If a person from 1700 asked you your job, would they understand your answer, and if not, how would you explain it to them?
If a person from 1700 asked you your job, would they understand your answer, and if not, how would you explain it to them?
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'm teaching silicon rocks how to think
I’m a peasant just like you.
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 barely try to explain my job to people today, particularly family.
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.
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.
Silicon techno wizard.
I make rocks solve repetitive problems faster than humans, and they can talk to each other anywhere in the world and group up to solve even more complex problems.
I get paid in pictures of cats.
Farmer. I operate big metal things that weigh as much as your village that sucks down every plant over an area the size of Lichtenstein, then produces enough grain to feed 1700s England for a decade.
Half these comments wildly overcomplicate their job.
'Imagine an entire city could see a bard perform!' You run a theater, calm down. They're old as rocks.
'I'm an erotic cosplayer, so I don't know if they'd follow.' Honey, people in the 18th century knew about sex work.
Everyone in software has to hand-wave some magic. Your new peasant buddy can probably grasp... printing.
I'm a programmer. I think I would explain it as creating and operating mechanical contraptions that help students find books to read and help them write new works and send them to professors. I work at a university and that is basically what our program does.
These days, I'm a residential carpenter in New England - I'd imagine it would be very easy to talk about my trade to people from the 1700s, and I'm sure the builders of that time would be fascinated by the power tools we have now.
I'm a barista, coffee houses were a relatively new thing in 1700. People from the Middle East and East Africa would probably understand "I make coffee", and maybe some very trendy Europeans as well (Wikipedia says the first coffee house in Europe opened in 1645 in Austria.)
If they weren't familiar with coffee, I'd say I make a beverage with the opposite properties of beer. It's hot and perks you up where beer is cold and dulls your senses.
(Random thought: how did beer refrigeration work pre-industrial revolution? Were our ancestors chugging lukewarm beer?)
I'm an archaeologist.
Back in the 1700s this wasn't really a thing. Although there were folk, usually educated people like vicars and wealthy land owners, who called themselves 'antiquarians'.
This mostly involved them employing the local unemployed to hack away at old burial mounds/tombs looking for treasure. Buggering up the archaeology for us future scientists in the process!
Machining and welding existed in some form back then, but I'd have to explain some updates.
My work is similar to that of a librarian, except the library I work with is invisible and can contain more books and scrolls than any normal library ever could.
My invisible library has information about all kinds of things, the weather, the money earned and spend, and other things that are important for merchants, scholars and leaders to know.It is my job to make sure the information arrives and is stored properly in this library. Also I have to make it easy for others to find and retrieve the information they need from this library.
Most likely yes, the organisation I work for would have been 200 years old at that stage.
I'm a postie.
We made an automaton clerk. It has neither arms nor body, but it works all day translating physician's documents, so they may be stored with uniformity in a library that has neither shelves nor paper.
I mean, yeah. The theater goes back to at least Ancient Greece. So they’d know what I’m talking about, even if the job duties have shifted slightly throughout the centuries.
Imagine an abacus. Now imagine that abacus to be very large, as large as the side of a building, with hundreds of rows, each row with 256 possible arrangements.
Now imagine making different arrangements of the rows in that abacus, such that they are directions on how to change the arrangements of other rows in that same abacus. Further, suppose that this abacus can follow a series of these directions itself, without a person needing to do it.
What I do is to write a series of these instructions in order to accomplish specific tasks on the rest of the abacus. Adding numbers together, search through rows to find specific numbers, copying them. Numbers might represent points on a map, accounts in a business, words in a book, even colors in a picture, like you might find in a tapestry.
But then imagine this abacus is the size of a whole city - that's the number of rows it has. But its elements are so small that the whole of it can fit in your pocket. And it uses the same energy to accomplish its tasks that is found in a bolt of lightning, but in very small amounts.
In my time, we’ve covered much of the world in a mesh of fine glass wires. We shine light through them to communicate over long distances. I edit the texts in the light emitting boxes to tell the light where to go.
I’m also largely responsible for cleaning up other people’s messes, like the day shift techs who generate shitty MOPs with a shitty tool that they don’t know is doing stuff wrong because they’ve never actually run a command in a Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel, Overture, etc. in their life and now I’m just ranting and rambling…
I try to predict the future in order to find a way for us to invest the money universities have given us that ensures we can pay scholars a modest wage once they're too old to work. The goal is to not run out of money before the last scholar dies.
I'm a stochastic Asset Liability Modelling specialist in the financial and investment risk function of the asset management company of a pension plan for the university sector.
Stock markets and securities had already existed in various forms for centuries, but pensions and insurance are really more of 19th century phenomenon, as are probabilistic views of the world (closely related). Stochastic analysis is a 20th century beast, and multidimensional non-linear optimisation in financial mathematics is a relatively recent 21st century development!
