7 ms·

The taxonomy of jobs that most people have in their minds is extremely simple (doctor, lawyer, teacher, builder, engineer, window cleaner, garbage collector, as

by jl6 7y ago

The taxonomy of jobs that most people have in their minds is extremely simple (doctor, lawyer, teacher, builder, engineer, window cleaner, garbage collector, astronaut, ...) and is mostly based on a grade-school understanding of what kind of jobs people do. But the reality is that there are millions of types of jobs, with incredible variety and specialisms, and the real content of a job is rarely captured in a job title.

badtuple 7y ago
Not only that, but the incredible depth of pretty much every field. Not every practitioner dives deep, but the masters of any job leave me speechless.
- collyw 7y ago
  Having worked filling shelves in a supermarket, I disagree that it applies to every field.
  - jcbrand 7y ago
    I would imagine the depth there is in determining what goes where on the shelf. You as shelf-filler probably didn't get to make this decision though.
    - HenryBemis 7y ago
      There is a "science" behind shelf placement decisions and it has to do with height, location on the aisle, colors, lights, and of course the "fee" that the outlet asks for the premium spots. Someone who just fills shelfs (I've done that for a toystore a few decades ago, for a a couple of months). Depends whether someone gets to just fill the shelf as per plan or has the curiosity to ask "WHY", noticing why X things fly off the shelf why Y things two shelves lower stay there forever. This curiosity builds the critical thinking 'muscle' and can motivate a shelf-filler to switch into marketing (hypothetical scenario has to do with a 17yo working part time and then deciding to studio marketing)(I didn't study marketing) :)
      - HenryBemis 7y ago
        too late to edit "studio" = study phone's autocorrect, sleepiness, and fat fingers is a nasty combination :)
  - inopinatus 7y ago
    Having dated someone who specialised in developing and enforcing visual merchandising guidelines for an international cosmetics brand, I have to suggest that it just might.
    - kortilla 7y ago
      Well it doesn’t, given that it only takes one example to negate “every field”.
      - NullPrefix 7y ago
        Are you going to provide that example?
      - jcbrand 7y ago
        Someone working in the very bottom rung of a field not having to deal with any of the complexity of that particular field is not a valid negation.
  - cryptoz 7y ago
    There is a massive differences between a well-stocked shelf and a poorly stocked shelf. The science behind the product decisions, brand placements, etc, is well-studied and practiced. The store-shelf-stockers themselves have a major impact with their level of detail-oriented work. I'm sure you could measure it financially, and that a nicely done shelf stock makes more money than a poorly done one.
  - keiferski 7y ago
    Don't confuse job in the hierarchy of an industry with the industry itself. For example: a ticket clerk at the train station isn't aware of the complexity of train engines, route planning, economics of public transportation, and so on. It doesn't mean that train transport is simple.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    People can master nearly anything and stand out; boring physical labour is actually one where there are obvious things to be amazing it. It may not earn people a pay raise, but there will be a noticeable and impressive difference between an expert shelf-stacker and someone killing time for money. That being said there are a lot of jobs where I have difficulty imagining what mastery looks like; say in an automated, low choice style field like bus driving. I couldn't recognise an expert bus driver from a relative novice. But that probably only reflects my lack of knowledge about bus driving.
    - necovek 7y ago
      When driving a car, I tend to optimise (my wife would say overoptimise) for everyone's efficiency, and I am sure a lot of that can be applied to bus driving — for instance, many of them will stop too close to a red traffic light, so cars in adjacent lanes can't see them when they are only on the that side of the street.
    - bykhun 7y ago
      I fell in love with driving after that scene in Parasite movie where we takes this very-very smooth turn. I now try to roll my Skoda like it's Mercedes: I stop and start smoothly, I turn wheel so that people don't spoil their imaginative coffee. It makes me feel like I'm guiding a spaceship!
