<p>Can anyone explain what you do day to day as a programmer/developer?</p>
<p>What are your work hours like? What are ? What are your day to day duties? Do you just type away all day, or are there a lot of administrative task like answering emails, going to meetings etc.</p>
<p>Also a slightly unrelated question. Do most professional programmers/developers get too burned out from programming during their day job, making it unappealing to tinker with their own code and work on personal projects?</p>
<p>I use to be in a software developer position. For me, the work hours are great, though I heard alot of people had lots of overtime. I would think it is a very lazy job; you either sitting on your butt all day writing/testing code or sitting in a meeting room planning or demoing your projects.</p>
<p>As for the side question: Yes you do get burn out and you need to sign a document something about if you create stuff on the side and it even semi-relates with what the company does (for me its oil and gas) then it will belong to the company.</p>
<p>This is why I moved on into being an electrical engineer in the utility industry, which is what my degree is about anyways ;)</p>
<p>Write code, eat donuts, coffee break, impress the interns, complain about corporate IT, meetings, lunch, more coffee, conference calls, complain about suppliers, more coffee, catch up with Facebook from your phone while you do a full build, test some code, yell at the interns, catch up with Engadget, and so on.</p>
<p>I did go thru burn-out a long time ago. Everyone does.</p>
<p>Sounds like the perfect job for me</p>
<p>BEngineer, could you tell me how bad overtime typically got at your firm? Are we talking 60hr/week, 80hr/week etc.</p>
<p>I’ve read that developers generally have to work overtime to finish a project. Is this something that occurs often?</p>
<p>turbo93, </p>
<p>I’m assuming that you got over your burn out? Do any developers ever get so burned out that they leave the industry all together?</p>
<p>I’ve been an SE since 1986 with most of those years spent as a independent contractor, and still is.</p>
<p>Overtime work, well it really depends on the nature of the project and sector. If it’s private industry and the project is Revenue Driven, more than likely there will be overtime to meet deployment deadlines and to fix production issues. Back in the day Telecom was commonly known as sweat shops. If you’re in the public sector, and it’s a capital funded project, you will probably work a regular 40 hours.</p>
<p>You do get burned out, but with the state of the economy, and the tons of work being outsourced, you make it work for what it is.</p>
<p>Some developers end up supporting the systems they (or someone else) built. Then you are on call and might have to work from home. Also, a lot of companies have off-shored some of their programming or testing, so you sometimes end up on phone calls or chats in the wee hours trying to work with them to debug something. And yes… there are meetings where people want you to actually commit what you plan to build to writing (design) and review that with people. And meet to discuss the “undocumented features” testers have found in your code so you can either explain it to them or go fix it if it really is a problem.</p>
<p>Many of the burn-outs leave software altogether, true. In my case I went back to college for yet another degree for a few years. I am now wearing two hats, as a developer and as an HMI / HF engineer. There’s a lot of overlap and I would not want to do fully one job.</p>
<p>In my company there are lots of hardcore 50+ year old developers that are not interested in management or sales or what not, so they stay in software.</p>
<p>Work hours are ok, if you’re lucky (I do my 40/week, and we generally get paid overtime). This is very rare tho.</p>
<p>The company that I used to work in has people do 50 hours per week probably five times a year (10hrs over per week). I have not done overtime at that company even if the project was in a tight deadline as work usually finish on time.</p>
<p>I did the burnout thing in my 30s. Then have been in a moderately quieter position in my 40s and 50s but it can still be a ton of hours depending on where we are in the schedule. There’s an expectation that you’re always available though this is common in a lot of jobs today. The nice thing is that work hours are very flexible, we have a nice kitchen, great fitness center and the people in the office are all smart. If you’ve been around for a while and have made a lot of contributions, your management may make all kinds of accommodations to keep you if you’re going through difficult stuff in life (family illness, disaster, wanting to live in a foreign country, living in the South during the winter and North during the summers, etc.)</p>
<p>Oh yeah: free caffeinated drinks. Lots of them.</p>
<p>Do most engineers go through overtime and burnout as well, or is it just the CS people?</p>
<p>What I have done over the years is rotate my set of responsibilities/task position so I don’t get stuck in something too long. My main areas are: Database Architecture/DBA/Devlopment, Systems Engineering and Project Management. Every few years, I will take a break from a 100%-technical position and “cut trees” and do Systems Engineering which is doing CONOPS, design documents, development documents, test procedures, etc. Other times, I will be the project manager do schedules, allocate resources, etc. Usually, my Systems Engineering or Project management positions are short and makes me miss being 100%-technical and I go back to being technical…but it is good to take a break from each area.</p>
<p>Probably not the best thread to ask that question.</p>
<p>With CS, I think that you work hard after university and continue to work hard but you don’t feel burned out. The burnout comes when you get married and have kids and the additional time for the additional responsibilities results in the burnout because you can’t do it all.</p>
<p>Does anyone know how software development compares to other jobs such as web development, database admin, app developer, video game developer, corporate R&D at a tech company, etc</p>