Ask HN: A day in the life of a programmer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: A day in the life of a programmer?

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I want to pursue a career in Web development and eventually software development. I've never seen it done in real life.

What's it like being a programmer day to day like the responsibilities from morning to afternoon what exactly would you do?

I want to know how programmers spend the entire day at the office. are there video examples of real world jobs where people code?

Someone tell me their day as a programmer. Thanks

I'm not too particular on what languages you use or frameworks but I'm getting into PHP web development if that helps.

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Varies widely, depending on where you're working, what you're working on, where in the development cycle you're at, what programming-related responsibilities your job includes, what your level of seniority is, etc.

Here's a typical day at a Japanese megacorp as a Level 3 Peon ^H^H^H Salaryman:

  8:55: Get into work, begin checking email.
  9:45: Most email to the outsourcing subsidiary is triaged.
  10:00: Planning meeting for project X
  11:30: It is over.  Begin working on bugs assigned in the tracker.

(Representative example: List of students assigned to a particular class has an off-by-one error resulting in there being one less student actually displayed in reports than the report says it contains.)

  12:55: Three bugs done, good job.  Break for lunch.
  1:30: Back from lunch.  Planning meeting for project Y
  2:30: Meeting over.  Meet with trainee for scheduled professional development lesson.
  3:00: First uncommitted time on the day.  Begin making progress on the quarterly objective.

(Sample objective: ~20 new features in our proprietary framework. We have a custom tag which we use in our Big Freaking Enterprise Java apps which lets us turn POJO collections into tabular data, but let's have it such that users can click on a particular row in the table and have that highlight the row, through the magic of Prototype.) Nobody will ask me about this for another three weeks so I have to pick the pace, being mindful to tread the line between looking like I'm busy but not being so productive as to make more senior engineers look bad.

  5:30 PM: Planning meeting.
  7:00 PM: Meeting over, quick break for dinner.
  7:15 PM: Eating dinner at desk.

I'm totally cashiered at this point but cannot socially speaking make a habit of going home this early. Accordingly, I sit quietly at my desk and make a show of working diligently. It is mostly for show. Everyone around me knows it is for show, much like them checking that I am diligently working is for show. These are important shows.

  9:00 PM: Hit the first group of more senior salarymen going home.  Yay.  Almost done.
  9:30 PM: Apologize for my early departure.

Note that the above is not crunch time in a Japanese megacorp, as you can see by me arriving and departing on the same calendar day.

Here's a day in the life of my consulting career:

  8:00 AM: Inbox triage for my own businesses.
  8:30 AM: Leave hotel.
  9:00 AM: Arrive at office.  Get coffee/cereal.  Consume them while reading client-related email.
  9:30 AM: Enough email for the moment.  Start working on Project Deliverable A.

Representative example: complete redesign of the front page (low-fidelity mockup) plus 2,000 words of copy plus 10 suggestions for the H1. These will be A/B tested against the existing front page.

  10:00 AM: Meeting with stakeholders for Deliverable C.  Representative example: email content for a free one-month mini course which they'll use to get more leads for the software.
  11:00 AM: Back to working on A.
  12:30 PM: Lunch, downstairs with team.
  1:00 PM: Meeting with stakeholders for Deliverable B.

Representative example: Implement a first-run experience of the software to handhold users through getting their account set up and running.

  2:00 PM: Tired of working on A. Investigate JS frameworks for B.
  4:00 PM: JS framework chosen.  Write down in notes.  OK, back to A.
  5:30 PM: Prep for tomorrow's meetings, check email.
  6:00 PM: Apologize for ducking out early.

There are still client team members working (and there will be until 7 PM or so in the evening, at least). I have, however, to go to a dinner that I had scheduled for 6:30 PM. (I generally work such hours as are standard and customary for clients. At some clients this means I'm out of the office at 5 PM on the dot, at others it means a bit later. If "standard and customary" means "salaryman hours" at your office then at around 6:30 or so I just leave quietly.)

