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?
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.
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 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.
Just look up the movie “Office Space” it pretty well summarizes it all.
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’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.
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.
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I rapid-fire solve technical problems all day.
I also place orders. But that’s the easy stuff.
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.
Decided to go back to school to go something more meaningful, but that was what my first job basically was. I was hybrid, though. So I was working from home pretty often too, and I lived 10 minutes from the office so I would come in late and leave early on those in person days too. Sometimes I’d spend an hour writing a script and pretend it took me like 2 weeks.
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, tooIn the mornings I’ll usually read news while enjoying a cup of coffee and a Zyn, too, forgot to mention that
I work in data refinement. I stare at numbers until I find some that feel scary. Than I put those in a bin.
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.
Or even construction… there are office jobs for that too. I know firsthand.
This is a good concise answer
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.
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.
