I’ve never had an office job and I’ve always wondered what it is a typical cubicle worker actually does in their day-to-day. When your boss assigns you a “project”, what kind of stuff might it entail? Is it usually putting together some kind of report or presentation? I hear it’s a lot of responding to emails and attending meetings, but emails and meetings about what, finances?
I know it’ll probably be largely dependent on what department you work in and that there are specific office jobs like data-entry where you’re inputting information into a computer system all day long, HR handles internal affairs, and managers are supposed to delegate tasks and ensure they’re being completed on time. But if your job is basically what we see in Office Space, what does that actually look like hour-by-hour?
An office is usually divided in different departments that have different functions.
In no particular order, not exhaustive, and skipping management and IT, typical functions could be:
Customer service. Pick up the main phone line and check the official mail box, talk to customers, redirect calls to other departments.
Sales coordinators. Receive orders from customers, through sales representatives or by web etc. They basically ensure that all incoming orders have the proper data to be processed. Keeps track of order confirmations and maybe send data back to the customers.
Logistics. Arrange shipments from suppliers, to customers and between stock locations. Files all documents for toll and tariffs.
Debtor controllers. Keeps track of customer payments, outgoing invoices, payment plans, sending reminders and debt collection.
Creditor controllers. Register incoming invoices. Get approvals from whoever ordered it and pays the bills on time or whenever it makes most sense for discounts and such.
Finance controllers. Keeps track of the entire balance sheet. Bank reconciliations, cash flow, investments, files and pays taxes. General bookkeeping that doesn’t fit in the other departments. Does the financial statements, reporting, monthly, quarterly or annually.
Purchasing, HR/Payroll and PR/marketing are self-explanatory I think.
All of these administrative functions are necessary in most companies, but in smaller companies it all could very well be done by a single person, while in large companies they might have several people in each department.
Many companies have several subsidiaries or other constructions, so tasks or functions can also be spread out like that. For instance, I can be the creditor department in one company while also doing finance in another or payroll in a third. So while the functions are somewhat strictly defined by the tasks, it’s only in very large companies that someone does just one function.
All office functions are constantly being made more efficient. A lot of it is truly boring, so it’s in everyone’s interest to automate as much as possible. I don’t feel sorry for someone losing their office job to an algorithm, no, I’m happy for them not having to do it anymore.
It’s not a stupid question. When I was interviewing for my first office job back in 2001, I literally asked if they could show me what I had to do.
Seing someone who entered data into a program, I asked if that’s it? You really want me to just enter data into that program? OK, I can do that. And so I was hired to put numbers into boxes on the screen and have been doing that ever since. Not the same program of course. I’ve been around all departments by now and spend most of my work time working on avoiding typing numbers into boxes.
I help our customers make their business processes less stupid, time consuming and riddled with errors. Practically speaking it means I go to meetings, documentation process changes, build out business process automations, and attempt to convince an unwilling workforce that no, 17 spreadsheets is not the only or best way to run a business (change management).
Recently finished university and got my first job in basic accounting. All I do is well, watch videos on phone, messages people and a bit of accounting here and there. Boring, relaxing and that’s about it. Going to stick with it for a year and then prolly find new work.
I work for a consulting firm, so a project is whatever our client has contracted us to do, for the objectives and timeline we’ve agreed to in the contract. We do workforce readiness, largely. So the client might be adopting a new software and wants us to create the employee training on it.
We contract with them for training to help their leaders deliver workshops, maybe some e-learning modules and assessments, and to have it done in a certain number of weeks. That’s an example of a project, and typically we’ll have a small team on the deliverables for it: the modules and the workshops. Meetings are to check in on progress, fix any issues, meet with the client or their subject matter experts. So that’s my office job, though luckily it’s been remote for me since covid.
Be engineer, draw pictures with numbers next to it that mean that your picture is important. Give picture to someone who agrees that your picture is important and presses on your picture with a stamp. Then give your picture to people that don’t work at desks to make a thing that looks like your important picture.
The best part there is that you’re not responsible for any damage your drawing causes if you’re not the one with the stamp!
Milton is that you?
In Office Space the main character seems like some kind of analyst, maybe a project manager who makes sure things are getting done as planned and addresses. The other two guys from the office were software developers if I remember correctly. The annoyimg lady answering phones was a receptionist.
So it varies widely depending on what needs to be done and who it is assigned to. I have worked in the same IT department for over 15 years and had four different positions working with the same large software systems doing very different work (help desk, testing, requirements, project management). I interact with security people, administrative assistants, and even directors as part of the work.
‘Office work’ is more of a description of the location and setting than the work itself.
I mostly played video games in between intense bursts of productivity to get work done.
Yes, I was doing this before remote work was a thing. You just have to be slick. I once set up a “lab” of three PCs to “test some new software” in a back room and then played Birth of the Federation on one of them while the other two ran perf counter output, for 3 months straight. This was an act of desperation to keep my mind busy. They had laid almost everyone off in the company so I didn’t have much to do, but it started a tradition that carried me all the way to retirement!
