What people do for a living takes up about half of their waking life (and they probably dream about it too), so it will tell you so much about the person. Personally I love my job and what I do, so I really want to talk about matters at least related to it because my life does revolve around it indeed. So establishing some common ground with the other person can really help to start the conversation.
But of course the conversation doesn't have to specifically be about either job through progression.
But only if you know the person well enough to have the context of it. What a person's job says about them is very different, for example, if they love their job vs hating their job.
Love or hate the job, knowing what it is gives you insights/guesses into skillsets, education level, economic level, possibly the type of people they mingle with, etc, etc.
When I did my PhD I hated it when (most) people asked about my research. It's not because I wasn't interested, it's because I'm really interested and was (still am) bad at giving concise summaries, so I felt like people who really didn't care and wouldn't listen to the answer were asking me to embark on a long explanation that required a bunch of preamble etc, just in order to make conversation.
Anyway, I feel largely the same about work. I love talking about what I do, but not with people who aren't listening and who are just asking to form an opinion of my social status. So 9 times out of 10 I just sort of mumble something and talk about something else, just like in grad school.
You can really just give your title and a little flavor. I generally say “Oh, I’m a software developer for an educational company. I work on a reading app.” and that’s usually all there is to that unless they ask follow-up questions; I would say that’s less than a third of the time.
Every once in a while you get the hyper-interested person who asks a ton of follow-ups but they’re at least usually actually listening.
That doesn't work if your field is super weird and niche. You end up giving the same elevator pitch over, and over, and over... I suppose it's a "nice problem to have".
I try play a game when i meet a new person: see how long i can go without discussing work with them. The best new connections tend to take the longest to reach work, it’s often a signal of a lazy conversation starter and like you said just an attempt to size up our social status.
> it’s often a signal of a lazy conversation starter
But this is fine, no? If it helps start a more enjoyable discussion afterwards. When you don't know the ones you are speaking with at all.
Though I indeed avoid focusing on work when starting a conversation. I usually try to phrase the question as "What do you do in your life?", which is more general and allows answering hobbies. I'm more interested in what people like than what they are possibly forced to do to fund it, or their opinions. Usually people will answer their what they do for a living but they will get another, more explicit question. I'm interested in knowing whether they will indeed answer by what they do for a living though.
And if they do something meaningful or enjoying for their living, it's actually interesting.
I have some anxiety so I recognize it as people looking for a safe topic in hopes of striking some common ground. It is still lazy conversation skills and boring for everyone involved. I wish I wasn't like that, but inferring from past events I won't change any time soon.
I can't hold conversations about drinking in a pub discussing girls for very long. They seem insignificant.
However I did make lifelong friends by accidentally talking about Europe's energy policy, satellites and also the MySpace effect on youth.
Sizing social status is painful - I totally agree but when people are genuinely interested in going into depth of topics which highly resonate it produces an amazing effect.
I play a variant of this: how long until a stranger asks me "what do you do?"
Over the last decade or so, I've found that I'm asked this question far lass than I used to be. I don't know if the times have changed, or if it's that I'm older and so generally am meeting older people now.
I was at a dinner party and asked someone what they do. They ran a research lab, and I was really interested, and asked questions. He was surprised I actually liked chemistry and was interested in his research. He said normally people just joke about how they hated chemistry in high school, so he normally avoided talking about it. He said people don't realize it's really rude to basically tell someone that their life's work is boring and they hated it when they were 16. I'm now much more careful about how I respond to what people do for a living, even if it's not something that I'm interested in.
> people don't realize it's really rude to basically tell someone that their life's work is boring and they hated it when they were 16
They generally do, but when you drop something like "I'm a research chemist" on them, they freeze up. In most jobs, there's a certain commonality of experiences. Oh, tell me about your craziest customer stories, or the worst meeting you ever flew across the country for, or whatever. When you have a job that doesn't fall into an "office work" category... that isn't going to work out. Since most people aren't great or even good conversationalists, they're going to fire off a lame joke and hope it's not a total disaster.
