There are so many “Day in the Life” software engineer videos (mine included) and we all kind of fail at explaining what the job actually looks like. So I did something way more honest: I wrote down everything I did as a back-end software engineer for a month, tagged it by category (coding, writing documentation, designing, meetings, networking, code reviews, career development, collaborating, on-call/devops), and tracked how long each thing took. In the video, I walk through real examples: fixing and re-enabling broken tests (I didn’t break them), creating diagrams so future me (and reviewers) can understand integration tests, refining requirements, doing code reviews, and collaborating on design decisions like adding a secondary index. I also talk about the stuff people don’t glamorize: manual deployments (we’re not fully CI/CD yet), triaging alerts, and being on call—which I really hate because it feels like you’re not building anything new. Then I average it all out. The big takeaway: I only coded about ~30% of the time. A lot of the job is documentation, meetings, designing, researching, and on-call/devops work (logs, dashboards, deployments, and knowing who to pull in). If you’re unhappy at work, I recommend tracking your own “pie chart” and adjusting what you do more/less of—especially if you’re trying to level up into more design and analysis work for promotion.