Engineers on Internet, what is it you actually do, and how is a day on the job for you?

It varies from job to job, but I assure you it’s a lot more admin work than you bargained for.

Average week on the current job: 13% drawing making/drawing revising, 7% new 3D models, 20% talking/planning/troubleshooting with factory and CNC staff, 25% production and resource planning, 5% internal meetings, 30% customer relations and related admin work

Thats going to vary widely depending on what kind of engineer is answering.

I’m a civil working in land development. My day to day depends on what projects I have an what stage they are in. My job is mostly at my desk with the occasional field visit for meetings or checking out something that has gone wrong in the field. I do a lot of my work in Civil 3D or in various stormwater modelling programs. The stress isn’t awful but can be rough at times when we are under staffed and behind schedule.

I get to work on an interesting variety of projects though. I just got my first residential job approved. 400+ lot neighborhood with a pretty large interconnected pond system for stormwater control and 3 sanitary lift stations working in series. That job has been going on for over 2 years. Other jobs are small commercial sites that you can knock out in a month. Stuff like fast food restaurants that are all pretty similar and you just have to figure out how to lay everything out efficiently.

I started out as a software engineer. Currently Director of Engineering at Google. These days I’m more of a manager of engineers than an engineer myself.

Most of my days is spent on things like hiring, reviewing other people’s work, meeting with people to make sure they understand what I need them to do, meeting with other managers to make sure I understand what their teams need and they understand what my team needs.

I’m an automotive engineer working on an autonomous truck project. In any given day I’ll answer some emails, attend some zoom meetings, work on some circuit spreadsheets, model some electrical harnesses/ethernet/coax/etc in 3d, maybe work on making a print for our supplier, and start shouting when NX crashes. It’s way different than the other, more industrialized jobs I’ve had but it’s good to get out of your bubble even if it’s stressful.

Not really the traditional engineer, but it’s in my title: Software Engineer II (basically means senior).

Typical day starts with a standup meeting where everyone reviews what they did the day before, any problems or blockers, and what they will be working on today. You will usually have a few cards/tickets assigned to you representing bugs or new features. If you had any blockers you’ll contact either product or another engineer to walk through it.

You also get code reviews from other developers assigned to you. Typically you look those over before you dive into your own stuff. Make your comments and kick it back to the original dev if something needs to be changed. Also during the day QA might contact you with questions or issues encountered one of the tickets you have in QA.

Depending on the size of the organization, you might also do support rotations where you troubleshoot production issues. Some companies have an app support team for that.

If there are any major new features you might have 1-2 hour meetings thrown in. If you’re senior, you might be doing some research and design and documenting in the wiki.

You might have some release tasks like merging and deploying depending how automated things are. If there are spec failures in a release branch you might be troubleshooting those.