I'm an anesthesiologist. If I never hear another family member say "you're going to need a really big hammer to knock him/her out", I'll join the church of whatever god made that happen. In purely social situations, though, I know it's a conversation-killer, because most doctors don't know much about what I do, let alone laymen. So I have a small repertoire of ways to redirect the conversation back to "let's get to know each other a bit" topics. I think anyone in an unusual (but not, on its face, fascinating) job does.
This seems like something you could work on instead of implying it's other people's fault for asking you about a topic that they don't know they aren't interested in yet.
If you have a punchy 20 second description, and then ask what they do, you'll have pivoted away unless they want to bring it back.
To be fair, I think the parent commenter is aware this is not the fault of the one who asked.
Though when doing a PhD, it's a worthy goal to be able do give a quick description. It also forces you to think about the goal / meaning of your work. Some topics are more easily summarized, but still.
We do science for people, it's only fair to be able to present them your work more or less roughly.
I had something for people not into computers, like: "I work on a method to find and understand computer bugs quicker and better." (Familiar with bugs? you don't like them? So you know it's useful!)
And then I could develop for the curious.
"Programs are written with code that tells the computer what to do, step by step. Like a cooking recipe. There are tools to see programs do things step by step so you can notice some step is wrong. On big programs this gets tedious. My approach helps starting this step by step investigation closer to the problematic step."
If still curious: "How? There's another method that looks at the step that looks at these steps and check they are correct with respect to some given rule. For instance, if you have a bag of objects, no step should try to remove an object if the bag is empty. This technique usually tells you something is wrong but does not tell you why it happen. I combine the first method with the second one: when some rule is broken, you are left exploring the program step by step at the point the rule broke, which is way better than doing it from the beginning". And go further / present the caveats if I feel whoever is listening is still curious.
For the people who already actually interacted with some code, I would also drop the technical words that are probably familiar to them. If you don't know whether they already actually know some stuff, they usually say the technical words themselves, to clarify.
For people who asked politely, they would receive the one sentence summary but often they want to know more if you piqued their curiosity. I had something like a progressive image of the thing that gets more and more precise to stop at the right time.
By the way you probably started skipping paragraphs in my comment at the point yours was satisfied. I made several paragraphs to allow you to do so.
Yeah, when someone asks about you research as a casual conversation they're only looking for extremely high level summaries. Something like "I research plant metabolism."
I could see how a conversation could go very sideways if you're responding to "oh what do you research?" with details that are "in the weeds."
I'm familiar with the idea of a punchy 20 second summary. I worked on consulting where everyone had something like that to introduce themselves with in a meeting. I haven't been able to bring myself do do it, even if I understand why people do and what the advantages are.
This is also good practice for when you need to find a job, which often requires interfacing with people that have little familiarity with your PhD topic but have access to those that do (e.g., recruiters, business owners).
So what? I lose opportunities to gain "valuable skills" all the time. There are better ways to acquire those skills than this, especially since it's a huge mood drain
I enjoy talking shop a great deal -- but I absolutely hate it when I've been going on about something that has caught my fancy and then notice that I've been boring the person I'm talking to to tears.
So I mostly don't talk about my work unless I'm just with other software people.
So if I have this right, its bad to tell people what you do for a living, but its OK to tell people to stop telling people what they do for a living?
What I find especially annoying is that the fact that 'what do you do' is being asked by someone else - so it follows that if they were not interested in that topic, they would ask another question. Which means it's not the social responsibility of the person answering.
But wait, also, there's nothing cringey about someone having a hard time relaxing and talking more broadly. Everyone has a hard time in SOME social setting, and its not a big deal. This article reads like a designer clothes ad - making you feel bad to make you buy (or do) something.
Now I'm done whining, I think a much more constructive framing would be a title/topic like "Asking what people do for work isn't always best. Here are some alternative icebreakers". Or "Fit the mood - making smalltalk without work". That would have been a much better article.
Secret life hack: you don't have to answer "what do you do?" by talking about your job. You can talk about literally anything else that you do, preferably something that seems relevant to the person in front of you, and turn it into a more interesting two-sided conversation.
