[doctorwho42]

Oh man,(spoilers) my pet theory is that the 'work' is actually them self-adjusting their implants. Remember they describe a number as a 'feeling' and some numbers 'feel' wrong. And we see behind the scenes that they are testing the main character with the psychiatrist/wife to see if it breaks the 'chips control/severance'.

They are simply engineers perfecting the implants so that they operate better.

[aspenmayer]

I think that the numbers are in-house red team fuzzing attempts against the implant, with the goal being lower mean time between failures of the implant. It could also represent a debugger IDE, with the “spooky” numbers that we see jumping around onscreen on the workstation representing some kind of bad data that doesn’t pass tests that the normal numbers onscreen do pass.

I’m reminded of the in house help desk tech support that someone calls for in the film Vanilla Sky, analogously.