And what do things look like when I'm working on my own business (where, n.b., all of the products involve substantial amounts of code that I wrote)?

  7:00 AM: Wake up early for meeting.  It was canceled.
  9:00 AM: Breakfast with wife.
  9:30 AM: Catnap due to only having 6 hours of sleep.
  12:00 PM: Up again.  Business administration (moving money).
  2:00 PM: I should really be getting lunch now, but I'm on HN instead.
  3:30 PM: Will probably be done with lunch.  Start working on essay.
  6:00 PM: Probably done with essay, if the mood is right.

If not, I'd have task-switched to one of the other todos on my list. Of the top ten exactly one involves programming and that is under 100 lines of code.

  6:30 PM: Come home, play League of Legends a bit.
  8:00 PM: Dinner with wife.
  9:00 PM: Quick sweep of inbox for 20 minutes or so.

I have difficulty telling if your salaryman example is facetious.

Though, admittedly, as an American, even if I worked for a Japanese company, they would likely not treat me like that.

I do 40 hours. In crunch time, I work hard 100% of that - and I might work 45 hours tops. Then, I go home exhausted and sleep.

You're assuming people at Megacorps are working hard. They go home exhausted, but not because they exerted 100% of their mental capacity on solving problems for the company.

I applaud your conviction to work your 40 at 100% and then go home, and in many places this is absolutely achievable and I absolutely recommend it.

Japan is (largely) not yet one of these places. There is a culture there related to work and life that is very very different. The short version is that you can get lifetime guaranteed employment without risk of termination, but at the cost of the company owning your time. For the longer version, you can search Patrick's posts for "salaryman."

It's very interesting to learn about how these conditions came about. It's also interesting to see how things may change there as software continues to eat the world, crossing many previously-untouchable boundaries.

I am quite sure that it is not facetious.

A very interesting bit of history of work ethic is discussed in David Halberstam's book The Reckoning in which when the auto industry began to take hold in Japan, the workers there could not understand how hard the Americans worked--three shifts? Working in the middle of the night?

Now, it might seem reversed.

Aw! You changed how this comment is formatted so that now it has text in those tedious "boxes" designed for code samples where I have to scroll horizontally to read the longer lines of text (and there are some extremely long lines of text, e.g., the one that starts "6:00 PM: Probably done with essay").

Please reconsider whether you really want to use those "boxes"!

I tied my best to format it for HN without having to put a line break between every increment. If you're not happy with the result, you can copy it into your favorite text editor to reformat or, in the alternative, I'll refund your purchase price.

All I'm saying is that I read the initial version without any "boxes" that was published for a few minutes, and much preferred that.

I thought maybe you'd like to know that the extra work you did "improving" the comment has negative value to some of your readers.

The alternative is to have them formatted as paragraphs, but that makes it hard to group together. Hacker News doesn't really do single-spacing well, or any sort of formatting. I wish it had a real Markdown implementation, but, well, that's the cost of writing it in a language with no libraries.

Usually, the bigger the company, the more time is spent trying to get uninterrupted time to program. When the company is smaller you get as much time as you like to program. This is because there are a lot less people you have to communicate with.

So at 200+ companies. Half of your work week is dedicated to just constantly communicating what you are doing. (Everyone must know everything all the time).

At smaller companies, you tell the one person you work with what you are doing and thats pretty much it for the week.

Everyone's mileage will very but this has been a pattern I have seen in the industry.

My experience matches this observation. Working with a much larger company as a vendor, the difference becomes magnified (e.g. LargeCo wants meetings meetings meetings all the time, even when the same information could be communicated in an email to all concerned parties).

Woke up, fell out of bed

Dragged a comb across my head

Found my way downstairs and drank a cup

And looking up I noticed I was late

Found my coat and grabbed my hat

Made the bus in seconds flat

Found my way upstairs and had a smoke

And somebody spoke and I went into a dream

Really depends on where you work and what you're working on.

Sometimes it's 50/50 documentation and coding. Other times it's close to 100% coding/bug fixing. If you're at an awesome company, it can be: 75% coding, 10% task tracker fiddling, 15% StarCraft2.

