What do office workers actually do?

That's like asking what a construction worker does. They build stuff, but like... what? The answer is whatever their specialty is. You can be an officer worker and do many, many, different things just like you can be in construction and do many, many things.

For some quick very general examples you could be in sales, or software development, or customer service, or data analysis, or graphic design, or so very many others.

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

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 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.

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.

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 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!

The bulk of my day is reading other people‘s documentation to make sure it‘s at least reasonably up to standard.

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 work as a programmer, we get a feature request from a customer that passes through a lot of stages (billing, scheduling, architecture, etc). When it gets to me it's a simple "it's now x, it should be y, this is done when a, b and c". I then go through and change or add code until everything is achieved, it's then tested and out it goes. Rinse and repeat.

you spend most of your time "hopping on a quick call," replying to an email reiterating what you said last time, and doing the needful

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.

Hour by hour, my job evolved from taking calls from clients who owed us money, to then answering questions from agents who weren't as skilled at it as I was.

In the process of being promoted, I was asked to join a daily meeting of over 100 people talking about the issues affecting our department.

Once in a great while, something came up in that meeting that gave me the heads up to prevent chaos in our department and stress to members.

There's a whole shitload of cogs turning in modern corporations. There's also a huge danger of people leaving and nobody understanding why the cogs are there.

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.

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.

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 am a project manager for an automotive part maker.

My job is emails, tickets and meetings on the computer all day every day.

My job is to make sure the engineers work on the correct tasks at the right time. I am responsible for the planning and delivering on time (delivery is a part with mechanical, electronic and software working together correctly). I am responsible to keep the project within the budget. I decide on priorities, what the team needs to be working on first, second and third. I am responsible for making the team work according to the quality process, which means they must follow to correct steps, design rules, reviews and create the appropriate documentation.

I can tell you, sitting in front of the screen all day, is harmful to health (in a different way than a physical job is). For example, almost everyone I work with is wearing glasses, my own vision has degraded a lot.

Reality is that there is a lot of difference between office jobs, mechanical designer, purchaser, corporate laws specialists, and let's say project managers have very different jobs but still have office jobs.

Hour by hour? Read e-mail, browse lemmy, chat using teams (or slack), run to a meeting, then to another one, meet someone in the corridor and ask them a question about an ongoing project, realize that you need to review a report, open the file and get called, rfget a coffee, run to another meeting, conclude you won't neither review the report X or nor start the report Y and call it a day.

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.

Lots of microsoft excel and bullshitting

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.

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.

It really varies too much between industries to give a single answer. Someone at an insurance company is going to be doing something vastly different than an accountant, and they'll be different from an architect (though only part of what architects do is in the office).

That being said, office work for the average worker, as in a salaried or hourly worker with a fairly rigidly defined job description, is usually going to be paperwork, even though there's not always paper involved.

It's taking information and moving it around, in one way or another.

As an example, one of my exes worked for a company that handles employee benefits, investments, and other services to other companies. Lets say a worker has an IRA, gets a nice insurance policy, and there's a pension fund.

Her job is to take data from the company that contracted with the company she worked for, enter that data into the system in an properly formatted way, run calculations, then trigger the appropriate funds being moved from one account to another. No meetings unless something goes wrong. It's all day data entry and management.

Now, before that job, she worked at a tax service under a CPA. She would get actual paper back then. Receipts, forms, and look for deductions for the client, then print out the church correct tax form, have the client sign it, then send it off. She would finish one, then start the next, all day long during tax season. Off season, she would be receiving accounting records from clients and entering them into the system of the company she worked for, and process things like withholding.

Pretty much, neither of those jobs required leaving the desk her entire shift.

Now, my best friend runs a department at a community college. He leaves the actual desk frequently. There's meeting with his superiors, meetings with his underlings, meetings with vendors, budgeting work, orders, policy decisions, disciplinary decisions, and the list keeps on going.

My best friend's husband was a flunky at architectural firm. When he was on a project, his job was drafting designs per specifications given to him. It required doing some oh the work, meeting with the architect, then changing anything per their decisions, or finalizing those plans. From there, once plans were ready to be used by someone to build something, he would essentially coordinate between contractors and his office to troubleshoot any snags with things like permits, supply issues, etc. So it was usually a lot of desk with work over a few weeks or months, then weeks or months barely at a desk, but still mostly in office.

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Myself, I never had a long term office job. But, during recovery from a work related injury, I was pulled into the office of the home health company I worked for. My injury precluded patient care, but I was okay for light duty.

I was placed in staffing. I would roll in early, about 6 AM, and check for any call-ins. That would be employees needing to have their case covered by someone else for whatever reason. I would call other caregivers based on availability, proximity to the patient, and hours already worked. The last one was to avoid overtime unless absolutely necessary.