I do building maintenance. I might have to explain wiring and electrical to them. But plumbing has been around since roman times, so I think they would get it.
I fit suits and make custom clothing for people for a fine mens clothes store. That's been around forever.
Well, my job showed up around then. So they would know the term Millwright, but the modernisation would probably make them a little incredulous.
I'm in Product management. Even my own family don't really get what I do
Is your dad actually your dad, or is he your brother? Well my job uses your blood to find out these questions and more. We mix your blood with glowing ingredients, and compare the illuminated patterns that we see when we shine light on it with those of your family members, as well as compared to a rough reference mishmash of all blood we've collected so far.
Can you offer me your arm, please?
The very broad strokes of it? Sure. The specific nature of it? Absolutely not. I'm in a fairly specialized branch of printing, and while I understand the basic principles, I couldn't explain, for instance, why it is that the printable CMYK gamut is so much smaller than the sRGB gamut, which is in turn far smaller than the visible color gamut. Nor could I explain why certain formulations of ink don't produce linear colors, and why inks for different processes tend to broadly be more or less linear.
Hehe. On weekdays I go to a building that is owned by a company. I sit down on a chair at a desk, stare into a device and sometimes push some of the 105 buttons on it. Sometimes I also fill out forms on paper. After 8h plus break I leave and go home. In return the company advises my bank to increase a number each month.
We have really advanced technology, so few people have to work in agriculture or as handymen and theoretically it's enough to feed us all. The rest of us keeps busy by shuffling paper around. And in recent times we were able to do away with some of the paper and replace it with those machines. There are some slightly different variants, but they pretty much all look the same.
We have these things that are like stained glass books and I make how the glass looks.
Front-end developer.
I make a long list of things for people to do in order to create a final outcome, and then keep track of the progress and find solutions for deviations.
Project manager.
They never really called it that, but I'm pretty sure the concept isn't new. Architects and the likes did pretty much the same when building ginormous structures back in ancient Rome and Egypt, so they'd get the idea. Probably wouldn't understand the project deliverable, but at least the process.
I'm a teacher. They would understand that I educate the young, but would be nowhere close to understanding my students. They would think I teach a few children of the wealthy when I actually teach hundreds from the poorest of families in my area. Including several imigrants who speak a different language and many students with various disabilities.
My job is to digitize cassette tapes, VHS tapes, and other magnetic media.
So first I'd have to explain the miracle of how we managed to capture moving images and sounds onto these thin strips of plastic covered in rust. I'd follow that up by explaining how that technology is now considered quaint and out of date, and that these days we just get a thinking machine to remember that sort of thing for us.
I'm a magister, scholar, and merchant. (I own a technology company).
Hell no
I test and design massive industrial electrical systems used in steel mills, power grid distribution, space equipment, coal mines, oil & gas, etc etc etc.
They didn't even figure out electricity at the time
I am paid to perform other duties as assigned.
I'm a glorified locksmith for magic wiz boxes. Technically I do other things as well, but mostly it's just getting past the locks that people have lost the key for.
There are also magical entities that take works from the nether realm and bring them into existence here, only they are all powered by grumpy demons and so I don't deal with those.
We have devised methods to allow performers, both thespian and musician, to be heard and seen by larger and larger audiences. These audiences can be several thousand. Imagine if an entire city came out to see the performance.
I am one of the individuals responsible for maintaining and operating those tools.
i sell gold & silver so ye
Nope
Easily, I think they had a form of food delivery in the 1700's, it's just faster now.
Lots of "I use magic to do magic stuff" for talking to people not long after the Salem witch trials.
Before the melancholia debilitated me, I worked a long time as an unguilded teamster.
I use vastly advanced looms to do math
Yes.
For sure they'd understand. My job had been around for quite a while (not a hooker)
I make machines talk to each other so that people can talk to each other through the machines from really far away. Like, you know that brand new thing called the telegraph? Well now we call those optical telegraphs because ours are made of pieces of lightning called electricity, and I work on even better versions of that. You can talk to anyone you know instantly with the machines I work on, no matter where in the world they are.
They probably wouldn't understand what a software engineer is. I would explain to them that we have mechanical devices that are so complex that humans have to write instructions on how it behaves. That's probably not enough, but would be enough for them to ask clarifying questions.
I'm just going to call myself an artist of new media types and end it there.
Books
I work with a number of shops (all belonging to one family) to try to make sure that we send enough stock from the company's warehouse to them.
Yeah I'd say that's a simple one .
Someone else makes a complicated tools for teeth doctors to record what they do and helps them keep track of how much money they are owed.
