 1~4hours.

    - Catching up with emails&amp;#x2F;team conversations.

    - Reviewing other developers patches.

    - Repeat until calling it a day, usually 7~8 hours with 1 hour break.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>erikb</author><text>Many people complain about the usual work chaos. I&amp;#x27;m also an engineer and I don&amp;#x27;t get it. For me, having other people come and ask questions is not distraction but an opportunity to help, learn to know their point of view, learn new things. Meetings are a way to influence the direction of the company however small my influence may be. Other people talking can really distract if it&amp;#x27;s heavily on topic, but usually also enables a little smalltalk 2-3 times each hour, which provides a lot of the otherwise missing social life between Monday Morning and Friday Afternoon. Even the actual development can happen together with one or two other guys, which increases the speed (since what&amp;#x27;s hard for me is usually easy for one of the colleagues and vice versa) and makes the solutions smarter (you can&amp;#x27;t just think off something, you need to be able to argue it as well).&lt;p&gt;In my eyes it&amp;#x27;s really addicting, and I usually get this after-disco&amp;#x2F;cinema low when the amount of people in office starts to slow down.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s the actual &amp;quot;engineering work&amp;quot; you are trying to do without interacting with people all the time?&lt;p&gt;Edit: I think most answers can be summarized as &amp;quot;When I&amp;#x27;m left alone I get into the flow mode, and that&amp;#x27;s enjoyable&amp;quot;. The same way I mostly get it when working together with a colleague on a problem. Both ways may not always be the most productive, but due to producing a good feeling we prefer these. I see, thanks for showing your points of view.</text></item><item><author>treehau5</author><text>Profession: Software &amp;quot;Engineer&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;[06:15] First alarm goes off;&lt;p&gt;[06:45] Finally wake up, get out of bed, shower, shave, make espresso for me and the wife&lt;p&gt;[07:15] out the door, 30 minute commute to office&lt;p&gt;[07:45] breakfast bagel at my work cafe&lt;p&gt;[08:00] arrive at desk, begin contemplating work -- work on something I procrastinated on the previous day so that I can have a good standup report&lt;p&gt;[9:00] everyone arrives at office, noise increases 10x, I am physically unable to concentrate anymore. Earplugs and noise-deadening headphones help some, but then having those on distracts me&lt;p&gt;[10:00 til 05:45 or 6:30 pm] Constant battling distractions, meetings, interruptions, and general work-related chaos, trying to somehow manage to squeeze in any actual developer work. Work proclaims how &amp;#x27;fun it is to work here! awesome! totes cool! We have so much cool stuff! Our culture is the best culture!&amp;#x27;&lt;p&gt;Help me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nyrulez</author><text>Hmm. How about actually building stuff? For most software engineers, thats a very important part of their job&amp;#x2F;life&amp;#x2F;happiness. That requires long focus and flow. And in my personal opinion has a great sense of fulfillment attached to it compared to lot of scattered micro impacts. Ultimately you need to learn to balance both otherwise it gets very frustrating​.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What&apos;s your working day like?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m curious about the details of the usual working day for different professions&amp;#x2F;positions (not necessary technical).&lt;p&gt;Examples of professions&amp;#x2F;positions: UI Designer, CEO, Sales, CTO, Welder, Trader (online&amp;#x2F;offline), Recruiter, System developer&amp;#x2F;administrator, Web developer, Civil Engineer, Quality Assurance Engineer, Teacher, Professor, Astronaut... Anything.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll start:&lt;p&gt;Profession&amp;#x2F;position: Web developer - full time, remote - &amp;lt;50 employees organization.&lt;p&gt;Workday:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    - Wake up &amp;amp; prepare myself.

    - Join a 10~15min call with my team (3 Developers, 1 Manager, 1 Designer).

    - Start working on assigned issues, usually for 1~4hours.

    - Catching up with emails&amp;#x2F;team conversations.

    - Reviewing other developers patches.

    - Repeat until calling it a day, usually 7~8 hours with 1 hour break.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>erikb</author><text>Many people complain about the usual work chaos. I&amp;#x27;m also an engineer and I don&amp;#x27;t get it. For me, having other people come and ask questions is not distraction but an opportunity to help, learn to know their point of view, learn new things. Meetings are a way to influence the direction of the company however small my influence may be. Other people talking can really distract if it&amp;#x27;s heavily on topic, but usually also enables a little smalltalk 2-3 times each hour, which provides a lot of the otherwise missing social life between Monday Morning and Friday Afternoon. Even the actual development can happen together with one or two other guys, which increases the speed (since what&amp;#x27;s hard for me is usually easy for one of the colleagues and vice versa) and makes the solutions smarter (you can&amp;#x27;t just think off something, you need to be able to argue it as well).&lt;p&gt;In my eyes it&amp;#x27;s really addicting, and I usually get this after-disco&amp;#x2F;cinema low when the amount of people in office starts to slow down.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s the actual &amp;quot;engineering work&amp;quot; you are trying to do without interacting with people all the time?&lt;p&gt;Edit: I think most answers can be summarized as &amp;quot;When I&amp;#x27;m left alone I get into the flow mode, and that&amp;#x27;s enjoyable&amp;quot;. The same way I mostly get it when working together with a colleague on a problem. Both ways may not always be the most productive, but due to producing a good feeling we prefer these. I see, thanks for showing your points of view.</text></item><item><author>treehau5</author><text>Profession: Software &amp;quot;Engineer&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;[06:15] First alarm goes off;&lt;p&gt;[06:45] Finally wake up, get out of bed, shower, shave, make espresso for me and the wife&lt;p&gt;[07:15] out the door, 30 minute commute to office&lt;p&gt;[07:45] breakfast bagel at my work cafe&lt;p&gt;[08:00] arrive at desk, begin contemplating work -- work on something I procrastinated on the previous day so that I can have a good standup report&lt;p&gt;[9:00] everyone arrives at office, noise increases 10x, I am physically unable to concentrate anymore. Earplugs and noise-deadening headphones help some, but then having those on distracts me&lt;p&gt;[10:00 til 05:45 or 6:30 pm] Constant battling distractions, meetings, interruptions, and general work-related chaos, trying to somehow manage to squeeze in any actual developer work. Work proclaims how &amp;#x27;fun it is to work here! awesome! totes cool! We have so much cool stuff! Our culture is the best culture!&amp;#x27;&lt;p&gt;Help me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>squeaky-clean</author><text>I enjoy helping when people come up to me with legitimate questions, for all the reasons you mention. It feels like half the time, I&amp;#x27;m being bugged not for any real reason, but because the person couldn&amp;#x27;t bother to put some effort in first.&lt;p&gt;For example, I&amp;#x27;ve become known as &amp;quot;the regex guy&amp;quot; at the office. I know regex really well as well as the ins and outs of the regex engines of languages we use. I don&amp;#x27;t mind when I get called over to help with a tough regex, or optimizing something. But way too often whatever I get interrupted and cross the building just to replace &amp;quot;.*&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;.+&amp;quot; or something equally simple.&lt;p&gt;I usually just type the solution and tell them my copy of Mastering Regular Expressions is on the office bookshelf if they&amp;#x27;d like to borrow it, the first chapter should cover all the basics. I&amp;#x27;m also very happy to explain the basics of regex to someone in my down time, but very few people have taken me up on that offer.</text></comment>