The software used, I would type in the name, and their details would pop up with their address, phone number, and current schedule. Same with the patient.

The first step for me was always to check the patient's location, because that let me filter out people on the list as available by proximity before anything else, since I would have to just go down the list. I'd enter a name, check the location, and decide who to short list. Once I had the short list, I'd verify they were not going into OT, and start calling, with priority given to employees that had requested more hours.

Most of the time, a call-in would take fifteen to twenty minutes to resolve.

Once the morning run was over, it would be time for a quick coffee and come back to handle any afternoon call-ins in the same way. Have lunch, then repeat for evening/night call-ins.

During the few months I was doing it, most of the time, that was handled by maybe 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Some days it was all handled before lunch, and very occasionally by the time the coffee break was available. Very variable because there are days when folks just didn't call in as much. And there were days it was crazy, particularly when there'd be something like a bad flu run through local schools and the parents would either catch it, or need to take care of their kids.

But, usually, the afternoons were either straight up bullshitting with the ladies in the office (not flirting or messing with, just swapping healthcare war stories), or helping with sorting out patient intake and/or prioritizing staffing for new patients. A new patient means you either shuffle staff around, hire new caregivers, or break it to the bosslady that someone is going to need overtime until the other options could happen. Since I knew pretty much everyone, I was good at figuring out who would be a good pick for a patient's needs.

A few times, I did some of the initial onboarding for new caregivers. Get them the employee handbook, introduce them around, talk about expectations, that kind of happy horseshit.

Tbh, I liked it most days, but not as much as patient care. Don't think I could have done it for years or anything, but as a temporary thing, it was nice.

See? Totally different daily routines and work between industries.

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.

They do the work in the office. Just like work from home works in the home.

And a florist works in the.....floor.

Today I have...

• spoken to a team member under my supervision about their workflow (30m)
• reviewed applicants for a role on my team (15m)
• prepared some financial reports for a client (1h)
• prepared some financial forms for that client (1h)
• figured out the right methodology for a complex letter for that client (30m)
• drafted a complex financial / legal letter for that client (1h)
• felt stressed about this client's situation (45m)
• applied a check list to this client's project (30m)
• reviewed and attended to some emails (30m)

It's time for lunch now.

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

I'm a translator. I translate everything you can possibly think of. HSE documents, emails to illicit lovers, websites, I'm your person.

I rapid-fire solve technical problems all day.

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

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.

Recently finished university and got my first job in basic accounting. All I do is well, watch videos on phone, messages people and a bit of accounting here and there. Boring, relaxing and that’s about it. Going to stick with it for a year and then prolly find new work.

In Office Space the main character seems like some kind of analyst, maybe a project manager who makes sure things are getting done as planned and addresses. The other two guys from the office were software developers if I remember correctly. The annoyimg lady answering phones was a receptionist.

So it varies widely depending on what needs to be done and who it is assigned to. I have worked in the same IT department for over 15 years and had four different positions working with the same large software systems doing very different work (help desk, testing, requirements, project management). I interact with security people, administrative assistants, and even directors as part of the work.

'Office work' is more of a description of the location and setting than the work itself.

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).

I’ll just give some examples.

We know that construction workers build things, but many office workers are behind them. When you hear “office worker,” think “information worker” as that will help.

What information?

Someone has to pay the construction workers. This involves accounting and payroll tasks best done at a computer.

Architects design the project being constructed and this is done in an office.

There are permits, inspections, regulations, taxes, real estate licensing etc to clear the project and this is done through computers and telephones.

Coordination of the different work crews must be planned - we don’t just ask concrete, civil engineers, plumbers, electrical, and landscaping to all show up on the same day and just figure things out. These things are scheduled out and arranged with many different companies / subcontractors and this is mapped out on a computer and agreed to over the phone.

The new apartments being constructed will need tenants to rent them. Billboard space is going to be rented near the building. A graphic designer is designing the billboard on a computer in an office. Someone else is calling the billboard company to arrange the large scale printing of it and to purchase the time it will be displayed.

I’ll stop. This is off the top of my head. If construction workers, with their obviously valuable and easy to understand work have this many office workers behind them, you can imagine how it’s even more complex for things like tech companies.

I largely analyze data and create software to automate business tasks. This allows people in my company to make informed decisions about the business, how money is or should be spent, who & where to hire, helping non-techical people automate repetitive tasks. I also present/interpret data and influence decision-making.

This might mean creating forecasts. Automating data analysis with reports. Building data sources (gathering and manipulating data from different places and compiling it). Building interactive software or excel sheets for non-technical users. Creating white papers or presentations on analysis I've done. Etc.

I use excel, google sheets, google app script (basically javascript), tableau, python, and SQL.

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.

