Typical Day

I thought it would be interesting to start a thread for people considering a career in IT. Feel free to post a "day in the life" from your job. I work as a Senior Network Architect in Tampa and this was my Thursday last week:

6:00am - Alarm Goes Off
7:00am - Drive to work.
7:30am - Arrive at work, check e-mails, put out morning fires
7:40am - Surf the web for the latest news
9:20am - Get some coffee, formulate a plan for things to do today
9:30am - Having issues with a Cisco IOS release that we pushed to many sites in the network. Working directly with Cisco on this issue but neither Cisco nor I have been able to recreate it in our respective labs. We have a router from a different site that arrived and will try to recreate the issue in our lab again.
9:35am - Began building the testbed. It is small consisting of only a switch and 3800 series router to test connectivity across a T1 link. Trying to determine if there is a bug with this certain version of IOS code.
10:15am - Could not recreate the issue as connectivity tests were successful between the devices, back to the drawing board.
10:30am - Informed operations supervisors of the test result, will need to come up a new plan of action with my group and theirs. Operations involves Tier I/II support and I work in Tier III engineering.
10:45am - Call up customer in order to get more details about a request for an upgrade at one of their sites. This is to determine what services will be running and how many people will be at the site. This will determine the equipment they will need and the bandwidth provisioned.
11:05am - Auditing devices in the network based on configuration specifications determined by the customer and my team. This is part of an ongoing project that I am in charge of.
11:45am - More web surfing
12:00pm - Lunch - I normally go at 1 but have other obligations at that time today
12:39pm - Issue gets escalated up to me directly from Tier I, Major site outage. High impact/visibility issues bypass Tier II due to company policy
1:53pm - Still working on issue, missed meeting at 1pm
3:06pm - Issue Resolved, it was visibility only due to IPSec misconfiguration. Back to surfing the net.
4:10pm - Check emails, nothing new. Refresh on BGP confederations and route reflectors
5:20pm - Leave work and head to the gym
7:15pm – Leave gym and head home
7:30pm – Eat dinner while streaming Grooveshark from my computer
7:50pm – Finish dinner, talk with some friends while listening to music in the background. Facebook is great as it has allowed me to stay in contact with old friends from the places I used to live.
10:15pm – Set the alarm and head to bed, 6AM comes up awfully quick

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Comments

tbgree00

The Lonely Island song Like a Boss is a typical day for me, especially the part where I turn into a jet and crash into the sun.

I always get to work by 7:45 and leave around 7:30 - 8 depending on the projects we have going on. This week I've been leaving at 5:30 though, which has been nice for my wife.

We have three "seasons", busy season is 1/1 - 4/15 or so and that is 8-7 work days shared between two people in my department. project season is 4/16 or so until 7/1 where we accomplish everything we couldn't during busy season with hours from 8 - 8 typically, though it goes until midnight some nights depending on problems and planned downtime.

Third season which I haven't experienced yet is quiet season which is just breakfix, long lunches, and leaving at 5 daily except one day a week when you leave early. I don't think this season actually exists!

Title is Network Administrator.

Ryan82

tbgree00 wrote: »

The Lonely Island song Like a Boss is a typical day for me, especially the part where I turn into a jet and crash into the sun.

Hit on Debra, get rejected! Love that song!

higherho

Everyone wrote: »

We do plenty of work, it's just often in spurts.

On the operations/support side of things, you're sitting around waiting for something to break or go wrong. It may seem like you're not busy until something does, but then when it does, you'll be VERY VERY busy. As a Systems Administrator, I always said if you're busy all the time, then you aren't very good at your job. You should be able to keep things stable without too much effort.

On the consultant side of things, you'll be busy all the time, if you're not, then you aren't making any money.

Architects, Engineers, Developers, and any other roles that revolve around completing projects, will only be busy when there are projects to be completed. If you complete all your projects, and the company doesn't have the budget to start any new ones, you won't be busy again until funds are released to start more projects.

If you are a System Administrator and your the only one and your not busy at least 6 hours out of the day then your system must be very small and have wide gaping security flaws.