Hey everyone! What's happening?
I was thinking the other day
And I realized that while my day in the life video
is cool, and chill and all. It doesn't really do a great job of explaining
What exactly I do at my job, and I figured that's probably something you all want to know.
So today I'm going to talk in detail about what I do at work.
Okay, let's begin!
Throughout my career I've been mostly focused on writing mobile apps
and to be specific, when I mean mobile apps,
I mean apps that tend to be more productivity or social focused.
These are some of the apps that I worked on.
I'm what some people call a product engineer since the engineering that I do
is directly related to the product that people use.
Some engineers are not product engineers by contrast
and they work to provide services for other software engineers
or make improvements to websites and apps that they run faster
and so that they're up and running all the time.
So in order to talk a little bit about my responsibilities as a product engineer,
let's dive in and talk a little bit about the product process.
We have a product manager or PM, who kicks off this whole process by deciding on what we're building.
It then gets handed over to a designer who figures out how is this thing gonna look?
and then finally it gets handed over to the engineer who builds the thing,
so let's walk through a simple example
So say that you and I are working on an app for food delivery. The product manager might say
Hey, let's put a button on the home screen so that users can order their favorite dish from their favorite restaurant on one tap.
The designer would then take it and then figure out how it's going to look on the screen by creating mock-ups
The mock-ups then get handed over to the engineer who implements and ships the feature to its users.
The whole process is actually very collaborative and is usually not divided up like how I described as an assembly line.
What actually happens is that we all provide our own expertise
but then we end up making a lot of decisions together.
So I would say a solid 20 percent of my time is spent doing exactly this.
I should also mention that this process moves super quickly.
It's not uncommon for us to conceive an idea and get it out within a week or two.
Because there are several people involved in this process
to keep everyone in the loop, we have frequent meetings in order to communicate what we're all working on
Ok! So 20% of my time is spent working with PM's, designers, and other engineers to discuss what we're working on
Next
70% of my time is spent building stuff.
So based on the discussions we've had with the product manager and designer,
it's up to me and the other engineers to build the thing.
My process usually goes something like this...
Number one: figure out a plan for how to build the thing. I asked myself questions like
do I need to coordinate with other teams in my company in order to accomplish this?
What classes am I gonna make?
Should I use what Apple's provided me, or should I make my own custom version of it?
How am I going to format the data that I want to show in the way that I want?
And once I have a plan, sometimes I'll review with other engineers to make sure that my plan makes sense.
So lastly, I go and code according to my plan
and sometimes it goes according to plan and sometimes it doesn't
But it certainly helps to have a plan so that it saves time and frustration.
In addition to building features, I will be fixing bugs in the mean time
or making improvements to our tests and tooling to make development easier.
So this whole portion of reading, writing and fixing code takes quite a bit of time because of all the little problems
I'm solving along the way and so usually a large portion of my day is spent doing this.
and so the last 10% of my day is spent doing miscellaneous things.
Things like:
Having one-on-ones with my manager and other people to talk about career stuff
Participating in meetings in other parts of the company to find out what everyone is working on
and just working and participating in any other areas that I'm passionate about at work.
Okay So if my math is correct that comes out to a hundred percent.
20% collaborating with cross-functional roles, 70% building and coding
and 10% miscellaneous things around the company
and not every day looks the same on the job
There are some days where I have meetings all day and I code only for an hour or so
and there are other days where I have no meetings and I code for the whole day
The variety of my days helped me to maintain a good balance.
Anyways, I hope that gives a little more clarity into what I do at work. Thank you so much for watching!
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And if you like this video give it a thumbs up and leave me comment down below if you have any questions
Or if you'd like to tell us what your work day looks like. See you next time, and hope you have a great day
talking about terrace house with my coworkers.
going on coffee breaks.
showing people pictures of my cat and dog