No Stupid Questions

They do the work in the office. Just like work from home works in the home.

And a florist works in the.....floor.

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 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.

Depends who's looking

In Office Space the main character seems like some kind of analyst, maybe a project manager who makes sure things are getting done as planned and addresses. The other two guys from the office were software developers if I remember correctly. The annoyimg lady answering phones was a receptionist.

So it varies widely depending on what needs to be done and who it is assigned to. I have worked in the same IT department for over 15 years and had four different positions working with the same large software systems doing very different work (help desk, testing, requirements, project management). I interact with security people, administrative assistants, and even directors as part of the work.

'Office work' is more of a description of the location and setting than the work itself.

there's a billing dept in my company. i assume they handle billing. they have an office. they sit at desks a lot. they make calls and verify insurance and process payments and whatnot.

I have a friend who is a software dude. i dunno what he does but I'm assuming it involves offices, desks, and software.

I work in an office as a network administrator. Largely my day to day is a meeting every morning to go over what everyone is doing for the day, then looking through and responding to all the alerts that came up from all the servers I manage(things like failing backups, unexpected reboots, stopped services, strange login behavior, etc)

Then, if I still have time in the day, I put time towards some of the long term projects I have which largely consists of finding things that can be automated and scripting up solutions to that

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.