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?
As a former software engineer turned product owner turned manager, thank you for including other perspectives. When complaining on the internet, engineers typically think other people should be doing all the specification work and they just implement it, without realizing that in the pre-agile days, the bureaucracy was soul-crushing. We need engineers to discuss all these technical details like permissions and whatnot, they’re the best people for the task! But at parties, engineers talk about this as if management is stupid for not working it out for them. No, software engineers shouldn’t try to reduce themselves to code monkeys. You’re problem solvers, you’re engineers.