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
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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!
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 try to make rocks think with electricity and then cry when it doesn’t think the way I want it to (software engineer)
What’s electricity?
I spent about 30 seconds staring at this question, followed by 3 minutes pondering how to explain the phenomenon of electricity to someone unfamiliar with it, but nothing came to mind. Then, I went online and found that, while we have some understanding of how to detect and manipulate electricity, fundamentally, it’s just how our universe works and we don’t know exactly what it is.
I was moreso pointing to the fact that it wasn’t discovered until after 1700, not the fact that it could have been explained to someone in 1700. It’s still wild how we don’t know why it happens.
It’s just little tiny things wiggling around in wires. They’re always there, and if you wiggle them just right you can make rocks think!
I probably should have just said lightning instead
Mostly because the rocks are very stupid and will misunderstand your instructions at first opportunity. Kinda like Amelia Bedilia.
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 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!
We have found a witch, may we burn her?
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!
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!
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 take food from the baker and carry it to people’s homes directly in exchange for custom. We call it “being a delivery girl”. The amazing part is what the baker makes, it’s called “pizza”
most understandable I’ve seen yet