My wife and I’s favorite game when meeting new people is to try and go as long as possible without talking about our work or asking about theirs. It makes it so much more interesting when careers / jobs finally enter the dialog.
Around a decade ago, I stopped asking people the basic questions, like what they do, where they're from, how old they are, or their gender and pronouns when that is unclear. I find that it's irrelevant and will bias the relationship for no good reason.
I had a good friend with whom I mostly kept in touch over the phone and online for many years, and I didn't know their name until they died and I got a call from their relatives. I still don't know what their profession was.
Just connect and engage with people, and have fun. It's a lot easier to make friends when you drop these arbitrary filters of age, profession, place of origin, gender, and so on. And in some ways, in the time I've spent not trying to get those details anymore, they have become irrelevant to me.
I've talked with endless amount of people, people I know since before and people I don't know since before, and I don't think anyone (unless relevant to the discussion at hand) has asked me how much money I make, or who I'm sleeping with.
Maybe it's because I'm not 16 years old, or maybe it's because I don't frequent night clubs in hot metropolitan areas anymore, but that strikes me as very odd that most of the people you end up talking with bring up those two subjects.
> Most of the time people steer the conversation right back to the two big hitters - how much money do you make and who are you sleeping with.
This is probably the segue I hate the most and consider a deal breaker for any future interaction. A lot of people DO ask directly how much money do you make.
Yup, this is what I do when asked that question, I just start talking about my hobbies instead of what I get paid by others to do. Then I ask them what their passion is, which tends to be much more interesting than what they spend their work-days on.
When I used to get asked: "What do you do?" quite often, I would reply: "I plant flowers". Funny thing is, I still do - but now that I am not in prime "rat race" age, I have slipped away from that answer and usually just answer Med Tech developer" or such.
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 conversation over there.
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.
I do notice a difference between north and south of Europe (more likely to be asked in the north) but it always felt more like "do you do an interesting job?" more than "can you be useful for my next startup?" :P
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.
One day at farmers market i was buying tomatoes and the guy asked me what was my job (swe) and he started saying that he was only there to help his brother and that he works for a company that sells firewalls to other companies and tried to sell me the product, while putting tomatoes in a paper bag.
I think that depends on the city. In very international cities like London or Brussels you usually start the conversation with "so what brought you hear?" knowing that most of the time is the job. So you try to understand what someone is doing. I find that a very common opener with someone you're just meating.
I think in europe, it is even worse. Because, where you come from and which language you speak is the most important thing ever. Luckily, we have seen huge progress on LLMs and hopefully get rid of this nonsense.
Agreed that non-work stuff is usually better for casual discussion, but I really dislike this position of "work? surely you can talk about something more interesting!" because for some people that is all they want to talk about, and everyone's definition of "work" is different. It's more important to listen to people than criticize their general topic of conversation, imo. Based on personal experience this is probably nicer in theory than practice, but it's still what I tend to work toward these days.
Instead of "So what do you do" you can always ask "So what do you like doing" ... that might give the person the chance to still talk about work if he/she/they/it/es want to :)
I don't think the biggest problem is leading with the "what do you do?" question, or even being a person that somewhat defines their life around their work or career. I think the bigger problem is a lot of people are inherently selfish.
"What do you do" or even "what do you do for fun" tends to be a leading question because you want to talk about yourself, what you do, what you like or understand what you can get out of it.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being at a conference, say, where we're all somewhat defined by a subject or interest and someone asks what you do. It's just very dull when it feels like they're aching for you to finish so they can explain how great they are. Or they're immediately angling for the opportunity to pitch to you, or make money from you, or tell you how further ahead in life they are.
IMO, by all means lead with a question about someone's work. But take a genuine interest in their job and their life. Ask questions. See if you can go for ten minutes without mentioning yourself. If they're not a fan of their role and you're genuinely taking an interest in them, it's incredibly easy to pivot into "what do you do when you're not studying gorillas in the Congo?!"
