I (programmer and team leader) get requests from the king (management and project manager) and pass them to the peasants (code monkeys), clean after their shit (QA and code review). I get peanuts in return while the king keep most of the loot.
Bob: “why can’t the king just ask the peasants directly?”
I’M A PEOPLE PERSON!!!
I’M A PEASANT PERSON, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU NOBLES, WHY CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT
The project manager is your peer, not your king.
It all depends on the project and the team. On some, you work with and along the PM and all is good, and other times you get dictated unconnected requests that you need to fight or ignore.
Thankfully I’ve only ever worked in the first environment.
Lucky, my first 2 dev jobs had PMs that were right out of college business majors with zero web development experience. They were just direct unfiltered conduits between the clients and devs, but with a layer of telephone game and almost no ability to day no to the clients.
It was a fucking nightmare. By the time I did get a good PM, I was pretty much burned out and started my own consultancy (since I’d been managing a small team and doing both dev and PM’s job by then anyway).
Ah, so you’re the
grand viziercourt jester.That definitely define my everyday job experience.
I get peanuts in return while the king keep most of the loot.
Well, at least this part hasn’t changed.
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Folks in 1700 understood what an engineer was. I’d just tell them I design really complicated looms.
Can you get it to draw bewbs? Asking for a friend
That’s the point they burn you at the stake for being a witch.
Well, if they weigh the same as a duck
I’m a chemist, so I’d just tell them that I’m an alchemist.
Ooh, good idea. I’m an alprogrammer. Or is it alware algineer?
So close, yet so very wrong.
Apothecary might be better.
To be honest you might get away with moving the term chemistry forward a couple of decades
Beginning around 1720, a rigid distinction began to be drawn for the first time between “alchemy” and “chemistry”.[104][105] By the 1740s, “alchemy” was now restricted to the realm of gold making, leading to the popular belief that alchemists were charlatans, and the tradition itself nothing more than a fraud.[102][105]
My career hasn’t changed much since the 1700s, I’m a winemaker. Our company doesn’t have a vineyard we buy grapes from farmers, so our winery is in the city not some villa on the hill. At first glance our warehouse full of barrels is pretty similar to an old school winery. I could show my counterpart advances we have made in automation, like our bottling line or the giant industrial press, and I bet they’d get a kick out of moving stacks of barrels or fermentation tanks with a forklift. Using food grade plastic instead of wood makes cleaning easier, and our pump is electric not hand driven, but ultimately little has changed. Our wine lab is pretty high tech and probably the main exception, I dont think they tested for things like acidity and sulfur levels until the industrial revolution. I was literally just talking about this yesterday with my coworker. We had the bottling line out in the yard and we were sanitizing it by pumping boiling water through it with a diesel powered compressor. My contemporary may not understand sanitizing, or the equipment we used to do it, but he would easily understand the bottler and the importance of keeping it clean. I would love to share a few bottles of modern wine with a pre industrial master and vice versa.
i bet they’d get a kick out of moving stacks of barrels or fermentation tanks with a forklift.
Yeah, that would be really impressive!
Few people from 2024 understand what I do, so no.
What do you do?
I’m an in-house consultant for Enterprise Content Management.
Sounds IT-related. Can you fix my printer?
Best I can do is strangle you with a USB cable.
Nice. This is my new go-to answer for that question.
I’m sure your granny will be thrilled.
If it means I never have to deal with printers again, I’ll take it.
Can you do 2pm, next Tuesday?
I’m down. The safe word is ‘wenches’.
Have you been stalking me?
Use a micro or mini-b.
LOL me likey
Please tell me it’s not Opentext…
Fortunately not. I haven’t quite descended to the seventh circle of hell yet.
Exceed is still the only program that handles graphically intense Unix X11 sessions properly for Windows machines. It’s still not great though.
Some of us still have to slog through old CAD applications that have long been abandoned.
I’m thinking of the episode of That '70s Show where Kelso’s dad is trying to explain to Kelso what he does for a homework assignment.
Kelso: “OK, let’s get started. Question number one, what’s your job?”
John: “I’m a senior executive statistical analysis technician.”
Kelso: “You’re a senior execu… what?”
John: “Well, in plain English, I concatenate the verse statistical information to maximize the potential utilization of data.”
Kelso: “So you give people data!”
( Kelso is on the verge of writing it down. )
John: “A lot of people think that. No. My job’s not about output, it’s about throughput.”
Kelso: “So you throughput data!”
John: “Well, now you’ve lost me, son. Oh, listen Michael, you know the eight tracks you love so much?”
Kelso: “You make them!”
John: “No, but because of us, other people who make them are able to make them better.”
Kelso: “So, you fix stuff!”
John: “You could say that…”
( Kelso starts writing. )
John: “But I wouldn’t.”
( Kelso erases it with frustration. )
And then it keeps going on the like for a while.
Yeah, that’s pretty much how it goes for me.
