What's the average day of a Software Engineer?

Check the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt79JcPfZQA

Dear Russell,

I will say that the answer to your question very much depends on the company you work for and what you are working on. I can tell you about my experiences, but your mileage may vary.

When I was working as a software engineer for a pharmaceutical start-up, my job was to develop software to analyze biological data as well as set up a large computing server and maintain the company database. I was analyzing the biological data too. What I was doing on any given day changes day by day. The smaller the company is, often the more diverse your role is. There were some long days and some weekends were taken up by work. But, I will say it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot and my role in growing the company was tangible.

At Google, I work on improving an aspect of the search experience. That means understanding the current code, analyzing a lot of data, changing the code, and running experiments to see if my proposed changes are worthwhile. Once things are moving along, I write documentation on what I am doing. Generally, I work on 2 to 4 projects at a time, where each project is some targeted improvement in how we do things. Days are not short, but manageable. Some engineers prefer to work shorter hours at the office, but work at home on either evenings/nights and/or weekends. Some software engineers at Google work on keeping the systems up and running. These engineers are on call at times, which means they can be called at home or where ever (nights and weekends included) to help fix some problem. Of course, they are paid for the time they are on call. Other engineers at Google work on other projects like Android. Days may be quite long particularly at some times during the year. It is about one's ability to get the work done in a timely manner more than it is about how many hours one is spending. I would say my current job is really exciting; it is not often one gets a chance to work on software used by millions. It is a fabulous place to work with great software, great people, and great benefits.

I was also a software engineer at a major hospital. I worked on implementing specialized research software for specific biological experiments, such as determining if a patient has a genetic-based disease. I worked with a lot of research investigators on a wide variety of problems. That had the least number of hours per week generally, but being in academia, the pay isn't quite as good as in industry, though there are other benefits such as a good retirement package ... and the insurance plan was quite good. :-) It was fun to learn a lot and I was on a number of pretty good research papers.

I hope some of my experiences helped answer your question. Best wishes!

Hi Russell!

Here are some helpful sites:

http://www.wikihow.com/Become-a-Software-Engineer
http://tryengineering.org/ask-expert/what-does-computer-software-engineer-do-could-you-give-me-description-field
http://www.programmerinterview.com/index.php/working-as-a-software-engineer/working-life-big-company-part-1/

Best of luck! Please keep me posted. I would like to follow your progress!