What's a typical day at your job like?

[eecook]

Just write whatever comes to mind, here are a couple of questions to get you going.
What does your company do?
How long have you been working for?
What do REALLY do?
How's an average day there?
Do have any traditions with your coworkers?
Do have lunch all together?
Do you stop to eat at all?
How many women work with you?
etc.

The company I work at is a small company  based in Argentina focused solely on electronics design. While we take on any challenge the focus is power electronics. We are a full-time team of 5 EEs + 3 part time PhDs (all guys, only my boss secretary's girl) and I've been working here for almost 2 years.

My "office" hours starts at 8.30-9.00. First thing I will do is take half an hour to check my emails, look at my assigned tasks and layout the activities for the day. After that I'll go to the kitchen and make some tea. Then depending on the day I will (from most likely to less likely):
> Open Altium and work on a PCB
> Create Release documentation
> Rework a board
> Do lab tests
> Document custom magnetic components
> Work on some design

We usually stop to have lunch between 1-2pm and have lunch sitting on the table like you would do with your family, which is kinda cool. We have something to eat, some laughs and back to work in 30-40min. On Fridays though we all go to a BBQish kinda place which is awesome and it has become a tradition  which so far we have not broken.
After lunch we work till 6-7pm.

[smjcuk]

> What does your company do?

Software/trading/financial/simulation and occasional bespoke hardware. Anything technical and obscure that no one else does. We're odd jobs.

> How long have you been working for?

8 years.

> How's an average day there?

Get up, rush kids to school, go home, sit on arse at home in front of laptop and visual studio for a few hours whilst on the phone, get kids from school, spend two hours doing emails, go home (3 feet). Occasionally we have a day out and I'll sit on the beach and work (joy to 9h battery life and 4G tethering).

> Do have any traditions with your coworkers?

Yes. Quake 3 arena on Mondays. The guys on the other side of the globe lose because the server is close so they have a shit ping

> Do have lunch all together?

No. Everyone is antisocial. Plus we're all home based all over the world so it's pointless. I've only met three people I work with.

> Do you stop to eat at all?

Frequently. Way too frequently.

> How many women work with you?

Quite a few (about 40% of our staff).

[Mechanical Menace]

Right now I'm technically on sick leave and doing some part time work while I work out if I can go back or not, but there's no bad blood between me and my bosses.

But I'm attached to the physics department of a university. I'm part of a small team that look after their node of a distributed HTC cluster tailored towards computational physics. It's not as impressive as it may sound, I only hold a bachelors and they put me through it. We also do cycle scavenging for local jobs, but that's more of the teams pet project than serious work. The average day now consists of nothing more than dealing with job proposals to put on the system and helping people much smarter than me get their ideas into workable code. Occasionally may have to swap out a server, occasionally may have to do some actual work It's very rare that any systems coding gets done any more other than small patches, but that was fun and stressful at the same time. The worse aspect is when you're the designated person on call and something goes wrong at 3am. TBH it's a great place to work if a bit dull at times and I really hope I can get back to it.

We're all rather active in the local UUG and LUG, and that fits in with our "tradition" of having pointless arguments about irrelevant technicalities (or equally valid approaches) over drinks and/or a meal lol. We very rarely have lunch all together, but we do work it out so nobody has to eat alone. Out of the team of 7 people 2 are women, one is "the boss." Been a university though there's at least 50% women we work or deal with, our team is just predominantly male.

> Do have any traditions with your coworkers?

Yes. Quake 3 arena on Mondays. The guys on the other side of the globe lose because the server is close so they have a shit ping

I didn't even think of that sort of thing as a tradition lol. We do Half Life 2 Deathmatch now (was Nexuiz) on a Wednesday though, but there's also a few people from the CS department in on that. We also have a Minecraft server (snigger as much as you want) that the same group use and is quite active.

[Christopher]

A typical day? Absolute bollocks.

-

Seriously though, start at 8, read email & look at what I have to do that day. Go for a cup of tea with my mate and have a chat about what we're doing that day and what naughty stuff we got up to the night before (young singletons!)

Sit at a computer for 4 hours designing PCBs, wiring runouts, test specifications, purchasing. Or if you're lucky in the lab helping a technician to get your shit made properly since half of them can't read a schematic to save their lives or complete various PCB level or system level testing as required.

