That’s like asking what a construction worker does. They build stuff, but like… what? The answer is whatever their specialty is. You can be an officer worker and do many, many, different things just like you can be in construction and do many, many things.

For some quick very general examples you could be in sales, or software development, or customer service, or data analysis, or graphic design, or so very many others.

Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late. I use the side door, that way my boss can’t see me. Uh, and after that, I just sorta space out for about an hour. I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I’d probably, say, in a given week, I probably do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.

The thing is, it’s not that I’m lazy. It’s just that I just don’t care. It’s a problem of motivation, all right? Now, if I work my ass off and the company ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime. So where’s the motivation? And here’s another thing,I have eight different bosses right now!

So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my real motivation - is not to be hassled. That and the fear of losing my job, but y’know, it will only make someone work hard enough not to get fired.

Now they are trying to offer me some kind of stock option and equity sharing program? I have a meeting tomorrow where I am probably going to be laid off.

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.

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 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!

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.

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.

Getting emails faster than you can read and respond to them, and they are all urgent exceptions.

Meetings that could have been emails, wasting your time while the real emails continue to stack up.

Askng important questions (via email) and getting ignored, or only some of the questions addressed.

Visits from the newest suit talking about how great their new ideas will be, just like the last one who said the same thing and was replaced after 6 months.

It is a lot like the movie Office Space, except in current times instead of one job you’re doing the work of 2.5 people and making less than Peter did in 1999.

Lots of microsoft excel and bullshitting

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.

It really varies too much between industries to give a single answer. Someone at an insurance company is going to be doing something vastly different than an accountant, and they’ll be different from an architect (though only part of what architects do is in the office).

That being said, office work for the average worker, as in a salaried or hourly worker with a fairly rigidly defined job description, is usually going to be paperwork, even though there’s not always paper involved.

It’s taking information and moving it around, in one way or another.

As an example, one of my exes worked for a company that handles employee benefits, investments, and other services to other companies. Lets say a worker has an IRA, gets a nice insurance policy, and there’s a pension fund.

Her job is to take data from the company that contracted with the company she worked for, enter that data into the system in an properly formatted way, run calculations, then trigger the appropriate funds being moved from one account to another. No meetings unless something goes wrong. It’s all day data entry and management.

Now, before that job, she worked at a tax service under a CPA. She would get actual paper back then. Receipts, forms, and look for deductions for the client, then print out the church correct tax form, have the client sign it, then send it off. She would finish one, then start the next, all day long during tax season. Off season, she would be receiving accounting records from clients and entering them into the system of the company she worked for, and process things like withholding.

Pretty much, neither of those jobs required leaving the desk her entire shift.

Now, my best friend runs a department at a community college. He leaves the actual desk frequently. There’s meeting with his superiors, meetings with his underlings, meetings with vendors, budgeting work, orders, policy decisions, disciplinary decisions, and the list keeps on going.

My best friend’s husband was a flunky at architectural firm. When he was on a project, his job was drafting designs per specifications given to him. It required doing some oh the work, meeting with the architect, then changing anything per their decisions, or finalizing those plans. From there, once plans were ready to be used by someone to build something, he would essentially coordinate between contractors and his office to troubleshoot any snags with things like permits, supply issues, etc. So it was usually a lot of desk with work over a few weeks or months, then weeks or months barely at a desk, but still mostly in office.

Myself, I never had a long term office job. But, during recovery from a work related injury, I was pulled into the office of the home health company I worked for. My injury precluded patient care, but I was okay for light duty.

I was placed in staffing. I would roll in early, about 6 AM, and check for any call-ins. That would be employees needing to have their case covered by someone else for whatever reason. I would call other caregivers based on availability, proximity to the patient, and hours already worked. The last one was to avoid overtime unless absolutely necessary.

The software used, I would type in the name, and their details would pop up with their address, phone number, and current schedule. Same with the patient.

The first step for me was always to check the patient’s location, because that let me filter out people on the list as available by proximity before anything else, since I would have to just go down the list. I’d enter a name, check the location, and decide who to short list. Once I had the short list, I’d verify they were not going into OT, and start calling, with priority given to employees that had requested more hours.

Most of the time, a call-in would take fifteen to twenty minutes to resolve.

Once the morning run was over, it would be time for a quick coffee and come back to handle any afternoon call-ins in the same way. Have lunch, then repeat for evening/night call-ins.

During the few months I was doing it, most of the time, that was handled by maybe 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Some days it was all handled before lunch, and very occasionally by the time the coffee break was available. Very variable because there are days when folks just didn’t call in as much. And there were days it was crazy, particularly when there’d be something like a bad flu run through local schools and the parents would either catch it, or need to take care of their kids.

