8 answers
Tylar
Student
Sumter, South Carolina
8
Questions
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What is the average work day of a SW Engineer like?
How long do they work and what type of work do they do? #engineering
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8 answers
Zuli Posada
Recruiter
6
Answers
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Updated
Zuli’s Answer
a typical working day, depends on the company, the team and the project.
you can start your day with Agile stands up in the morning, then after prioritising work, you can start coding and collaborating with different parts of the business and other like-minded colleagues.
you can start your day with Agile stands up in the morning, then after prioritising work, you can start coding and collaborating with different parts of the business and other like-minded colleagues.
Earl McCutcheon
Community Support
3
Answers
Kyle, Texas
Updated
Earl’s Answer
I fully agree with everyone else on this list and its great advice and while YES 100% most dev roles and especially freelance is going to be really flexible in scheduling and day to day, have remote options or awesome offices with all kinds of things to help keep your mind healthy and productive, and have great benefits (gotta keep the coders happy to keep productivity up for that win win)
But, here is the other point I would like to make on top of the other recommendations as it all depends on the gig really. Some platforms you develop for will have extremely tight hard set deadlines and have a regular development CRUNCH process calling for extra long shifts, required overtime, and late nights in high stress environments to make sure the release comes out on time.
For the term CRUNCH if you do a little research on you will find a lot of new articles on this surrounding video game development cycles when a game is approaching a release for a preordered game and its not finished yet, but it happens across all industries and is not key holed to game dev only it is just the most talked about one.
The negatives are obvious, its a high stress environment, with fast coding and rapid deploy making it easier to make mistakes but bigger penalties for those mistakes, The Plus side to these though is that you will usually see increased benefits and pay to help offset the increased negative aspects it involves. if a company has required crunch and does not offer a increase to salary and benefits to compensate stay away from that company, but on the flip side signing up for CRUNCH time can get you a lot of extra income and be a really good way to get extra paid vacation time for more rest and relaxation between crunches. Gotta weigh the pros and cons of each and go with the process that works best for you.
But, here is the other point I would like to make on top of the other recommendations as it all depends on the gig really. Some platforms you develop for will have extremely tight hard set deadlines and have a regular development CRUNCH process calling for extra long shifts, required overtime, and late nights in high stress environments to make sure the release comes out on time.
For the term CRUNCH if you do a little research on you will find a lot of new articles on this surrounding video game development cycles when a game is approaching a release for a preordered game and its not finished yet, but it happens across all industries and is not key holed to game dev only it is just the most talked about one.
The negatives are obvious, its a high stress environment, with fast coding and rapid deploy making it easier to make mistakes but bigger penalties for those mistakes, The Plus side to these though is that you will usually see increased benefits and pay to help offset the increased negative aspects it involves. if a company has required crunch and does not offer a increase to salary and benefits to compensate stay away from that company, but on the flip side signing up for CRUNCH time can get you a lot of extra income and be a really good way to get extra paid vacation time for more rest and relaxation between crunches. Gotta weigh the pros and cons of each and go with the process that works best for you.
Nafis Faramarzi
Software Engineer
1
Answer
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Updated
Nafis’s Answer
It partly depends on your seniority level and definition of your role in the company you work for, but in general you have meetings to talk about
what you did the day before, challenges you had, if you need help from your colleagues, and what you're going to do today.
you'll also hear the same from your teammates and try to be helpful with any challenges/problems they have.
Then you'll spend your time doing your work which will most probably include development (aka writing code). It means you're asked to add a feature to an existing software product, fix a bug a customer is reported or is found in quality assurance activities, do a performance enhancement (so that the software runs faster, for example) and etc.
You'll also have meetings to analyse latest requirements/change requests from your customer, do feasibility analysis and estimate them.
If you're a more senior software engineer, you'll probably help your teammates with their coding problems, explain the technology you're using in your software, and etc. You may also be involved in production release activities which based on the methodology/deployment strategy can be done on a pre-set specific date including a series of tasks done by operations people and developers or being done continuously with less work and pressure which obviously takes less time also.
In general the nature of software engineering is like problem solving. You may encounter problems you've solved before or something new which requires analysis and investigation.
Software people usually work 8 hours a day and most of them have flexible working hours which means you can start work anytime 8-10 and can finish 4-6. Depending on the company policy, you may also be allowed to occasionally work from home.
what you did the day before, challenges you had, if you need help from your colleagues, and what you're going to do today.
you'll also hear the same from your teammates and try to be helpful with any challenges/problems they have.
