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…

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

And a florist works in the…floor.

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.

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.

there’s a billing dept in my company. i assume they handle billing. they have an office. they sit at desks a lot. they make calls and verify insurance and process payments and whatnot.

I have a friend who is a software dude. i dunno what he does but I’m assuming it involves offices, desks, and software.

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.

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 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.

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.

Depends who’s looking

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

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.

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.

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.