But, usually, the afternoons were either straight up bullshitting with the ladies in the office (not flirting or messing with, just swapping healthcare war stories), or helping with sorting out patient intake and/or prioritizing staffing for new patients. A new patient means you either shuffle staff around, hire new caregivers, or break it to the bosslady that someone is going to need overtime until the other options could happen. Since I knew pretty much everyone, I was good at figuring out who would be a good pick for a patient’s needs.

A few times, I did some of the initial onboarding for new caregivers. Get them the employee handbook, introduce them around, talk about expectations, that kind of happy horseshit.

Tbh, I liked it most days, but not as much as patient care. Don’t think I could have done it for years or anything, but as a temporary thing, it was nice.

See? Totally different daily routines and work between industries.

I’m a translator. I translate everything you can possibly think of. HSE documents, emails to illicit lovers, websites, I’m your person.

I’ve never really had a “desk job” where my job was to sit at a desk 9 to 5. But a few of my past occupations included at least some desk time, such as:

• Flight instructor. Most of my day was spent either in the classroom briefing/instructing, or in the plane instructing/overseeing. I spent a significant portion at a desk creating lesson plans, updating logbooks, communicating with students, grading assignments, communicating with other instructors, communicating with our Designated Pilot Examiner, filling out FAA paperwork, that sort of thing.
• Aviation mechanic. This is more of an administrative job than the posters at your local trade school would lead you to believe. An owner/operator/pilot/plane haver guy brings you a plane for an annual inspection, now you have a research project. What exact make and model is this thing? What modifications has it had during the 50 years it’s existed? Under what authority were those modifications made? Is it still in original or correctly modified condition? Are there any manufacturer service bulletins or FAA airworthiness directives issued for this aircraft, and I mean THIS aircraft, or its components? Like, they’ll call out ranges of hull numbers in these things. Then there’s recording all the shit YOU did to the plane while it’s here.
• Project manager of a short-run job shop. First up: Meet with the customer and massage the idea they have out of their brain. 3 times out of 10 tell them which aisle in Wal-Mart they can find what they want, 1 time out of 10 explain why what they want isn’t physically or technologically possible. Once I’ve got a good idea of what the customer wants, it’s time to do some preliminary design work, research materials and prepare an estimate, deliver this to the customer. 7 in 10 times we hear back from that, get the okay to build, now it’s time to order materials, do any of the design work which may include CAD design, electrical design, computer programming, whatever. Scheduling and directing my team, contracting with any talent I don’t have in-house, the all important staring at a wall visualizing fourteen different variations on some little yet pivotal detail, and then I’d end up in the shop running laser cutters or lathes or table saws or whatever to get it built. Then the most important part: Invoicing the customer.

I’ll just give some examples.

We know that construction workers build things, but many office workers are behind them. When you hear “office worker,” think “information worker” as that will help.

What information?

Someone has to pay the construction workers. This involves accounting and payroll tasks best done at a computer.

Architects design the project being constructed and this is done in an office.

There are permits, inspections, regulations, taxes, real estate licensing etc to clear the project and this is done through computers and telephones.

Coordination of the different work crews must be planned - we don’t just ask concrete, civil engineers, plumbers, electrical, and landscaping to all show up on the same day and just figure things out. These things are scheduled out and arranged with many different companies / subcontractors and this is mapped out on a computer and agreed to over the phone.

The new apartments being constructed will need tenants to rent them. Billboard space is going to be rented near the building. A graphic designer is designing the billboard on a computer in an office. Someone else is calling the billboard company to arrange the large scale printing of it and to purchase the time it will be displayed.

I’ll stop. This is off the top of my head. If construction workers, with their obviously valuable and easy to understand work have this many office workers behind them, you can imagine how it’s even more complex for things like tech companies.

I am a project manager for an automotive part maker.

My job is emails, tickets and meetings on the computer all day every day.

My job is to make sure the engineers work on the correct tasks at the right time. I am responsible for the planning and delivering on time (delivery is a part with mechanical, electronic and software working together correctly). I am responsible to keep the project within the budget. I decide on priorities, what the team needs to be working on first, second and third. I am responsible for making the team work according to the quality process, which means they must follow to correct steps, design rules, reviews and create the appropriate documentation.

I can tell you, sitting in front of the screen all day, is harmful to health (in a different way than a physical job is). For example, almost everyone I work with is wearing glasses, my own vision has degraded a lot.