Then you'll spend your time doing your work which will most probably include development (aka writing code). It means you're asked to add a feature to an existing software product, fix a bug a customer is reported or is found in quality assurance activities, do a performance enhancement (so that the software runs faster, for example) and etc.
You'll also have meetings to analyse latest requirements/change requests from your customer, do feasibility analysis and estimate them.
If you're a more senior software engineer, you'll probably help your teammates with their coding problems, explain the technology you're using in your software, and etc. You may also be involved in production release activities which based on the methodology/deployment strategy can be done on a pre-set specific date including a series of tasks done by operations people and developers or being done continuously with less work and pressure which obviously takes less time also.
In general the nature of software engineering is like problem solving. You may encounter problems you've solved before or something new which requires analysis and investigation.
Software people usually work 8 hours a day and most of them have flexible working hours which means you can start work anytime 8-10 and can finish 4-6. Depending on the company policy, you may also be allowed to occasionally work from home.
Martin Miranda
Software Engineer
1
Answer
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Updated
Martin’s Answer
I normally work from 9 to 5 (more or less) and my time is mainly split between meetings, programming, researching/studying, and drinking coffee :)
A few common meetings I've seen across many companies are daily standups, which is a time where you catch up with your teammates about the current status of things. Planning and estimation sessions, where you and your team will go through a list of tasks that need to be completed and will discuss each one of them, giving an estimation in terms of effort or time. You would use this to plan future sprints that are chunks of time (normally 1 or 2 weeks) where the whole team will be focused on a set of tasks, previously selected and agreed by everyone. After each sprint, you would normally have a meeting to review the finished sprint and to come up with ways to improve as a team. All of these meetings are part of a methodology called Agile which many companies follow nowadays.
Researching and studying refer to a time that you can use to investigate anything that you might need to finish a task or something you would like to learn as part of your personal/professional growth. You can also use this time to work on innovative ideas with your teammates. All of this depends on each company. One thing for sure is: YOU NEVER STOP LEARNING! :)
Depending on the company you work for, you might have some flexibility to work from home, partially or full-time. Some people prefer to work from home and others prefer to work in an office where they feel more productive.
There must be a hundred things I missed in my response but this is pretty much the foundation of how your day to day will look like. Plus a bunch of fun team activities!
I hope it helps and good luck!
Martin
A few common meetings I've seen across many companies are daily standups, which is a time where you catch up with your teammates about the current status of things. Planning and estimation sessions, where you and your team will go through a list of tasks that need to be completed and will discuss each one of them, giving an estimation in terms of effort or time. You would use this to plan future sprints that are chunks of time (normally 1 or 2 weeks) where the whole team will be focused on a set of tasks, previously selected and agreed by everyone. After each sprint, you would normally have a meeting to review the finished sprint and to come up with ways to improve as a team. All of these meetings are part of a methodology called Agile which many companies follow nowadays.
Researching and studying refer to a time that you can use to investigate anything that you might need to finish a task or something you would like to learn as part of your personal/professional growth. You can also use this time to work on innovative ideas with your teammates. All of this depends on each company. One thing for sure is: YOU NEVER STOP LEARNING! :)
Depending on the company you work for, you might have some flexibility to work from home, partially or full-time. Some people prefer to work from home and others prefer to work in an office where they feel more productive.
There must be a hundred things I missed in my response but this is pretty much the foundation of how your day to day will look like. Plus a bunch of fun team activities!
I hope it helps and good luck!
Martin
Thank you that excites me (:
Tylar
Yana B
Senior Support Engineer
10
Answers
Concord, California
Updated
Yana’s Answer
Hi Tylar,
Best part of working in software engineering is flexibility. You can work at any time, from anywhere as long as you have access to the internet.
Usually hours are just normal business hours, however there is definitely more flexibility.
Depending the team you are on and the company you work for, you might be required to be on call from time to time, it means that you might get a call in the middle of the night or on the weekend. But there is usually a rotation schedule, so it doesn't happen often.
If you enjoy writing code, build software/ websites, have good analytical thinking, SW engineering might be for you.
You can also try coding school during the year or during the summer to get a taste of what it would be like. I have encouraged my kids to do that and they have been learning how to code for the last 2 years and love it.
So, give it a try before you decide if this is something for you. Good luck
Best part of working in software engineering is flexibility. You can work at any time, from anywhere as long as you have access to the internet.
