161–170 of 249 posts
I don't talk about work--theirs or mine--with my neighbors, yet curiously I know what an awful lot of the adults on my block do for a living.
To be honest I have experienced this a lot in San Francisco, where people ask first what do you do, second where do you work and then what's your name...in Europe it really isn't the central part of the conversation and most likely the job doesn't even get mentioned in a dinner or a normal conversation with someone you met in a bar/club/wherever. It always shocked me how "what you do" defines the start of the convers…
It definitely is part of the conversation in (parts of) Europe, but not very central. I see it as part of finding common ground to continue the conversation.
To be honest I have experienced this a lot in San Francisco, where people ask first what do you do, second where do you work and then what's your name...in Europe it really isn't the central part of the conversation and most likely the job doesn't even get mentioned in a dinner or a normal conversation with someone you met in a bar/club/wherever. It always shocked me how "what you do" defines the start of the convers…
It depends on who you're talking to in San Francisco, and everywhere, really. In my part of San Francisco, we don't ask the question what do you do, because that automatically slots you into one class or the other in the hierarchy, and so we intentionally avoid that in order to be able to interact without prejudice. Different scenes, same (tiny) city.
I like telling people I’m a programmer. There’s lots of less exciting jobs.
In my (at this time very long) experience people don't know what a programmer does, unless they're programmers themselves. In fact, whatever I say about my work ("programmer", "data processing", "computer-based analysis", "(whatever)" they really have no idea anyway. It's much easier to answer "I'm a carpenter".
I think it's better to state the field you're in rather than your job title. For example, if you work for a bank, say "finance".
Why is the WSJ telling me what to do? You stop telling people to do stuff! I come for news, not to be preached AT. The news has this authoritative Father-like tone lately. It's unearned and patronizing.
In the UK we do this as part of status negotiation - the second question anyone asks (after whats your name?) is what do you do? Then we can decide whether we are above or below the other person in the status hierarchy, which is roughly as follows: - Architect - Artist/Designer/Creative - Lawyer/Doctor/Teacher - Executive/Manager - ... - ... - Bar staff - Engineer - Software Engineer - Waiter - Driver - Cleaner
For what its worth, this is called “occupational prestige” and sociologists run public opinion studies to create actual lists like that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_prestige
Doctor
Lawyer
Software Engineer (if you mean "Computer Systems Analysts and Scientists")
Teacher (Postsecondary school)
Architect
Engineer
Executive
Teacher (Elementary or Secondary Scool)
Software Engineer (if you mean "Computer Programmers")
Teacher (Kindergarten)
Manager
Designer
Artist
Driver
Waiter
Bartender
Cleaner
Which gives a clue why you should never call yourself a computer programmer.
Why is the WSJ telling me what to do? You stop telling people to do stuff! I come for news, not to be preached AT. The news has this authoritative Father-like tone lately. It's unearned and patronizing.
Personally, I can't think of a more likely-to-tell-everyone-in-the-room profession than a journalist.
A journalist is not filling in part time for a Bishop.
I wish people would talk about their work more. There's so much to learn about how different industries function that's invisible to outsiders. I don't want to hear about office politics, but I want to hear about your suppliers and customers, how do you decide what to sell, what to buy vs build, what weird regulations or norms exist in your industry, who are the experts in your industry and how did they become expert…
The crowds don't want to be enlightened, they want to be entertained.
I stopped asking people what they do, and instead ask ‘what are you about’ - always gets an interesting answer, after the initial perplexity of the question.
I like to say "tell me a story". What kind of story, you ask? Any story. I like true stories, but you can make something up too. The conversation ends up a lot less awkward than going off script after talking about what you do for a living.