Office work is largely paperwork, even if very little is on actual paper nowadays. Much of the work involves creating records or communicating with others to get things done. A salesperson will try to find clients for the product or service. They’ll typically create a record of customers or prospects with their contact information and notes about the negotiation. They’ll create a formal quotation or estimate for the customer and if the customer wants to move forward they’ll create an order confirmation. That document will trigger some other department to fulfill the order, either by providing a service or product to the customer. A work order might be provided to a service technician specifying what work is to be done and where. If a product needs to be delivered a picking slip might be created to tell someone in a warehouse where to get the product and how many to get. Once it’s been picked the product will go to the shipping department to be packed and shipped. An item fulfillment will be created saying what items were packed, how many, and what the tracking number is. Once the order is fulfilled an invoice will be created. If the customer paid in advance the payment will get applied to the invoice automatically or by someone in the accounting department. If the customer is on credit terms they’ll be sent the invoice with instructions on how to pay and when payment is due.
There are so many steps like this. The records help the business plan. They know how many parts and supplies to order. They can track if they’re selling more or less than forecast, if they need to place a rush order for more parts, ask people to work overtime or hire more employees. If something starts costing more they can look to see if they need to raise prices or redesign the product to use a different component, or find an alternate source. At the end of the day, it all comes down to accounting, making sure the company is generating enough income to pay the bills, suppliers, and employees, and hopefully make a profit.
In my case, I work IT for a healthcare company. Current major projects of mine include trying to migrate servers from our data centers to the cloud and setting up Disaster Recovery options. These are 2 of my 22 current projects.
On the day to day, I’ll determine what it takes for an application to run and how does it communicate to find the most optimal way we can build it within vendor and enterprise specifications. An example might be…
- Application is a hosted Web Page
- It stores all of its data a SQL Database
- Is used by locations outside of our network, so this will require
- A Public Endpoint to be accessible outside of our network
- DMZ’d Network Security Group or Application Security Group to manage exactly what and be accessed from where
- Is a low-tier application that does not require low latencies
In this case, I can decide to use a PaaS Web Server and PaaS SQL Server, so that I don’t have to manage security and updates of the Operating System in the future. After deciding this, I might diagram how everything will connect and communicate, then build the infrastructure to fulfill this design. Lets say that means going to Azure (the cloud provider), building the Web Server and SQL Server, creating the DMZ rules (443 inbound from anywhere to WebServer and 1433 only from WebServer to SQLserver) I set up a backup system for both of these to take daily backups in case anything goes sour, then determine what steps are necessary to make sure that I can minimize the downtime for the migration, since it will take time to restore a backup from the data center’s version into the Azure version.
I’m trying to keep things simple-ish for this example because there’s a wide variety of tools, environments, and processes that come into play for any one of these builds. Most of the time is spent not in actively moving things, but in determining best courses of action and minimizing downtime, especially being a healthcare environment where an application could be actively impacting a patient’s care.
Of course there’s all the other stuff you might expect, like emails about a server not working right and meetings about how management wants to use more AI while needing to cut costs to the organization because we’re “not currently economically sustainable.”
While by no means a comprehensive view into the work, I hope it grants some insight into the role!
I’m a chemical engineer at a plastics company. When I’m in the office I’m looking at data and making decisions based on that, like whether to stop or increase production rates, whether to shut something down for maintenance, or finding what piece of equipment is broken and causing a problem. I also design improvements to the process like finding better ways to run the machinery, new equipment that gets us more capacity, or new ways to control the equipment. I would say about 80% of my time is in the office and 20% is in the manufacturing area.
I was until a few years ago, a machine operator in plastic extrusion. All but one of our engineers were useless. Did they do work? Sure. Was it productive to the line? Occasionally…
We paid $20,000 for a new mil thickness tester, made by young engineers at the local university.
They held a whole “class” to show us how it worked, presented not by the ones who built it, but by our engineers.
It failed during presentation. So we all learned how to measure manually instead. It never worked. They ended up installing the old one back, which hardly worked.
Then for the next year it sat broken, and unless the old thickness tester was in a good mood, we had to do it manually, which was so utterly time consuming and difficult.
While I think engineers are important- so many just fuck around, least where I worked.
The idea of letting young engineers at a university design production equipment is WILD to me. Universities make PROTOTYPES. The gap between prototype and reliable production equipment is so big you could drive a bus through it.
A good production engineer is worth their weight in gold but when you have shitty ones you’re better off letting the workers run the ship. At least they know what’s happening and where the hangups are. You’ll know a good engineer because they’re down talking to the lead hands on the shop floor because they want to understand what’s actually happening and run ideas through the shop before they fuck with things.
The bulk of my day is reading other people‘s documentation to make sure it‘s at least reasonably up to standard.
You…. Are a saint.
Other people’s work
Let me take a liberty to answer for everyone.
Most of human activities now generate a lot of data, or require a lot of data to happen.
It can be anything from construction blueprints and software, to more subtle things like goods distributions on the shelves or schedules or whatever.
Behind everything you see in the world there is a data management, and behind this data management there are layers of people making those decisions from top to bottom.
Some of those people managed to create spaces where all they have to do is to say “nothing on my side” during the meeting.
Others are the opposite, have to take the toll and process the massive amounts of this data.
This is what the office job is nowadays.
I do IT governance. When someone builds a server or a firewall rule or a database in a way that could leak patient data to somewhere it shouldn’t be I find it and make them fix it. Generally people don’t want to redo something that they’ve done so there is a whole process around who you tell so that everyone know the problem and who has to fix it.
I’m a translator. I translate everything you can possibly think of. HSE documents, emails to illicit lovers, websites, I’m your person.