Very often those people just wait until you finish talking to start talking about themselves. Once I attended a party with my brother's group of friends. I decided to do a little experiment. I asked people about them and I listened to get to know them, but i talked about myself only when asked directly. For two days no one bothered to ask me what I do for a living or what are my hobbies.
Telling people what you do is more than just telling them your job title, it's also a great opportunity to tell them what motivates you about your job, and thus showing some of your values, which is pretty important when meeting new people and allows you to more easily form bonds with those that share similar values.
"So you're an accountant, huh? Tell me, what motivates you? You just like numbers? That's it? Just like working with numbers? Umm... do you have a dog?"
"Oh, you're in gambling industry? You build online gambling websites? What makes you passionate about it? What are your values that led you down to this path? Oh, just that the pay is good? Okay man, I can totally see that, yeah..."
Job of an accountant is definitely a lively one. They usually have a lot fun stories to tell, if you appreciate the specific darkness of humor related to people getting into a jail for being greedy, stupid or both. They also love to boast about breaking the rules or clever ways they made sure people observe them.
I have yet to meet a bland accountant.
They are also rather valuable contacts, since other people tend to owe them for solving their little crisis couple years back and such.
I love talking to people and asking about their jobs. But I suppose I’m the rare person that isn’t asking cuz I care about status, but to find out about different worlds or common ones.
If I met an accountant I’d ask them if they saw the Monty Python skit [1] or Accountant humor, or any number of things. I am too curious about everything to skip this question.
I seriously doubt that's the case. I think the vas majority of people are stuck in jobs they don't especially enjoy or care about all that much and would gladly do something different if they could but life often doesn't allow for such changes.
So for them, telling about their jobs is kinda meaningless. There's a million other things you can say about yourself that would tell me a lot more about you than the job you do.
I feel like it’s everything but the title. That always sounds so weird. Your job isn’t director or whatever, it’s doing things. And even if you’re signalling, there have to be better ways of getting across you’re a neophyte or a big shot.
No it's not, no one cares about your job. And having a job that reflect your values is not the norm. People want to know about YOU, not talk about what you do to get paid. Your hobbies for example are way more interesting.
While I agree with the sentiment of this article, I strongly disagree that no one cares. As a curious person, I often have a ton of questions about someone's occupation. For me, it is fun to hear people talk about their job.
I just don't like asking about occupation early-on in the conversation because it sometimes feel like socially categorizing people.
I work with computers, but telling people what I do has always been very tricky. They won't understand it anyway.
As another comment said - in Europe it's not that common to ask what people work with. It's definitely not the first thing people ask. It comes much later, if at all. Fortunately. I got so fed up of trying to explain what I did that I started to reply "I'm a carpenter", if anyone asked.
People don't asks questions on what's a carpenter doing because the very abstract notion of the job they have is enough for them, whereas they have actually no idea how the jobs is done, and certainly none of its technical aspects.
Strip down any technical aspect of your daily job to figure out its actual social function. It has one. Whatever it is it'll help you figure out how telling what's your job to people, and even maybe to yourself.
On the one hand, I feel like most people just do a job because, like me, they have to so they can have food, shelter, and medical care and it has nothing to do with their passions because only a privileged few ever get to align those things.
On the other hand, if someone tells me they work in marketing I instantly know that they are completely untrustworthy and only value enriching themselves at huge cost to society.
On the gripping hand, I don't really like meeting new people anyway, largely because of tedious bullshit conversational maneuvering wherein someone is trying to suss out how best to sell me something, get something from me, or if I'm open to participating in their echo chamber bullshit.
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But of course the conversation doesn't have to specifically be about either job through progression.
But only if you know the person well enough to have the context of it. What a person's job says about them is very different, for example, if they love their job vs hating their job.
Anyway, I feel largely the same about work. I love talking about what I do, but not with people who aren't listening and who are just asking to form an opinion of my social status. So 9 times out of 10 I just sort of mumble something and talk about something else, just like in grad school.
Every once in a while you get the hyper-interested person who asks a ton of follow-ups but they’re at least usually actually listening.
