I’m 3 years into my apprenticeship as a union plumber. I gotta say, it’s not as bad as I thought it would be, but its also not great. So far I’ve only worked on new construction jobs, so it’s less unclogging toilets and more operating heavy machinery and installing pipes both underground and inside walls that haven’t been built yet. Each job is slightly different but my day typically starts around 3, leave the house at 3:30. Get to work around 5-5:30 (sometimes 6). Then we pretty much pick up whatever we left off with the day before. We load up a cart with our tools and whatever materials we need to get started from out of the gang box and then it’s off to the races. From here it could literally be anything. Some days we just have to move materials. Some days we are piping in heavy ass 8 inch cast iron piping. Some days we are doing copper pro press work. Some days we find ourselves 25 feet up in the air on a scissor lift, other days we are laying pipe 6 feet underground on a bed of gravel. There’s a lot of variety depending on what stage the building is at and also what type of building is being built. There’s even further variety still if you end up getting into service plumbing. Almost all of the days i come home covered in sweat, some days I end up covered in mud, and for service plumbers there will be days you come home covered in shit. At my current job we get there at 5:30 and take lunch at 10:30, then we leave at 1:30. It would be nicer if I didn’t live an hour and a half away. A lot of the days I end up taking a nap on the way home and I make it home by 4. Usually the days go pretty quickly doing that kind of work but they also leave you pretty drained. I’m currently taking elective CAD classes at school so that I can hopefully get out of the field and into the office but that’s going to depend on job availability. Overall, there are worse ways to make a living. But waking up at 3 in the morning sucks and I will never get used to that. It never would have been my first choice, but after hitting 30 and having a kid without having a career, its been a decent last resort option.

Sysadmin for one of the oldest remaining independent local newspapers in Germany.
I commute to work by bicycle, have a 7 hour work day, and we regularly have foosball tournaments and Nerf gun battles during work hours.
Other than that, it’s pretty standard sysadmin work, made more interesting by the specialized software we deploy, the extremely high security and resiliency standards, and the special characters who work at a local newspaper in 2024.
The team and my boss are really chill. It’s low stress, unionized, with really decent pay, flexible schedules, right to work-from-home and 42 days of paid vacation (plus 13 national holidays and unlimited sick days).

I’ll work this job until the newspaper goes bankrupt, when (not if) the entire sector of print journalism disappears.

Software Developer. I try to get at least one thing done a day at work. Low hanging fruit first. A day may be a feature request, a meeting to go over new features/bugs in a system. I do maybe 4 hours of actual coding a day. But I do save the entity I work for literal millions/hours a year automating some of their workflows. I open source a large part of the work I do, which is supported by my employer, so thats nice.

I am pretty blessed honestly. Its a good gig.

Monkey wrangler. I wrangle monkeys.

Devops, working with aws infrastructure and networking, terraform, ansible etc. A lot of Linux!

It’s fun and pays well. Recommend it for anyone who gets excited about new open source things and Linux features. I’ve been known to change terminals and editors a lot, and constantly change my neovim plugins and themes, even switching to tiling window managers occasionally.

I’m just having fun and getting paid for it.

I work as a software developer, making 3d, Virtual- and Augmented Reality applications for industrial and commercial customers. For example I make trainings where you learn how to operate certain machines in VR or tourism apps where you can explore the history of a place through phone AR. Basically, I do the same thing as a game developer, often using game engines like Unreal and Unity, but not making actual games.

I work from home, so a typical day is just me sitting in front of my computer for 8 hours a day. Sometimes I have to visit a customer or a trade show for a few days, so I’ll take the train and stay at a hotel somewhere. It’s generally a pretty interesting job where I get to use a lot of different tools and hardware. It’s also not very stressful, in contrast to actual game development.

Facilities manager for a wildlife and heritage charity. I lead a small team looking after health & safety, compliance and building maintenance and repairs.

Ninety percent of my time is spent at the keyboard, but since I am peripatetic and move around the properties that I cover, I have a different, and usually beautiful, view out of the window each day of the week. When I am not sat behind a desk, I will be crawling through an attic or have my head down a sewer or something.

My time is spent arranging contractors for routine servicing or repair projects, reviewing fire risk assessments and dealing with outstanding actions, writing client briefs for renewable energy projects, chasing people to do workplace inspections, advising on risk assessments, updating our compliance tracker, arranging asbestos surveys, ensuring that everyone who needs training has it up to date, proving to utility companies that their meters are wildly inaccurate and need to be replaced, working out why the biomass boiler/sewage treatment plant/water heater/automatic gate/car park machine/phone system/greywater pump/security alarm/whatever isn’t working and getting it fixed and so on.

Network admin for a non-profit. Lots of monitoring, patching, etc. We’re a small dept so I do everything from security to tech support. Also, solitaire.

Fix computers, I walk around my office plugging holes in our digital ship while my boss never gets around to fixing the underlying issues.

Sleep