I have been working for about 20 years. At the beginning of my career I had a choice of being in the ASIC side or board design and chose for board design because I thought (rightfully so, I learned later), that that was a more "physical" task. So I worked for about 10 years in board design and my typical work day was not typical at all. Some of the time researching parts. Some making schematics of circuits. Some making PCB layout. Some on debug and integration. Some time mastering scope and logic analyzer use. Some time talking my way thru all the people I have to receive products from/deliver to: SW engineers, FPGA engineers, mechanical engineers...

I made analog designs, digital designs, power supply designs... Then I started feeling more and more that I designed less and spent more time learning what the chip designers did, as chips incorporated more and more functions that once I did by myself.

So at the end I switched to FPGA design and today my typical workday is coding, debugging, simulating... 95% of the time on my computer. A good friend of mine coined a good phrase: FPGA engineers are SW engineers that disguise themselves as HW engineers. A good joke. But every joke has a bit of truth in it.