But this is fine, no? If it helps start a more enjoyable discussion afterwards. When you don't know the ones you are speaking with at all.
Though I indeed avoid focusing on work when starting a conversation. I usually try to phrase the question as "What do you do in your life?", which is more general and allows answering hobbies. I'm more interested in what people like than what they are possibly forced to do to fund it, or their opinions. Usually people will answer their what they do for a living but they will get another, more explicit question. I'm interested in knowing whether they will indeed answer by what they do for a living though.
And if they do something meaningful or enjoying for their living, it's actually interesting.
I can't hold conversations about drinking in a pub discussing girls for very long. They seem insignificant.
However I did make lifelong friends by accidentally talking about Europe's energy policy, satellites and also the MySpace effect on youth.
Sizing social status is painful - I totally agree but when people are genuinely interested in going into depth of topics which highly resonate it produces an amazing effect.
Over the last decade or so, I've found that I'm asked this question far lass than I used to be. I don't know if the times have changed, or if it's that I'm older and so generally am meeting older people now.
Either way, I welcome this change.
They generally do, but when you drop something like "I'm a research chemist" on them, they freeze up. In most jobs, there's a certain commonality of experiences. Oh, tell me about your craziest customer stories, or the worst meeting you ever flew across the country for, or whatever. When you have a job that doesn't fall into an "office work" category... that isn't going to work out. Since most people aren't great or even good conversationalists, they're going to fire off a lame joke and hope it's not a total disaster.
I'm an anesthesiologist. If I never hear another family member say "you're going to need a really big hammer to knock him/her out", I'll join the church of whatever god made that happen. In purely social situations, though, I know it's a conversation-killer, because most doctors don't know much about what I do, let alone laymen. So I have a small repertoire of ways to redirect the conversation back to "let's get to know each other a bit" topics. I think anyone in an unusual (but not, on its face, fascinating) job does.
This seems like something you could work on instead of implying it's other people's fault for asking you about a topic that they don't know they aren't interested in yet.
If you have a punchy 20 second description, and then ask what they do, you'll have pivoted away unless they want to bring it back.
Though when doing a PhD, it's a worthy goal to be able do give a quick description. It also forces you to think about the goal / meaning of your work. Some topics are more easily summarized, but still.
We do science for people, it's only fair to be able to present them your work more or less roughly.
I had something for people not into computers, like: "I work on a method to find and understand computer bugs quicker and better." (Familiar with bugs? you don't like them? So you know it's useful!)
And then I could develop for the curious.
"Programs are written with code that tells the computer what to do, step by step. Like a cooking recipe. There are tools to see programs do things step by step so you can notice some step is wrong. On big programs this gets tedious. My approach helps starting this step by step investigation closer to the problematic step."
If still curious: "How? There's another method that looks at the step that looks at these steps and check they are correct with respect to some given rule. For instance, if you have a bag of objects, no step should try to remove an object if the bag is empty. This technique usually tells you something is wrong but does not tell you why it happen. I combine the first method with the second one: when some rule is broken, you are left exploring the program step by step at the point the rule broke, which is way better than doing it from the beginning". And go further / present the caveats if I feel whoever is listening is still curious.
For the people who already actually interacted with some code, I would also drop the technical words that are probably familiar to them. If you don't know whether they already actually know some stuff, they usually say the technical words themselves, to clarify.
For people who asked politely, they would receive the one sentence summary but often they want to know more if you piqued their curiosity. I had something like a progressive image of the thing that gets more and more precise to stop at the right time.
By the way you probably started skipping paragraphs in my comment at the point yours was satisfied. I made several paragraphs to allow you to do so.
I could see how a conversation could go very sideways if you're responding to "oh what do you research?" with details that are "in the weeds."
I enjoy talking shop a great deal -- but I absolutely hate it when I've been going on about something that has caught my fancy and then notice that I've been boring the person I'm talking to to tears.
So I mostly don't talk about my work unless I'm just with other software people.