Side note: Having the ability to listen to music is a must for me and has never been an issue.

From my experience the day to day is usually a mixture of:

  Fiddling with Task/Bug tracking software.
  SCRUM meetings.
  Design meetings.
  Documentation.
  Coding.
  Design.
  Talking to clients/other team members/people.

This will vary depending if you're working on something new or supporting/improving an existing product.

All in all software devs have it pretty easy, if you're too stressed out or not enjoying your work ( for an extended period of time, obviously there are deadlines and things that come up that need to be dealt with ), start looking around, there's plenty of work and competition.

All programming jobs vary widely, from scenes straight out of Dilbert to ones from The Social Network.

That said, here's a typical day of a regular programming job:

9:30am - show up (10:30am in California)

9:30-10:15am - read last night's emails. Emails topics include group messages from executives, vague questions from sales/marketing/QA, help questions from other developers, plans and deadlines from your manager, and about 300 automated messages from dev bots you'll never read.

10:15-11am - reply to some emails and fix misc issues in code and build systems.

11am-11:30am - team meeting to discuss goals and deadlines.

11:30am-12:30pm - read the news and rally the troops to eat lunch.

12:30pm-1:45pm - lunch

1:45-2:00pm - read the news

2:00pm-6pm - actual work (including programming some new features, fixing bugs, setting up builds/releases, testing, researching issues on the web, reading/writing wiki pages). Special note: if your job is bad, this time will never be available to you and you'll be in meetings or filling out forms for IT/accounting.

Well, I'm working for an established international IT company. We are developing desktop, mobile and mostly web applications for well-known clients across the globe.

I am currently working on a huge (for us anyway) web project with 100+ people actively developing every corner of our infrastucture.

So my day is like: Arriving at the office around 08:30-09:00. On Tuesdays I have an inhouse English training with a native speaker, which means a couple of guys just talking about kind of everything.

After arriving/English training, I get myself something to drink from the kitchen, turn my workstation on and check on my mails which are typically not many, so I got through them under a minute. I fire up my dropdown console to fetch the latest changes on our develop branch (we use Git and GitHub), log into our issue tracking system and into the CMS we are using.

After that I start working on any task I have assigned to me. I put on my headphones, open Spotify, select a neat album I like at the moment and off we go to Sublime and Eclipse-lands.

I interact with testers, UI guys, squad leads, technical architects and other backend guys regularly via Skype. Our team consists of fellow Hungarians, British-Indians, Frenchmen and Belorussians, so it is pretty diverse. My day is usually about implementing new features and handing them over to the QA guys when done. We have a standup meeting at 2 PM when the team discusses the status of the stories which are in the scope of our current iteration.

We have a lot of fun during the day, joking around while coding. I always bump into coworkers in the hallway or in the kitchen and we usually have a little discussion.

On Thursdays we have a so-called "Beer Lesson" at a local pub where a couple of guys from the office and anyone interested get together to have some drinks and speak English only with the guidance of our English "teacher".

Yes, my day starts with 11 AM and ends usually at 9 PM and after dinner spend some time for an hour learning any new things.

11 AM - Check email, reply 11:20 AM - Start the tasks in the current sprint. We do have a weekly sprint (Every thursday release) 2:30 PM - Lunch 3 PM - Discuss with team for any clarification / issues / improvements in current sprint 3:30 PM - Work towards the sprint 8 PM - Report to our CTO to test the day's work 8 to 9 PM - Amends / improvement - Do quick fixes and mark it down to JIRA 9:30 - Dinner

After 10 PM - Learn anything new / Work on passionate projects / ideas

Between would go through twitter at early morning like 8 to 9 AM

Yes, I am working in PHP web development projects. I use both Git / SVN for re-visioning depending on the project. Just that you know how a fellow PHP developer day would be :)

Have you spent some time writing your own programs or writing programs for school, sitting at a machine, working on code? That's what a lot of it is like. You can expect to spend lots of time on code written by somebody else, fixing it or adding to it. The rest of the time is meetings and bureaucratic stuff. Sometimes you can goof off with coworkers. But if you've spent a lot of time in front of a computer, that's pretty much it.

