Ask HN: What is your day to day like?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31895751

by haliskerbas • 4 years ago

2 1 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

For people who work in the tech industry, what is your role, level of experience, and what does your day to day look like?

_benj• 4 years ago

Day to day has varied a lot depending on the company, team, project, status of the project, mood/energy levels, etc. so I’ll try to share a bit taking taking that into consideration.

Senior fortune 300 company, 10y of experience

Meetings day: I try to bundle as many calls as I can in a single day so other days I can have uninterrupted blocks of time. This days I’ll take calls (one on one with manager, team lead, product manager, qa, pair programming, etc.). It’s also a good day to do documentation, answer mails, fill reports, take legal compliance required course, and any other administrative tasks. I’m usually extra available that day to answer questions, monitor for bugs, etc.

Coding day: these days I try to set uninterrupted blocks of time in my calendar, disable notifications and be able to dig deep into whatever technical task I’m currently working. Depending on what it is this might be writing tons of code for a greenfield project, stepping through an unknown code base using to debugger to get familiar with it, hunting down a bug, implementing new features, etc. On these days I mostly monitor the one slack channel where my closer teammates are so I can provide/receive quick feedback if needed. These are my favorite days and I try to get n the flow state as much as I can during these days. Something else that would happen on these days is research, like comparing technologies to choose one for a project, writing small proof of concept projects to test a theory or otherwise spending time learning something technical to advance a project/task at hand.

There’s of course the in between all that, like multiple 5-10 min walks to think and talk to myself through something that might be challenging, the 5min pomodoro technique breaks, being available to provide quick feedback to other teammates or totally unexpected things that change the focus of the day completely, like a major production-breaking bug that needs a hotfix, etc.

There’s definitely more to the job but I think that might give you a general idea of how a tech day to day might look like.

Ask HN: What is your day to day like?

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