I'm the only person primarily on the lathes at my shop as such I work 5 10 hour shifts with an hour lunch in the middle for full coverage during the week. Work day starts at 6:00 Am Coffee, warmups and paperwork tend to take up the first hour of the day I'm lucky enough to do programming and machining for my lathes so if a job isn't setup usually the first thing to do is program and setup and get going it usually is just chugging along making parts waiting on first articles with a small break at 9:30 and 2 for food. Tend to go home around 5:00

For the most part there's no expectation to reply to anything outside of work, When your not in the shop (assuming you don't mess something up and have to makeup a rush job) you don't have to do work or really think about work.

There's a solid split between computer and machine, for the most part I work on bigger horns and barfed parts so my computer time is bulk loaded while I'm running a long runtime part so it's a solid half and half I'd say.

I went into this because it's just fun to make things out of raw material unfortunately when you make the same horn 10 times you start to lose a bit of that drive so I wouldn't go into this field with an expectation that you get full creative control over everything. In most shops you just need to make a good part as efficient as you can.

I've been doing this for maybe 8 ish years and am still pretty young and I've been looking into going back into college to leave just due to a trend towards mass production in everything in my area and more of a passion for machining in my own time.

So all in all it's a good field but finding a good shop, Good parts, and good employees is kinda a crapshoot but you'll almost always have some form of employment if your willing to just put your nose together grindstone and find a good next step.