Help With Group Project: 15 Careeer Questions For Professional Programmers

I have a group project to do in school right now. My role is to find out about a career as a programmer. I was wondering if those who are a programmer by profession wouldn't mind answering the following questions. There are 15 of them. I thought it would add a lot of value to my presentation if I had people who were actually in the industry give their input.

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1. What is your official title where you currently work?

2. What are the different positions or titles you can hold in a career as a programmer? For example, I've heard of Jr. Level Programmer and Sr. Level Programmer. What are the differences between them?

3. How do you attain a higher level and better paying position? Is it by years experience, hours of programming, or quality of projects?

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4. How are projects started, delegated, implemented, and finished in your company? What is your role in this process?

5. Are you usually working on more than one project at a time?

6. How long do projects take to complete?

7. Do you get to see the finished project?

8. What was the most boring, most exciting, and most challenging task you had to complete? What are you currently working on now?

9. Roughly, what percentage of your job involves dealing with people and working on teams, and what percentage is independant work?

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10. How many hours per day/week do you work?

11. What time do you start work and when do you finish?

12. Do you get any breaks, and how long are they?

13. Are there deadlines?

14. Is the job stressful?

15. Do you work a lot of overtime hours?

1. Programmer, Network Administrator, Database Administrator (I wear a lot of hats)

2. this is the first and only programming job I've had, so I'm not familiar with a lot of the industry terminology on the subject of programming positions

3. there aren't really different levels at the place I work, unless you consider management a level, so I can't really speak to this one.

4. we are given projects to complete by the company owners, and we are given specific deadlines (often unrealistic deadlines) upon which to complete them, and I am involved with all stages from planning to implementation.

5. always

6. anywhere from a few days to a few years. my primary project is ongoing maintenance and new feature implementation on a piece of software that is more than 4 years old.

7. yes

8. most boring is the repetitive stuff that even a trained monkey could do - usually involving data entry or manually writing getter and setter functions for classes which contain a lot of data members.
most exciting I would definitely say was starting the long term project in my answer to #6.
most challenging is certainly the long term project from #6. any new feature must fit in and coexist with all the existing code, so it can be a headache at times.

9. 100% of my job is coordinating with others. We do a lot of client/server stuff, and I'm usually the server programmer, so I have to communicate well with the client programmers so they know how to interface with my server

10. 50-60

11. 7am to 4:30pm generally, although working late is pretty routine around here

12. yes. I get a half hour for lunch, and they are pretty lenient with coffee breaks, etc, as long as I don't abuse the privilege.

13. yes, and they are often unrealistic, as I said in #4

14. it can be, but the stress is what makes it interesting

15. yes

thanks elkvis