I can only give my experience and I think mine is a bit unusual but here goes.

Like the Office Space folks, I’m a dev in a large (admittedly, non profit and really good) organization. Since covid, I’ve worked remotely but my day to day hasn’t changed.

We have a help desk where people send questions/issues. Someone on our team generally splits those roughly based on workload, skills, knowledge etc. Our goal is about half our work should be those one off requests.

I also have client units within the organization. They usually come to me with wild, bold ideas that I help make a reality or explain (gently) why what they are asking for is insane. Some of thr projects are based on what folks have heard are best practices in our industry, others are about cutting down manual work/seeing what we can automate.

Any of those projects can take anywhere from a couple hours to a couple of months. Some require buy in from other units, so on those I end up on a lot of meetings and email threads answering questions, hearing suggestions etc. I then (usually) coordinate with my manager to make sure I’m not stepping on any toes or there aren’t considerations which I had yet to consider.

Today for example, I spent about half the day working on help desk tickets, about 1/3 of my time was clarifying “what the hell are you trying to say?” Or pointing out logical gaps etc (much easier to do this upfront than write a bunch of code and have someone realize they meant something else entirely… People are dumb.) The other 2/3 was coding.

On my major projects, I spent an annoying amount of time emailing around to get approvals so a project manager would accept that my clients were fine with something I built, even though it was a bit unorthodox. Then a couple hours actually working on another project.

Plus, y’know, Lemmy time, cat skritching time and a bit of cooking.

Admittedly, my experience is unusual. I’m hihhly skilled but slightly underpaid in a non profit, so folks compensate by giving a lot of leeway. So a nice work environment plus I think what I do makes the world a better place, I’m pretty happy. I understand most office jobs are not quite like that but I don’t think they’re far off.