If someone working in semiconductor manufacturing were to answer this question they would probably have to say “I make sand think” and just walk away.
“You know how we dug out that trench to let some of the river through for irrigation, and then we fill it in for winter? Yeah I do that, but much smaller, and much faster, on sand. Got a shovel?”
Not much different than weirder than meat thinking.
For the uninitiated: https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html
i’m teaching silicon rocks how to think
I barely try to explain my job to people today, particularly family.
As a programmer, I’d just tell them “I configure contraptions to perform tasks for people”
Magic. Got it.
"Some other guys figured out how to trick rocks into doing stuff by putting lightning into them
I just write to the rocks instructions for how to do some work. I get paid for doing that."
“You know how clockwork automatons work?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
I think my job would be understandable at a basic level. My job involves healthcare, which has massively changed since the 1700s, but the basics are still there and would likely make sense to people.
I look at organs to find and document disease.
A witch!
Let’s toss them in a lake! If they die they weren’t a witch! If they don’t… We then know they are a witch!
Either way… Huzzah!
Ah, a barber!
Anatomical pathologist
Close! But I don’t have big enough brains or the paycheck to match lol. You could think of me as a glorified human butcher…far more crude than a surgeon. The pathologist gets the end result after all the blood and guts are out of the way haha. (Unless you’re a forensic pathologist…they slug around in guts all day!)
How do you get into that line of work??? Not because I want to, just morbid curiosity. I’m too squeamish.
Haha. Believe me I actually used to be very squeamish as a child. I still am as an adult with certain things…I nope the hell out of there for human vomit (altho it weirdly doesn’t really bother me with dogs and cats).
Dunno how it went away…I guess just slowly over time as you get exposed to more and more things. Plus I work in an incredibly well ventilated space, which cuts the grossness factor of any of it down by like 95%. You’d be surprised at how much smell influences your idea of “gross”, at least for me. And then if I am a bit grossed out by something, I can freely comment on it and laugh about it with my coworkers because I don’t have to worry about sparing a patient’s feelings…I only get the organ. I had a brief period of time in school where I had autopsy training…man I could NOT stand the smell and I almost threw up before because I tried to toughen it up and breathe through my nose. Big mistake! Idk how anyone can get used to smells like that. Mouth breathing only for me in that environment.
Anyway, my role is played by different people with different educational backgrounds depending on what country/region you’re in. Here in the US, my job requires a 4 year bachelor’s degree in basically any field… doesn’t really matter as long as you take basic science classes. From there, you enter a specialized 2 year master’s degree program. It’s similar to physician assistant school except we are paid a bit less (but with the advantage of not having to see patients). Our first year is book learning and our second year is hands on training on how to perform the job.
I was always interested in medical things, but I always hated having to interact with patients. This also allows me to work with my hands and see first hand the actual effects of disease. Cancer is no longer some mysterious, nebulous concept. I can see it with my own two eyes and feel it with my hands. Plus the paycheck is pretty stellar imo…not a doctor salary or anything, but I’m living comfortable as a single adult.
If it at all seems interesting, I’d encourage you to try to investigate more. I am generally hesitant to say my exact job title in public for fear of being doxxed (it’s a small field), but I’m always happy to share more with anyone over a DM.
That was super fascinating! Thank you so much for taking the time to explain!
Merchants have become so powerful that I, a serf, have been taught number solely to account for every penny they make. For this, I’m allowed to live an okay life. I do it with magic (Excel) because they are so big and don’t want to hire many of me. They still act like the Dutch and East India Companies, with slightly fewer atrocities.
I’m a peasant just like you.
I’m a literal wizard. I spend hours writing in an esoteric language known only by those who study it in order to bend the world to my will and make things happen as I wish it.
The structure of my magic spells determine what the outcomes will be, and things can get really strange if you mess up the syntax.
I C you.
C++
C++++ because I see sharp.
I C snakes
I’m currently in college to go into GIS (Geographic Information Systems/Science) and lemme tell ya I think more people in 1700 would understand “cartographer” than they would today.
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You are correct. People these days are idjits.
Not even really that but people tend to think that others have just outright stopped making maps. “Haven’t we made all the maps already?” Is a common response I get when I tell them. They seem to forget about data analysis and all that.
And, well… They’re not super wrong about how mapped earth is. They just misjudge the sheer, enormous amount of detail we need (which keeps growing with our ability to get more of it), along with the fact that sometimes it changes a bit.
“Haven’t we mapped everything already?” is a bit like saying “Haven’t we born everyone already?”.
GIS also is far more complex than what is visible in a single map. An example for this are the capabilities of satellites observing the earth, IIRC very few to none of them are mere security cameras - most of them have quite interesting spectra to observe green house gas emissions or vegetation (ie. land use changes) for example. GIS can then use this data and gather hidden information, sometimes over large spatial dimensions.
Exactly. We know what shape the land is even for the bottoms of the oceans. But that doesn’t mean we’re done making maps.
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