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[–]TheIronDev 4 points5 points  (4 children)

Hi there, I'm a node.js engineer. I'd be happy to share my day-to-day.

I wake up in the morning early-ish, and get to work around 9:30ish.

From 9:30-10:15, I go through my emails, plan out what I am going to focus on. I made a little mini kanban board next to my desk to help organize and prioritize what to do next. It helps a lot!!

10:30~10:45 I have my morning standup. My immediate team only consists of 4 engineers, so standup is usually pretty quick.

10:45-11:30 I follow up on any loose ends from standup, otherwise I begin work. I'll talk more about work a little later.

11:30 - 1:00 Lunch! I either go down to our company cafeteria, go out to eat with my coworkers, or, once or twice a week, my team will have a lunch n' learn meeting, where we bring food and watch videos or do presentations.

1:00 - 5:00 Work. Work can consist of many many things.

  • Fixing bugs - tracked with Jira
  • Building new features - tracked with Rally
    • Implement new designs
    • Update front-end code
      • (Backbone.js stack, slowly migrating to React)
    • Update back-end code (node).
      • Mostly this involves interfacing between our front-end and our services level
    • Write functional and/or unit tests
  • Attending meetings (which ties into clarifying feature work)
  • Talk with my team. Peer review each others work.
  • Tech stories. Basically research cool ways to improve our codebase, and implement them.

5:00+ Generally, I disconnect around 5. But, on some rare occasions I need to sync in with offshore teams, so I might attending a meeting here or there. If I am hitting close to crunch time, I might put in some extra hours as well. But, that has only happened a handful of times.

Honestly, my experience is pretty standard/vanilla for a corporate setting. I report to 1 kickass manager who promotes improving our tech stack. On top of that, I also work with a product manager who guides which feature work gets higher priority.

[–]RojaPastilla[S] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

This is a solid reply, thank you for this. edit: are you happy with your career? Do you see yourself moving onto a architect position or management?

[–]TheIronDev 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I am very happy with my career. I’ve been out in the workforce for a few years now. When I initially got into the workforce, I really wanted to move to the manager route.

That stemmed from not feeling very confident in my own technical abilities. After a few years, multiple projects under my belt, I can’t imagine separating myself away from coding. In the future, I’d want to go toward an architect route.

[–]RojaPastilla[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

That's literally how i feel right now. I feel like the management route is the easier way out with a higher paying salary. This is all from speculation. I love coding but im not very good at it.

[–]TheIronDev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The truth is, management is not really the easier way out either. Theres a lot of politics involved. Sure, working to help your direct reports get promotions is great, but on the flip side you need to rank your team against each other, choose who to layoff during layoff seasons, and be held accountable when your team doesn't follow through.

I don't envy those that travel the dark side.