Usually hours are just normal business hours, however there is definitely more flexibility.
Depending the team you are on and the company you work for, you might be required to be on call from time to time, it means that you might get a call in the middle of the night or on the weekend. But there is usually a rotation schedule, so it doesn't happen often.
If you enjoy writing code, build software/ websites, have good analytical thinking, SW engineering might be for you.
You can also try coding school during the year or during the summer to get a taste of what it would be like. I have encouraged my kids to do that and they have been learning how to code for the last 2 years and love it.
So, give it a try before you decide if this is something for you. Good luck
Thank you that really helps. (:
Tylar
Bereket Mengiste
Software Engineer
2
Answers
Austin, Texas
Updated
Bereket’s Answer
I agree with the other comments up here. In short, this would mainly depend on the team, project and company your in. If your in an Agile team your day would start in a daily stand-up (short team meeting) or other meetings with your stakeholders or team. Then you'd proceed to completing your task (coding).
Vineeth Abraham
Consultant, Program / Project manager
21
Answers
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Updated
Vineeth’s Answer
As Yana mentioned the biggest advantage of software engineers are flexibility. Now that almost all companies are coming up with connecting remote and working virtual it is easy to work from anywhere. Most of the companies have this policy and we are really blessed. How long you work based on your project, your efficiency. There are different support groups such as customer support, escalation engineering etc which may require shift based timings and active, where as development and testing engineering works on deliverable. They can deliver the project / module which they are working. Only catch here is to take responsibility of the assignment and deliver on time. Every software engineer is supposed to work minimum of 9 hours per day and few stretch more.
thank you for sharing.
Tylar
Benjamin Longhurst
Software Engineer
2
Answers
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Updated
Benjamin’s Answer
Hey Tylar!
I'll keep this one short and sweet, since there are already some really good answers here.
I usually work around 6-7 hours a day (not including lunch), depending on how busy I am. With code, it's easy to get absorbed and 3-4 hours can pass in what feels like a minute, so I like to finish a day when I'm satisfied with the work I've done. I'd say over the course of my career, probably 33% of what I do is coding and the remaining 33% is attending meetings, maintaining configurations, and the other 33% is finding bugs in existing code (i.e. code that I didn't write, but that has reported to be buggy by customers or other developers).
When you're actually writing code, the vast majority of that time is spent figuring out what code to write that will solve the problem, and figuring out how to fit your solution into the existing product. This includes time spend figuring out why the code isn't behaving in the way you thought it would - computers are very finicky :P . It doesn't take a huge amount of time to physically type the code out, not at all like writing an essay, although you'll spend a pretty decent amount of time thinking about and writing documentation too.
The companies I've worked for have been really flexible with work hours as long as I'm producing high quality code and getting my work done on time. I've worked with people that liked to get in at 11 and finish at 7, others who do 8-4, I usually do somewhere between 9-9:30 and finish between 5 and 5:30. That being said, not every company is the same and some may be quite strict on working hours.
Hope you end up happy in your career and find this advice helpful mate. All the best!
Head over to https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-python-3 and try out some programming if you haven't already! It would be a great way for you to get a feel of what writing code can be like.
I'll keep this one short and sweet, since there are already some really good answers here.
I usually work around 6-7 hours a day (not including lunch), depending on how busy I am. With code, it's easy to get absorbed and 3-4 hours can pass in what feels like a minute, so I like to finish a day when I'm satisfied with the work I've done. I'd say over the course of my career, probably 33% of what I do is coding and the remaining 33% is attending meetings, maintaining configurations, and the other 33% is finding bugs in existing code (i.e. code that I didn't write, but that has reported to be buggy by customers or other developers).
When you're actually writing code, the vast majority of that time is spent figuring out what code to write that will solve the problem, and figuring out how to fit your solution into the existing product. This includes time spend figuring out why the code isn't behaving in the way you thought it would - computers are very finicky :P . It doesn't take a huge amount of time to physically type the code out, not at all like writing an essay, although you'll spend a pretty decent amount of time thinking about and writing documentation too.
The companies I've worked for have been really flexible with work hours as long as I'm producing high quality code and getting my work done on time. I've worked with people that liked to get in at 11 and finish at 7, others who do 8-4, I usually do somewhere between 9-9:30 and finish between 5 and 5:30. That being said, not every company is the same and some may be quite strict on working hours.
Hope you end up happy in your career and find this advice helpful mate. All the best!
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