yeah because I have a real job (retail) not whispering to the lightning through the haunted frame like yall
Damn apparently you’re a poet too
“Shopkeeper” would be a pretty damn good job title too compared to retail.
‘Shopkeeper’ implies you might actually own the shop you keep. Modern retail provides few such jobs.
I don’t think the people in the 1700s would care
Working in a shop is a skill as old as civilization.
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.
I (a software engineer) am a high magician who fixes the spells other high magicians put into the magic box ages ago because the king wants them to do something other than whay they were originally designed to do.
I’d avoid magic on that one, since modern ideas about how magic works are pretty influenced by technology now. I suspect this would be gibberish to them.
How about “we have machines so complicated that it’s hard to set them, and my job is to try to change the settings on them and usually fail”?
Not sure if the concept of “settings” would be something they can relate to.
I was wondering about that too. I think they had adjustable tools in common use, but I could be wrong. They might have also used a different word when changing the depth “setting” of their horse-drawn plow, although “to set” has got to be a pretty old verb.
Even better: “our clocks in the future are very complex and it’s my job to keep them working”.
That would be more a like a sysadmin, though. OP has to introduce new functionality, which I’d want to emphasise.
They could say they’re a creator of automata, and the past people would picture basically robots, but that implies a more physical type of building, and also that they create things that are purely decorative or for entertainment.
We got this sand and tought it to do math. I give the math sand very specific instructions to do a task. There are many people like me, and a good chunk of them are giving the sand instructions to show silly cat pictures.
I wonder if it would be better to go with sand, or a new metal, given that the average person in 1700 would know the process of smelting ore better than most of the people here. Either way they’re not going to see the point without some explanation, because they’d think it’s easy enough just to draw a cat yourself.
Yeah, something like “We have machines with thousands of switches that can do complicated things depending on how you set the switches. My job is flipping those switches so the machine performs the desired task as best as possible”…?
I was trying to figure out a way to describe the interface to 1700’s people, given that all the machines they have require very up-close manipulation of the mechanisms to alter. My best guess is as a table covered in triggers like on a crossbow, but that reset themselves. You can tell what they’re doing with a sort of scroll that comes out with stamps on it. That’s still more like a 1970’s dumb terminal than a laptop, but I don’t want to try and describe screens or cursors before I can make sure they understand the concept that not all machines have to be mechanical, which I don’t think would be clear to them automatically.
I’m guessing at that point it sounds weird and alienating to them, and they might actually think their job as a peasant seems less depressing, especially if I bring up punctuality requirements compared to the 1700’s, where meetings would wait days for someone. White-collar work is better once you can understand what’s happening abstractly, or at least is for me, but no hard deadlines for anything does indeed sound great. They also may have gotten winters off, depending on latitude.
“what is this ‘switch’ of which thou speakest?”
A lever that influenced the workings of the machine, sir.
I’d go by ‘mechanical devices’, there were hardly any machines in our understanding back then.
Well, they did have clocks, even some early portable ones, and “automata” which were a bit like modern animatronics. Power applications like mills, too. I don’t know what word would work best, though.
I’m guessing they’d picture OP running around a giant room filled with clockwork, going at things with a pry bar and wedges. That is a bit like how computers worked in their first decade, albeit electrically rather than mechanically. Later in the 18th century they invented the punchcard loom, so that would be a good point of reference, but we’re all the way back in 1700.
Worth noting that the 1700s are, in fact, the 18th century. The first century was the years from 1-100, the second century from 101-200, etc.
But, yes. It was invented later in the 18th century than our audience came from.
Also a good point. It’s dumb that we’ve zero-indexed centuries and then given them one-indexed names, but that is the standard.
Well, it’s just how math and numbers in English work.
Cardinal numbers, the number of things you have, start with zero because you can have none of something (or less with negatives, but that’s neither here nor there).
Original numbers, Numbers that show which things were in what order (first, second, etc) start at one, because you can’t really have a zeroth something because then it would really be the first one.
So year 1 is 1 because it’s the first year, and it starts the first century. It would have been entirely possible for English to make the names a little nicer, but given that it isn’t, the math means the first set of one hundred years are the years before the one-hundredth year and cetera.
I mean, zeroth would still be zeroth; it’s just based on the cardinal the moment before it arrived rather than after, assuming you start with nothing and add objects. Unfortunately that’s not conventional, probably in any language, and so you get a situation where a positional notation clashes with how we want to talk about the larger divisions of it casually. This sort of thing is exactly why computer science does use zero indexing.
Relatedly, there was also no year 0; it goes straight from 1 BC to 1 AD.
It is a thinking engine. No further questions.
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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!
“What are you going to tell me next, you have a one-time cure for consumption?”
That’s witchcraft you’re talking about! Burn them! 😁
Medicine might sound a bit too good to be true, yeah, and this was indeed the end of the witch hunting period. Forklifts might be easier to understand, if really awesome, seeing as they had long had foot-powered cranes for really big projects like cathedrals.
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.
Im gonna guess, is that a job where you advise a company on how to organize, store, and use “enterprise content” (im gonna guess that’s like internal materials like training stuff, internal tools/software)
Not totally wrong.
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.
Huh. Somehow I understand even less what you do than before I read that.
My job is to leverage the core competencies of my employer into win win scenarios by proactively and synergistically reengineering document based processes. I hope that clears it up.
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
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 barely try to explain my job to people today, particularly family.
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!
We have found a witch, may we burn her?
Ah, a barber!
“So how do you guys get used to tasting piss so often?”
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.
Just wanted to say that I found the description of your job really interesting, so thanks for taking the time to write about it.
There’s absolutely no way that I could do it - I’m far too squeamish. But I’m glad that there are people who can do a job like this, which increases mankind’s understanding of diseases.
Hey thanks haha
That was super fascinating! Thank you so much for taking the time to explain!
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 try to make rocks think with electricity and then cry when it doesn’t think the way I want it to (software engineer)
Our customers are people who work on (redacted for privacy)
We help them keep track of if their work is on schedule.
Pause to explain the Internet here.
"The Internet is complicated. But imagine you’re holding a long string and I’m holding the other end. If I pull on the string, you’ll feel it. We could then have an agreed upon code like one hard tug is yes, two short tugs is no. Maybe certain patterns form letters , so we can spell words out for each other. Now we can communicate from pretty far away.
Now imagine if instead of me holding the string, it’s connected to a machine. Maybe that machine moves chalk over a chalkboard based on how you pull on your end of the string. I can then read this chalkboard at my leisure.
The Internet is much more complicated than that, but for my job that’s close enough. It’s a way to send information from here to there without anyone actually going there in person and telling someone.
My job is to work on the chalk machine. I help make sure it is set up right so it doesn’t fall over, and the code stuff like ‘one short tug is a, two is b, etc’ is agreed on and interpreted correctly"
Backend developer.
Great analogy!
