What Does A Software Engineer Do In An Average Work Day?

If you are interested in the career of being a Software Engineer there is a few things you should know about the job and its duties.

Understand, there is a such a wide blanket of jobs and position under the title of a Software Engineer in a sense it has become a generic job term similar to how the title of a Doctor when specified has specialties under the title such as Cardiologist, Dermatologist, Endocrinologist, etc.

Software Engineer Career Path. Source

We will be viewing the general entry-level Software Engineer job and duties before entering into specializing into specific roles such as web developer, mobile developer, data engineer, project manager, scrum master, and more.

Reality vs Stereotype

A common perception when most people imagine a Software Engineer they envision someone alone by themselves at a computer, furiously typing at a keyboard, and possibly in a basement with no windows. Often similar perceptions to the stereotyped hacker lone wolf a common misconception to the common day Software Engineer now a days.

The reality is software programs today require a vast amount of teamwork working in large teams, planning ahead of coding, and relatively large amount of infrastructure to often make something viable for a company.

Gone are the days of a lone wolf, now companies hire a diverse amount of skills and technical abilities in order to create teams to tackle these large scale problems or creating new software programs.

At the basic level Software Engineer is just a normal office job, but technical

Most parts are simply doing what any other office job has being meetings and meetings then likely more meetings with sprinkles of coding spread into the schedule. Along with responding to emails and drinking absorbent amount of company provided free coffee and tea throughout the day.

Often this can be a shock for those transitioning from university to the workforce as some believe it should be different for a field such as tech being fast paced and forever changing constantly.

A common day could be described as:

7:30  am – Wake up
8:30  am – Reach office and check email
9:00  am – Daily / Weekly standup meeting
9:30  am - Start coding
11:30 am – Agile meeting
12:15 pm - Lunch!
1:30  pm – Back to coding, usually with coffee or tea
3:00  pm – Collaboration meetings
5:00  pm – Send emails and completing final task to wrap up for the day

Many will end up in a similar job being they go on to work for a corporation or company even those that go off to work at a software startup with their ping pong tables and xbox gaming kitchen in the office these duties still exist and are needed to progress in development of software.

There are many perks to this career this may have not seem as such maybe another post will come up to talk about all the perks of this job and career, so subscribe to the blog!

 

 

 

References

https://codingnomads.co/blog/what-does-a-software-engineer-do/