Eat lunch

Repeat of the morning.

4 cups of tea a day fit in there as well, somehow...

[free_electron]

- Arrive somewhere in the morning. Depending on how early or late : park and plug in the car on the charger , or drop it off at the valet who will park it , charge it and wash it if asked.

- Grab a cup of Coffee , glass of orange juice or milk , maybe an orange , banana or apple too. 5 kinds of Cereal is also provided. I typically pick up a bagel or two on the way to work.
- Read some emails then go layout a cutting edge board for a few hours. Come hungry time : get something form the Whole foods Market stand in our cafetaria, the in-house chef's barbeque or one of the catering trucks / stands that shows up.
- Eat it outside on our patio or inside the breakroom or at your desk.
- Then go work some more on state of the art circuit boards, interspersed with answering questions on driving Altium , making footprints , schematic symbols, emails .
- Go home at some point later than 8 hours of work, most days 9 to 10 hours.
- Pick up the car form the valet, washed and fully charged. Drive home with kick-ass performance, totally silent (apart from road noise), leaving all those dinosaur-distillate burning rust buckets full of obsolete junk behind in an ion trail (mine doesn't rust : full aluminum body) . Sometimes just for fun take the long road through the santa cruz mountains and forests enjoying the sounds of nature, spotting a few deer or other wildlife.

- come home and throw something on the barbeque or enjoy the pool for a bit.

Once in a while , on a friday afternoon , it is beer'o'clock... or there is a team party where everyone brings some food or drink to share.

What we do ? Make the worlds most advanced car, and in-home energy storage units. Oh, and our sister company also flings rockets into space.
How long have i been there ? almost 8 months now.

For giggles : Tell your boss that he needs to hire a couple of valet's to wash employees cars and top off their energy storage for free , every day... watch his head explode...

[hneve]

Lol.

I start the car and drive people around from 6-8 in the morning to 15-22 in the evening.

Ya I'm a taxi driver.....

[GreyWoolfe]

Company is involved with digital imaging and biometric solutions at the Government level.  Thank goodness I don't work with the public anymore.  I am a remote field service technician, tasked with installing and keeping the equipment and associated software working.  All of us here in Florida are remote techs working from home.  Day starts typically around 7:00 AM doing administrivia, emails, reading server health checks and server back up logs looking to see if there are any issues in my geographic area I have to address.  Get breakfast and work on various projects (or not) until a service call comes in.  Break for lunch/web surfing and back to same in the afternoon.  I stop monitoring the company phone and laptop at 1800 hours.  Remote/phone fix is first order and if that isn't possible then it is off in the company van to fix the issue.  Sometimes it's easier to replace the equipment and repair on my nice, quiet, well lit workbench at home but as a rule, I try not to replace anything onsite so as not to set a bad precedent.  I have met all of my fellow techs over the 11 years of employment, but those are special occasions that happen very rarely.  Average workweek is 25-30 actual hours worked but get paid for 40.  Our manager said long ago that we don't get paid to work, we get paid to hit the ground running.  The job is kind of like flying, hours of tedium, broken up by either simple albeit, time consuming service calls or the sheer frenzied activity involved in getting a down site back up within service level agreement time frames.  My constant companions at home are my Dobie mix and Shepard mix.  I talk to them about the issues at hand or of the day and they sit and listen to me ramble on or lay at my feet and we all hang out together in comfortable silence.  It may not be the biggest paycheck in the world but it beats having a real job.

[zapta]

For giggles : Tell your boss that he needs to hire a couple of valet's to wash employees cars and top off their energy storage for free , every day... watch his head explode...

Life is good on government subsidies.

[EEVblog]

Get in around 9:30am after dropping off Sagan at Prechool or after swimming (4 days a week)
Bum around the lab, sit staring bewildered at all my unread email, maybe make a video on a good day
Eat lunch at my insanely messy desk while watching some Youtube or reading the news, walk to the post office to check the PO box just to get some fresh air.
Go pick up Sagan around 4 (3 days a week), maybe come back to the lab, maybe not.
Always on call for any child emergencies.
At best need to be home by 7pm on non gym days, otherwise it's leave at 5pm to go to the gym.