What I find especially annoying is that the fact that 'what do you do' is being asked by someone else - so it follows that if they were not interested in that topic, they would ask another question. Which means it's not the social responsibility of the person answering.
But wait, also, there's nothing cringey about someone having a hard time relaxing and talking more broadly. Everyone has a hard time in SOME social setting, and its not a big deal. This article reads like a designer clothes ad - making you feel bad to make you buy (or do) something.
Now I'm done whining, I think a much more constructive framing would be a title/topic like "Asking what people do for work isn't always best. Here are some alternative icebreakers". Or "Fit the mood - making smalltalk without work". That would have been a much better article.
I had a good friend with whom I mostly kept in touch over the phone and online for many years, and I didn't know their name until they died and I got a call from their relatives. I still don't know what their profession was.
Just connect and engage with people, and have fun. It's a lot easier to make friends when you drop these arbitrary filters of age, profession, place of origin, gender, and so on. And in some ways, in the time I've spent not trying to get those details anymore, they have become irrelevant to me.
To those that dont - you are truly the people I actually want to have a conversation with.
Maybe it's because I'm not 16 years old, or maybe it's because I don't frequent night clubs in hot metropolitan areas anymore, but that strikes me as very odd that most of the people you end up talking with bring up those two subjects.
This is probably the segue I hate the most and consider a deal breaker for any future interaction. A lot of people DO ask directly how much money do you make.
Haven't asked anybody an open-ended "So what do you do" in the five years since, and it feels refreshing.
What do they talk about instead?
"What do you do" or even "what do you do for fun" tends to be a leading question because you want to talk about yourself, what you do, what you like or understand what you can get out of it.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being at a conference, say, where we're all somewhat defined by a subject or interest and someone asks what you do. It's just very dull when it feels like they're aching for you to finish so they can explain how great they are. Or they're immediately angling for the opportunity to pitch to you, or make money from you, or tell you how further ahead in life they are.
IMO, by all means lead with a question about someone's work. But take a genuine interest in their job and their life. Ask questions. See if you can go for ten minutes without mentioning yourself. If they're not a fan of their role and you're genuinely taking an interest in them, it's incredibly easy to pivot into "what do you do when you're not studying gorillas in the Congo?!"
"Oh, you're in gambling industry? You build online gambling websites? What makes you passionate about it? What are your values that led you down to this path? Oh, just that the pay is good? Okay man, I can totally see that, yeah..."
I have yet to meet a bland accountant.
They are also rather valuable contacts, since other people tend to owe them for solving their little crisis couple years back and such.
If I met an accountant I’d ask them if they saw the Monty Python skit [1] or Accountant humor, or any number of things. I am too curious about everything to skip this question.
1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JrsB1RfksEA
So for them, telling about their jobs is kinda meaningless. There's a million other things you can say about yourself that would tell me a lot more about you than the job you do.
I feel like it’s everything but the title. That always sounds so weird. Your job isn’t director or whatever, it’s doing things. And even if you’re signalling, there have to be better ways of getting across you’re a neophyte or a big shot.
While I agree with the sentiment of this article, I strongly disagree that no one cares. As a curious person, I often have a ton of questions about someone's occupation. For me, it is fun to hear people talk about their job.
I just don't like asking about occupation early-on in the conversation because it sometimes feel like socially categorizing people.
Deleted Comment
As another comment said - in Europe it's not that common to ask what people work with. It's definitely not the first thing people ask. It comes much later, if at all. Fortunately. I got so fed up of trying to explain what I did that I started to reply "I'm a carpenter", if anyone asked.
Strip down any technical aspect of your daily job to figure out its actual social function. It has one. Whatever it is it'll help you figure out how telling what's your job to people, and even maybe to yourself.
On the other hand, if someone tells me they work in marketing I instantly know that they are completely untrustworthy and only value enriching themselves at huge cost to society.
On the gripping hand, I don't really like meeting new people anyway, largely because of tedious bullshit conversational maneuvering wherein someone is trying to suss out how best to sell me something, get something from me, or if I'm open to participating in their echo chamber bullshit.