Ask HN: What's your working day like?

Full time remote system administrator for windows and Linux servers with management responsibilities between various groups.

Employer employs about 75 people.

My day can be summed up with:

Arrive to work (home office or at the office 2 days a week) and check status boards for any issues.

Review any overnight emails.

Conference call between two Jr Admins and a few roaming techs 5-10 min tops)

Review change requests and bounce to others for impact assessments.

Sort and route requests between vendors, contractors, and various managers etc.

Write reports on all work and update milestones for all projects.

Keep the place humming. It's kind of a unicorn employer/job.

Software Developer, Full Time, on site, ~10 employees.

Workday:

- Wake up, get ready

- Get to work 15 mins late

- Review communications and determine what my work goals are for the day, usually takes an hour or less

- Get coffee from the nearby coffee shop with coworkers

- Start writing code

- Get lunch, typically 30 mins

- Continue writing code, but switch to PR review as necessary (especially if I'm getting tired of my own code)

- Read some HN while waiting for builds

- Try not to get bogged down with answering questions from devs about best practices, etc.

- Try to organize work into atomic commits and push

- Open a PR, feel a sense of satisfaction for a brief moment

- Review my own PR and realize I forgot to do some things, add comments to it so reviewers know what I forgot

- Leave late, since I got in late

I want to thank you for posting this. It's a bit inspiring to see how everyone else works, especially what time everyone gets up. My girlfriend has been trying really hard to get me to wake up early every day, and I've been slowly able to do that, but I'm not quite there consistently yet. Seeing all you guys post your stuff is like going to the gym with workout partners that motivate me instead of getting on a boring treadmill by myself. This is great. I also realized that I have not enough of a set pattern for my days.

Profession: Software Security Engineer (Work from home)

Workday:

- [08:00] Wake up in a daze make breakfast

- [08:30] Shower, get dressed and ready

- [09:15] Start work (at home), read email / respond to email.

- [10:30] Prioritize days work.

- [10:40] Research first priority issue, read bz, take notes, read again, familiarize self with new area (almost every time).

- [11:45] Eat lunch

- [12:35] Attempt to write a reproducer for any given sec issue / understand any given issue. Expect 5 - 10 "calls" for bullshit in this timeframe.

- [16:30] Take Dog for a walk.

- [17:30] Resume work, finish daily write up.

- [19:00] Play overwath / Powerlifting training (alternating)

- [19:45] Cook dinner

- [20:30] Wash up.

- [22:00] Check work mail for emergencies in the morning, or surprise meetings.

- [22:10] Shower.

- [23:30] Read /r/netsec news.ycombinator.org check oss- security.

- [24:00] Attempt to sleep.

Software Developer (mainly web). Full time. Sole developer in a 3-4 person department. Our consulting company (15-20 persons) was recently acquired by a much larger (1300 persons) but hasn't had an affect on us (yet).

[05:30 or [06:00] - wake up

[06:00]-[07:00] - make coffee and watch tv while I work out

[07:00] or [0715] - shower

[08:00] get to office (5 minute drive)

[08:15] - wait for my computer to finish starting up and be usable

[08:15]-[11:30] - work on assigned tickets, could be projects or bug-fixes or client meetings or anything in between

[11:30] - [12:30] - go home and make a sandwich for lunch, try to have a ~30 min nap

[12:30] - [17:00] - more assigned work

[17:00]-[23:00] - usually gaming and dinner, sometimes tv, errands

[23:00]-[05:30] - sleep, variable from 22:00-00:00 but consistent wake time.

Emails and chat are open all day. Not used much so it's not really a distraction. Some days I get to work 15 mins early and then I wait until Friday and leave early. I am one of 2-3 people who is here after 4:30 pm.

Most of the work is integrating custom functionality into the Umbraco CMS. Sometimes I get to write stand-alone apps though, which is nice. I get to do all the code and SQL and half the time figure out IIS stuff. We also support many clients that have outdated systems (ASP, ColdFusion) but those are usually bug-fixes to keep them running as best we can. Ever since the acquisition there has been very few days where there is enough work to fill a whole day (many many very big projects are just sitting at various stages of approval/planning/etc).

When I don't have enough work to do I build out functionality on my site or write an article. I do the coding here and we have a designer so I am getting to learn a lot more about CSS and layout that I don't get to do usually. Very rarely I will just pick up a tutorial to work through. My site has taken enough time to get to where it is that this is pretty rare.

To some people it sounds great but I would like to have consistent work and coworkers who I can actually talk to, even though we all are in cubicles next to each other, we are not a communicative group and the designer wants nothing to do with code (even though I'd like to get cross trained on design work). I've never been part of a code review and it's depressing not getting feedback about anything.

Sorry for the wall of text.