I work as Adminstrator and Developer for Medical Software in a Hospital.
Most of my days are either spend preparing for future planned Software deployments, checking if they can meet our needs. Fomulating out the requirements and data imports and exports to various existing systems. On others like today I'm a bit more hands on and actually fix a bug in an application, laid out a plan for QA testing and eventual deployment of the new release and wrote some documentation so that should I vanish from the face of the earth, the stuff I do can be picked up by someone else.

Account Manager at a marketing agency, I run ~5 marketing departments with a mix of my own staff, outsourced contractors and employees at my clients' businesses.

We create marketing campaigns that consist of a set of emails, social posts, ads, thought leadership articles, blogs, landing pages, downloadable PDF reports and the attendant reporting on how they performed, plus finding and targeting the audiences in various segments. It's a mix of database management, creative writing and design, project planning and communication meetings.

I generally spend about a 1-2 hours a day on each client, plus meetings. We make and send the collateral, get approval, execute, track, measure, compare, make a strategic conclusion, repeat

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.

Does finance count? I'm usually studying something in the alternative data space (that is, using non-financial data to make decisions on investments) so I can, in the end, make a presentation or deliver a product to someone. For example, an analyst decides to study a clothing company and asks me to scrape their prices in the main Latin American markets (because he thinks they can grow there or something). So I do that for a while and report back to him what I found. If it is interesting, I may be tasked with implementing something in our Excel add-in so he can plug that information into his own models, or I'll need to develop a model myself.
Lots of spacing out, browsing lemmy and playing bullet chess on my phone, too

Let me take a liberty to answer for everyone.

Most of human activities now generate a lot of data, or require a lot of data to happen.

It can be anything from construction blueprints and software, to more subtle things like goods distributions on the shelves or schedules or whatever.

Behind everything you see in the world there is a data management, and behind this data management there are layers of people making those decisions from top to bottom.

Some of those people managed to create spaces where all they have to do is to say "nothing on my side" during the meeting.

Others are the opposite, have to take the toll and process the massive amounts of this data.

This is what the office job is nowadays.

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.

Insurance:

For this "industry," it varies wildly by department and position. The lower your are (entry level, etc.) the worse it's going to be. People are always in accidents, so you'll be working customer service on nightmare mode. No real meetings, maybe a "huddle," and then back to work.

I've moved up slightly and it is night and day. I get work/claims, but I'm usually done by noon, and that's with me fucking around (on my phone, messing with the cat, chores, etc.). The projects are PowerPoints and excel sheets in my area, which are simple. Since I'm at home, when I'm done, I usually just keep myself online and work on crafts. If I'm extra bold, I'll take the laptop downstairs and play a game. The more specialized you get, the less work you have.

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!

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 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.

Typey type, typity type type.

Other people's work

I work with computers to map things.

Across my various jobs in this field, the days were usually varied but fairly busy.

I worked for a government agency that would map abandoned mines and locations of mishaps to better understand what kind of environmental issues were posed. This involved meetings with hydrologists, miners, drone pilots, and field workers. It also had some field visits, itself.

Another one, I worked for a city's outreach program and I often was in meetings explaining what I could do, and then I'd have to gather maps and data to put together the product they wanted.

For another job, I had to cross reference a ton of city and county data to find land lots that were large enough for a developer to potentially purchase and then build housing on. This included looking at zoning laws and reading a ton of documentation about new zoning and votes for such a thing. Also included learning about what each category of zoning meant.

Currently I work for an energy company and it's varied in a lot of ways. My day to day is never the same and is kind complicated to the average bear.

I reengineer business processes based on best practices and state of the art technologies and methods.

I worked in software development as a QA engineer. Every day I'd load the current build of the OS and test for bugs, check that fixed bugs are truly fixed, and write bug reports. Once a week it was on me to come in early and do a quick rundown to see how usable the build was and then send a report to the entire org so people knew if it was too problematic to install and remain productive.

I worked in IT at a place that was perpetually under water. I spent all day troubleshooting either end-user computers or servers. We never had a break from tickets, so there was always work to be done unless the holidays were in season and users were taking time off.

I worked IT Exec Support for a high-up individual. It required being on-call and meeting them at their office in different cities and being the personal IT for their staff. It was pretty unpleasant in that the exec never communicated effectively and was insulated by their staff such that they had unrealistic expectations about how things should work. I was proud to land the job, but I'm glad to be done with it.

I now work in IT at a place that is super organized. I mostly wait for someone to call with an issue. Most things are pretty easy to fix. Some days I have to administer our inbox and direct users or create tickets. During that time, I'm always busy. On the days when it's not that, I surf Lemmy (on wfh days) or read a book (on in-office days) between calls. I also configure devices for people and the like (think upgrades and new employees). I'll probably stay here until retirement cause it's the easiest job I've ever had.