system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What's "real" programming in a day to day job like?

I'm going to assume it's VERY different from the scope of school assignment programming but how different is it? What's an average "project" and how long do they take and what makes it so much harder/more complex than a school assignment would be?
gpt
School assignments usually come very well specified. They tell you EXACTLY what your code is supposed to do in all cases. In the industry, a lot of times we get assignments that are at least a bit underspecified. Say you're tasked with implementing a new feature. In a well-structured organization, a UX team gives you UI mockups and a PM has refined the ticket enough to include most of the obvious use cases, but it's usually not bulletproof. Part of your job involves figuring out all of the little details.

There's also the architecture of the whole codebase to consider. There might be some "quick and easy" way to hack together some new feature, but if it's violating the architecture then that's no good. You often have to do things in a slightly more verbose way that respects abstraction boundaries.

And if you're working on a serious product that you hope to sell worldwide, there are all sorts of extra layers you have to work with. You can't just throw text on the screen, you have to get translations made for every language you support. You can't just throw components on the screen, you have to make sure it works on all screen sizes, and that it's properly structured and tagged so that it works with screen readers, oh and also make sure you're not using color as the only indicator of something. You can't just throw data in a database, you have to think about security. You might have to make the application behave differently in different regions due to legal issues.

In short, you're almost never doing these little well-specified tricky algorithm things, you're doing things that are much simpler logically, but having to navigate the architecture of a large codebase.