[EEVblog]

Life is good on government subsidies.

Don't feed the trolls.

[lowimpedance]

What ! .. no time for jumping on the EEVblog forums.   

[EEVblog]

What ! .. no time for jumping on the EEVblog forums.   

Oh, yeah, half the day spent on the forum and reading comments

[EEVblog]

Altium had the whole free cafeteria thing. Different main stuff each day (Burger Friday's = yum). Breakfast lunch and dinner for those who want to work all hours.
Also a concierge service who could run errands for you, on site car wash and haircuts if you wanted. No valet parking, the place wasn't that big.
Make your own hours, and also work from home via VPN if you want, no one cared. No Dilbert meetings, no paperwork, my own credit card to buy whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.

[EEVblog]

At previous large companies (not Altium) it was basically Dilbert and Office Space combined.

[Alexei.Polkhanov]

Altium had the whole free cafeteria thing. Different main stuff each day (Burger Friday's = yum). Breakfast lunch and dinner for those who want to work all hours.
Also a concierge service who could run errands for you, on site car wash and haircuts if you wanted. No valet parking, the place wasn't that big.
Make your own hours, and also work from home via VPN if you want, no one cared. No Dilbert meetings, no paperwork, my own credit card to buy whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.

I worked at places like that and now I have split feelings about the whole "flexible work environment" thing. Yes I can work from home when I want and can, I can schedule my day etc., but it does not come free - expectation is that you work longer hours outside of normal 9 to 6 or 8 to 5. Also many companies expect you to monitor your email and reply to important emails on weekends and after hours etc. You are almost forced to be part of all outside of office activities - most of which I don't like etc and they have plenty. I started to feel like this is an invasion into life that I am not very comfortable with. I am thinking "hey I never subscribed to this!"

[NiHaoMike]

#What does your company do?
Make chips for smartphones, tablets, and various other networking products.

#How long have you been working for?
About half a year.

#What do you REALLY do?
I test touchscreen solutions. Part of it involves using a robot to actually touch the screen.

#How's an average day there?
I arrive on site, enter the lab, and check email for new tasks. Usually, I am one of the earliest to arrive and get the setup ready for testing to be done later that day. A few times per week, there will be various meetings. It's a 10 story building and just for fun, I have taken the "no elevator" challenge (e.g. the elevator is only used when going with a group or moving big items). I have to say that it's nowhere as difficult as it sounds, even going all the way up to the 10th floor.

#Do have any traditions with your coworkers?
Every once in a while, the DIYers get to talk a little about what they're doing outside of work. Every other week or so, there would be a meeting where half is about how everyone's doing and a random question about life outside of work. The remainder is a recap on how the projects are doing.

#Do have lunch all together?
Everyone seems to have different preferences, so usually not. The exceptions are the special events.

#How many women work with you?
Quite a few. They're not considered too different from the rest. Engineers are engineers.

[george graves]

Altium had the whole free cafeteria thing.

Wow - How many employees did they have there? A cafeteria of frozen things?  Or a real chief?  I worked for a company that was on the 18 floor of a hotel that had a nice restaurant attached - worst thing ever!!!!!  Part of our lease was that we got food from them - as long as we didn't abuse it.  I put on 10 pounds the first week.  Lesson learned. 

[rogerx3]

I ride my r1150 from A to B, B to D via C and then do paper work replicating what I did during my shift.
I work within the M25 in London.
Only once did I nearly get an offer to be stabbed trying to recover 415v copper cable drum from hooded figures.
12 years doing this job and electronics is my hobby.

[smjcuk]

Altium had the whole free cafeteria thing.

Wow - How many employees did they have there? A cafeteria of frozen things?  Or a real chief?  I worked for a company that was on the 18 floor of a hotel that had a nice restaurant attached - worst thing ever!!!!!  Part of our lease was that we got food from them - as long as we didn't abuse it.  I put on 10 pounds the first week.  Lesson learned.

I worked for a defense contractor which had a cafe, with a chef. When I say chef, I mean school dinner chef who probably got fired for serving slop.