I teach people to use that tool, and fix it when it breaks. Usually both because I'll try to explain how to do something and realize it's broken half way through
in 1730 they invented magazines, pretty much most tech and communications jobs are based off of that
I direct a controlled form of lightning down metal wires to power electric candles, and other amazing devices.
I solve problems related to how lightning rocks talk to each other. Often there's an issue with how automatic scribes decide they don't feel like talking. Some days I must travel more than double the speed of your fastest horse using a metal box with wheels. I will often complain when my metal box picks the wrong music to play.
We're not all physicist. I coordinate the movement of goods from one county to the other.
I'm an artist, so probably. I do traditional painting, something they'd get immediately, but my digital stuff would be difficult to explain. They'd probably think my subject matter is weird, but they'd certainly be able to identify my work as art.
I think so? Libraries certainly existed, so there's that. Workshops existed, even if they were less industrialized/more artisanal. The only novelty might be that the two should be in the same place.
Then again, libraries of old apparently were used for a lot more than just books/scrolls, and trade guilds must have needed written materials often enough... Maybe the modern makerspace is a reinvention of an old concept? I have no idea.
I create drawings of the enclosure of machines and contraptions, you know, the knobs and switches and all those things, and then instruct machines to assemble those machines according to the drawings.
I work for a training department for a large financial institution. I think I could explain it as teaching people how to do their job better. Though I don't actually do much teaching, personally.
I'd have to go through a bunch of concepts about light, moving motion and photography in general but I'm sure we'd get there eventually.
I make energy (a word describing the measure of the invisible magic which makes sea waves happen, the sensation of warmth of the sun on your skin, and the effort you put into lifting heavy rocks) move around really, really, really fast, and lots and lots of it too.
Controlling this 'energy' is a difficult task because if you give it even a little chance, 'energy' will escape in the easiest, most useless way possible. Half my job is planning how to prevent energy from escaping without doing something useful first.
I am an IT Technician, I guess I would explain my job as being a scollar and a teacher.
That's a challenge.
The job I do didn't exist when I was in high school, and most of the technology it was built on didn't exist until the early 1900s.
I suppose I could just call myself a general repairman and leave it at that.
I'm the guy who makes sure the castle is built to keep out the invaders. Only everything is made of captured lightning.
Gets burned at the stake
They'd understand perfectly. When my employers buy something, it's my job to check that it arrives in good order and matches what we asked for, and then arrange for the sender to be paid.
Sometimes the thing is a piece of equipment for transmitting real-time video of tumours from one part of the country to another, but I don't think we need to go into that.
Ambisonic is awesome man, it makes the sounds go vrooom all around you.
I do qa for headsets so uh... Imagine a painting that moves. Now imagine instead of seeing the world, there was a device that makes you only see those moving paintings. I make sure that device and the paintings work well together.
If anyone knows of any kind of animation technique from that era that would help with the description. But even flip books wouldn't be invented for like 150 more years so 🤷♀️ Maybe I could find a nice painting and give the person a bunch of mushrooms and be like "this but different"
I help shops with their inventory.
I spend most of the day in a room looking at humorous public announcements from people all over the world until someone breaks the communication system for the organization and exile criminals and bad actors
Doug Stanhope, the comedian has a good bit about the mexicans taking your job, then you must not have skills! Learn by pantomime: "Crank Crank?" "Si! Crank Crank" https://youtu.be/FOt03BNPExo?t=2220
I am sure chemical engineer wouldn't mean much to them, I hope if I said I am a fancy plumber would at least convey the idea.
Yeah for sure, they had my job then, some advancements have been made is all.
Sales person.
Not hard. I accept money and give it out on behalf of my Lords and Ladies, I mean, employers.
My official work title is "Site Reliability Engineer", which means I'm somewhere between a clerk, a tinkerer, and a millwright.
But I'm not recording any transactions by hand and the mills I work on don't have anything to do with grain. Instead, they're simple but very fast arithmetical machines that the moneychangers had built to account for every penny that moves from one bank to another.
Sometimes the machines don't work as they are expected to, and it's my job to catch this misbehavior and identify the cause so that one of the arithmetical millwrights can figure out how to fix it. I also help them them do the fixing and testing to make sure the equiment runs true before we set it back to work.
I work in a trade school and apprenticeship has been around for ages so I think it would translate. I would just say that I help teach apprentices along with their masters, specifically about boats and ships.
Yes. We do it using computers now, so a lot of what I do is more database management but the basic method we use for accounting has been around since before the year of our lord 1300. All the stuff we do is just to make it possible to do at scale.
Im a process auditor, so they would probably understand but would think my job is not necessary ( can't blame)
I'm sitting jester
Yes. I'd just say "you know how the Courts have the power to do X, and decide Y? Well the government decided to devolve those powers to an independent office, so that people didn't have to pay for lawyers and deal with complicated legal processes. I work in that office making the Y decisions."