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.
Engineer here. You’re salaried but treated like an hourly employee. You get paid to work 40 hours a week but get “told” that working less than 45-50 hours a week makes you a slacker. Your exempt which means you don’t get a mandatory 30 minute unpaid lunch or a paid 15 minute break every 4 hours. Vacation time is normally unlimited but requires manager approval so if you get the old “boomer” type that drank the corporate cool aid, good luck getting any more than 2 weeks worth approved regardless of years at company.
Sorry I digress, My job starts at 8:00 but I slide in to the daily standup at around 8:10. No one notices or cares. Afterwards, I get a cup of coffee, catch up on vital correspondence and questions from overseas coworkers. It’s sometime between 8:30 and 9:45 That I realize the Bangalore Software team sent out an emergency meeting at 11PM last night for 5AM This morning. “Oh well” I think to myself and sip on my coffee catching up on what I missed. Turns out one of them forgot to plug in a machine. They crack me up.
From 9:45 to 10:00, I have conditioned my body to take a shit. I time it for exactly 10 minutes. My second one is precisely times for between 4:00PM and 4:15PM. I figure those two times are freebies to my 9.5 hour forced work schedule. Upon returning, from my “break” I begin to actually work.
I design things using CAD software cool stuff. I am content by 10:10AM I have my headphones on, I am doing what I actually went to school for. I begin to think this is entirely worth all the other stuff I put up with. I get in the zone and time flies.
Its, 10:25AM. There was an emergency on the production floor. They tell me its a problem they have never seen before. They assure me they have taken all the proper diagnostic steps have been taken and I need to look at whats wrong to prevent a line stop.
I think, “its go time” I follow the techs down to the line and start diagnosing the problem. In no time at all, I find that they never checked the test wiring despite that being like in the first 5 steps of diagnosing a problem. I head back to my desk. Its 2PM by now, I microwave my lunch and work through it. Distractions happen maybe I get an accumulated total of an hour or two of design work done before its 6PM and I head home.
Yup…… You could tell me to switch jobs but every company I work for in my line of work is just like this.
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.
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.
Hour by hour, my job evolved from taking calls from clients who owed us money, to then answering questions from agents who weren’t as skilled at it as I was.
In the process of being promoted, I was asked to join a daily meeting of over 100 people talking about the issues affecting our department.
Once in a great while, something came up in that meeting that gave me the heads up to prevent chaos in our department and stress to members.
There’s a whole shitload of cogs turning in modern corporations. There’s also a huge danger of people leaving and nobody understanding why the cogs are there.
I’m a translator. I translate everything you can possibly think of. HSE documents, emails to illicit lovers, websites, I’m your person.
Other people’s work
They do the work in the office. Just like work from home works in the home.
And a florist works in the…floor.
and sex workers work on the sex
I work as a programmer, we get a feature request from a customer that passes through a lot of stages (billing, scheduling, architecture, etc). When it gets to me it’s a simple “it’s now x, it should be y, this is done when a, b and c”. I then go through and change or add code until everything is achieved, it’s then tested and out it goes. Rinse and repeat.
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.
Milton is that you?
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I reengineer business processes based on best practices and state of the art technologies and methods.
Riding along with OP’s curiosity, what does that actually mean? What’s an example of a business process which you reengineered?
I’m fairly sure it’s just a joke comment.
While it’s certainly facetious and a bunch of bullshit bingo, it does actually describe what I do, albeit in management speak.
OK I’ll give you a translation of the bullshit bingo:
- Reengineer business processes: dragging ancient, obsolete systems and processes into the current time.
- Best practices: I can tie my own shoelaces and eat with a knife and fork without stabbing myself in the face.
- State of the art technologies: we use computers.
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.
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.