      - __initbrian__ 7y ago
        Skoda Electric Bus https://www.skoda.cz/en/references/elektrobus-s-rychlodobijenim/?from=prod https://www.skoda.cz/en/references/elektrobus-s-rychlodobije...
    - prometheus76 7y ago
      When I was a young man, I was working at a children's museum, and one of our guests got sick by the front door. I was dispatched to clean it up. While cleaning, (no customers were around at the time), I flippantly said, "Where's the dignity in this?" An elderly woman who was working as a volunteer at the museum overheard me and said, "The only dignity a job has is the dignity you bring to it."
  - jsjw7sbw 7y ago
    Having worked with filling shelves, that job felt sometimes a lot more complex than my development job nowadays. The store I worked for didn't in general allow anything extra to be stored in the warehouse. This lead to the filling load sometimes having excess products that you had to fit somewhere. I really enjoyed making space by moving and rearranging products on the shelves. The products came in wrapped in big rollers that contained random products so looking at the roller product list and how they were packaged you had a puzzle to find a nice path that visited all the correct shelves. Occasionally you would have campaigns and such where you could be quite creative in setup and arrangement. It was the job I have been most satisfied with in my working life. However, I did only do it for 8 months for 6 hours a day. Maybe in the long run it gets more boring. The variety between shelf filling between different store brands and even different stores of the same brand made me really think no two jobs are the same.
    - gonzo41 7y ago
      I used to have a job in the back warehouse of a white goods store. I was moving around fridges all day long. It was a really good job. The best part was I couldn't take any fridges home with me in the evenings. I'd get home and my fridge would be already where it's meant to be. Also no one wanted me to do a fridge moving side project in the evenings.
      - o-__-o 7y ago
        this comment wins the thread. so apropos.
      - CyberFonic 7y ago
        When I had my pickup truck, friends would ask me for help in moving fridges when moving between rentals. Typical payment was beer and pizza so not too bad.
        nkrisc 7y ago
        You weren't paid in beer and pizza options that vested after four years?
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Supermarket logistics, which (or seems to me) system is built to put things on shelves in the way that creates most profit, is surely one of the essential defining advances in the last few decades of retail? I'm thinking short logistics chains and JIT? Not my field, but perhaps you need to widen your view a little. I'll bet there was someone at your store who was the Shiva of Stacking too? I only worked checkouts (pre barcode scanning, other stores had it).
- pengstrom 7y ago
  I worked a stint in fast food. I thoroughly underestimated the skill ceiling. Everything from burger wrapping, cleaning, taking orders and inventory could be optimized for time. It took almost a year before I was comfortable and by then I was doing things quickly, consistently and a few at the same time.
  - kqr 7y ago
    Similarly, I once talked to a person who worked at a major airport. Their job? Optimising and overseeing the transport of cutlery. From airplane, to cleaning, replacing broken parts, back to airplane. These things move great distances and they have to be delivered during very narrow time windows. And this has to Just Work for all arrivals and departures. Such a small thing yet so important and incredibly complex.
    - nwallin 7y ago
      The biggest problems faced by most companies are logistical problems. Doesn't matter if it's cutlery, bits, people, or shit. Your company's biggest problem is probably ensuring the right stuff is in the right place at the right time, while also ensuring the 7 other combinations of right/wrong stuff/place/time don't happen. But most companies don't realize that. They try to frame logistical problems as business problems and try to have fresh MBAs solve it. Half of all startups are some guy trying to solve a general logistical problem for a specialized audience using the cloud. Old guy at my old job. Retired Navy Chief. Never seen him smoke, but can't imagine him without a cigar in his mouth. His saying was "The important part is getting the logistics right. Everything else is logistics."
