All programming jobs vary widely, from scenes straight out of Dilbert to ones from The Social Network. That said, here's a typical day of a regular programming

All programming jobs vary widely, from scenes straight out of Dilbert to ones from The Social Network. That said, here's a typical day of a regular programming job: 9:30am - show up (10:30am in California) 9:30-10:15am - read last night's emails. Emails topics include group messages from executives, vague questions from sales/marketing/QA, help questions from other developers, plans and deadlines from your manager, and about 300 automated messages from dev bots you'll never read. 10:15-11am - reply to some emails and fix misc issues in code and build systems. 11am-11:30am - team meeting to discuss goals and deadlines. 11:30am-12:30pm - read the news and rally the troops to eat lunch. 12:30pm-1:45pm - lunch 1:45-2:00pm - read the news 2:00pm-6pm - actual work (including programming some new features, fixing bugs, setting up builds/releases, testing, researching issues on the web, reading/writing wiki pages). Special note: if your job is bad, this time will never be available to you and you'll be in meetings or filling out forms for IT/accounting.