My day is split roughly as follows:

5% - Morning developer scrum meeting.

10% - Email.

65% - New product development and ongoing product feature development.

15% - Support-related bug fixing.

5% - Client meeting calls, product planning meetings.

I'm 9 to 5 working at a PHP web development startup. The 9 and the 5 vary as needed but I'm almost always home for dinner.

(PS: We're hiring if you're any good and willing to relocate to Cleveland!)

can you tell me more about the 65% - New product development and ongoing product feature development. :)

Coding. Essentially, time spend in a text editor / browser window combo, developing new features and new products. Recently I've been working on mobile apps so there is also a bunch of testing on the device as needed. I personally use gedit but our developers use whatever OS and text editor they find most productive. Bunch of people here like SublimeText. Chrome is universal, though we test on other browsers when appropriate.

Your language breakdown really depends on the job and the project. If I'm working on a web app, I do about 50% PHP and 50% "frontend" (i.e. HTML / CSS / LESS / Javascript / Backbone / jQuery etc.). If I'm working on a mobile app, since we don't have a serverside language available, the frontend work shifts up (and any heavy processing / database usage we need ends up as an API on our server). There's also some Node.js sprinkled in there for worker scripts and queue processors.

My experience is very similar to that of Charles Bloom:

http://cbloomrants.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/10-04-13-reality-o...

This is the experience I had as a newbie http://hkelkar.com/2011/04/09/48964049/

Typical: you sit behind a computer screen 80% of the day. The rest is spent in meeting rooms without windows.

I don't work in an office as all of my client work is 100% remote and usually short- to medium-term. I mostly program full time in Objective-C and work on a wide range of problems like image processing, audio, networked applications and more recently parsing, NLP and (non-game-related) AI.

1. Wake up around 8, start working around 9.

2. Respond to emails for ~30 minutes.

3. Program for 7.5 hours, usually having lunch while working.

4. Have dinner, spend time with family.

5. Possibly program for another 1-3 hours. The late night stuff might be a side project (or more likely) the most complex part of the current project I'm working on.

6. Rinse, repeat. Take weekends off and try to take a mental holiday to the largest extent possible (drink some craft beer, smoke some pot, play video games, go shopping, take the family somewhere, etc).

I get paid (relatively) large sums of money to solve (relatively) hard problems. The key to being successful in that is getting large blocks of uninterrupted time to work, and when the complexity of the problem warrants it, being able to get in a lot of extra time researching and trying out different things.

There is also some time getting on Skype with clients but I try to keep a steady stream of github activity / emails flowing their way so we don't have to kill too much time talking about the work we're doing. It's not that I don't like to talk to people -- once I get started it's hard to shut me up -- but I think meetings quickly become counterproductive.

I either work from home or from a local coffee shop. I have a (somewhat) high end headphone rig that gives me the privacy that I need. I drink coffee like water. I exercise a bit and try to eat as well / healthy as possible.

Dealing with burnout is a very real thing and I don't think it matters how disciplined you are. I come from a corporate / entrepreneurial background which granted me a "work before mental health" work ethic. I take what I do very (maybe too) seriously. Still, I find it entirely possible to push myself too hard then find it nearly impossible to re-engage. It's never the end of the world because I recover quickly (a couple days max) but it is something I have to be aware of. I often make breakthroughs burning the midnight oil but that comes at a cost.

Put another way, sometimes you feel like you could work through the night. Most of the time you shouldn't. You need to find a balance between getting things done short term and getting things done long term. There's definitely an art to it.

The life of a programmer will vary considerably based on what type of job they have of course but for me it's like the life of a writer or a composer (though I don't wow people at cocktail parties). I spend most of my time in mental solitude. I love what I do and it's lucrative enough that people generally don't think I'm insane for being as obsessed as I am.

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