Chicken, sweetcorn and bone sandwich was on the menu. Free coffee all day (from a Max Pack machine). Ick. Nearly died from malnutrition in the first week. Then I discovered that they sold bananas round the corner at a shop so lived on bananas for 3 years. I couldn't do packed lunches because they searched you on the way in and out, including your foiled up sandwiches and if you left them in the car they'd go off.

[Tinkerer]

My company designs and manufactures aircraft/passenger communications equipment.


Get in, see what there is to do.

Test stuff, or write documents on how things should be put together, or troubleshoot stuff. Every so often, meeting on production issues and how to get those sorted. Paper work, and more paperwork, did I mention paperwork? Training people on how to test stuff.
Take lunch, more of the same as in the morning.

Not a design job, unless you want to call it a document design engineer, but deals with all the day to day issues of a production environment. Plus every board failure requires troubleshooting to figure out whats wrong. Low volume high priced stuff.

[rx8pilot]

Design and manufacture precision mechanics and electronics for specialty camera systems.

I start by reading the news and making coffee. Then I walk ~40 steps to my office/lab behind my house. I design, assemble, test, CNC machine, write software all day. Hoping to transition into sales soon that will get me out of the office half the week.

I fired all of my employees because they were too slow and and wanted to get paid based on the fact that they showed up for work - without actually working. Building  a new team from the ground up. For now, it is just my wife and I plus 2 dogs and 2 cats. No commuting and no babysitting lazy turds that call themselves engineers.

[lapm]

I work at brewery and could write long piece of it... But i dont want to bore all you Not much electronics or cool designs involved. Sometimes braindead ways automated machines work that makes one ask WTF were they thinking...

[hans]

What does your company do?

Industrial equipment for agriculture machines

How long have you been working for?

3 yrs

What do REALLY do?

On paper Electrical Engineer. In practice also firmware, software, testing, help production debugging work instructions and ranting (small division of company).
On a good day I work in Altium on a project, debug a board or write firmware for ARM CPU's.
On a bad day I need to help production at an "urgent" issue of a new batch boards. The only reason it's urgent is not because it's very complicated; it's because they don't want to hold any stock of anything and order, QA and package orders at the very-very last moment. Though luck.

How's an average day there?

I usually get in at 9AM, -ish,  and leave usually at 4PM. I work 24 hours over 4 days in a week at the moment.
I don't do plannings. I check mail, answer them, do what is urgent otherwise resume normal operation.

I work in the 'good side' of the office building, outside sun and in shade of trees. The front of office gets up to 30C in summer, back in office is a chilly 24C.
In winter or when trees are pruned I have a clear view for ~3km of (very flat) land. If I open a window I hear birds. On the land I see rabbits chasing stuff. If I look at my screen, there are too many projects TODO and too little time to do it. So I quickly stare outside.

I work in a room with 1 colleague and 1 intern. I do have a bench where I can solder and rework boards. Ideal, because I can stick on new parts on a board <2 meters, instead of 20 and 3 doors.
The colleague often makes quite a mess, but so is his time schedule when to visit customers. He ends up outdoors for 50% of the time.
The intern thinks I'm just a tiny bit crazy.

We have lunch together, but also coffee breaks together (2x 15 minutes). I usually visit them briefly, but leave when some colleagues need to pound on floor to announce their presence, or express really loud laughter and slogans to draw their attention.

Do have any traditions with your coworkers?

We like to annoy the crap out of colleagues with their local Dutch accents.
We have fish&chips on Thursday.
We have beers on Friday after 5PM, so everyone can drive home intoxicated.

How many women work with you?

2
They are all at finances.

[free_electron]

For giggles : Tell your boss that he needs to hire a couple of valet's to wash employees cars and top off their energy storage for free , every day... watch his head explode...

Life is good on government subsidies.

go complain to GM that they need to refund 2.1 billion dollar the government decided to write off as a loss.
Then tell all hybrid makers they can't receive subsidies
wile you are at it : do the same with big oil. With what they get in benefits a year you can fund the entire veterans for 10 years ...
oh , and go after congress. they are trying to block raising the minimum wage to 10$ while they, on average, make 172$ an hour....

once you straightened all that out : i may listen to your whine ... before all that .. you are below my noise level...

[zapta]

once you straightened all that out : i may listen to your whine ... before all that .. you are below my noise level...

I understand that your company is not the only parasite but at least the other guys don't come here to brag.