  - bonestamp2 7y ago
    I worked at a McDonald's in high school that was adjacent to a major highway so we were always packed. Even now, getting in the flow of programming when everything is going right and I'm making huge progress, that feeling pales in comparison to being in the zone when working drive thru with 8 orders on the screen and each of them is in a different state as you build them as fast as possible as different components are coming in from different stations all at once. When you tame that chaos, and it's saturday afternoon when all the best people are there and everyone is on their game... I've never experienced anything like it. It's like when you see a really amazing play in your favorite sport, but that same amazing play goes on for a couple hours. I imagine it's like being an air traffic controller or maybe a stock broker on the trading floor where you can talk to everyone and it's productive chaos at its glorious peak.
Nursie 7y ago
I fixed my mum's computer a few years back (cleaned up some adware and other stuff that was making it awful to use) and did a bunch of virus scans and cleanup etc. After a while she asked "Is this what you do for a job?" The conception of what happens inside our industry just isn't present in the wider population, and I imagine we're not unique in that.
- jethro_tell 7y ago
  Yes, this is a thing we see over and over. With all this extra access to learning and advancements in fields, that previous generations didn't have, there's a bit of a gap in truly understanding the complexities of various fields. We see this attitude a lot that kind of assumes anyone who isn't digging ditches is playing dress up, and anyone could put on the outfit and do it. That's why we have things like anti-vax, and people taking these incredibly simplistic views of complex fields. Assuming that anyone who puts on a lab coat can have the same valid medical understanding as the field that has been learning for hundreds of years and learned how to condense that down into a few years of school and an internship. It's the same reason older generations think you can just show up on time and move to the top of your field, sure it helps, but catching up to the baseline of knowledge in a lot of fields is a huge gap, you don't just sweep the floor in a factory anymore and learn how to program the robots over serial port. There's a big jump there that didn't used to exist. (though I assume there was a similar gap in the industrial revolution when we started mechanizing work). People can't even wrap their mind around real automation, they still assume it's going to be mechanization from the industrial revolution with computers. And there's so much else in this industry that people can't even understand that affects them in every day life situations.
  - pro-duct 7y ago
    > People can't even wrap their mind around real automation, they still assume it's going to be mechanization from the industrial revolution with computers. And there's so much else in this industry that people can't even understand that affects them in every day life situations. Terrifying, isn't it?
Toenex 7y ago
Very true. Therefore I always suggest people look at the organisation more than the specific role and learn how to evolve the starting position.
Kye 7y ago
I see this any time some fresh tech person claims AI will end music as a career. They think it's as simple as generating some nice melodies. Maybe some harmony, if they even know what that is. They don't consider all the sound design, concept, and personality that goes into making and selling music. You might persuade a computer to generate a set of passable songs for a discerning and skilled musician to choose from as a starting point. But I think I'll be dead before they're good enough to be better than just banging a few chords and presets together to see if it sounds good. Melody and harmony are what most of these efforts focus on, but that's the easy part for any experienced composer.
- prometheus76 7y ago
  And I think it would be naive and idealistic to think that the composer/songwriter/musician/performers don't have a roll in selling the music. Do I want to go to a concert where a computer is rolled out on stage and I hear amazing music, or do I want to see a performance with lighting and a performer working the crowd? The performance and the personalities of the performers are as much a part of the musical experience as just hearing sounds in headphones, in my opinion.
the_cat_kittles 7y ago
while i agree the content is never in the title, i think there lots of jobs are basically the same, and there are only a handful of genres of job. and two people with the same job title can be doing different jobs
msla 7y ago
For example: Have you ever thought about how school buses are routed? Every school day, every bus has to pick up some number of children, and then drop them off at a school on time. Ideally, the correct school. Some children have to walk to meet the bus, which must be taken into consideration because you don't want a young child walking close to dangerous areas, and then there are disabled children who need special buses. Deciding who walks, who gets to take a bus, and who in is some special circumstance is a logistical-legal interface which gets quite involved. Making that all happen isn't just one job, it's multiple, especially taking into account the fact there's software to help which must be made, tested, and deployed, and which users must be trained on. My point is, to the average person, adult or child, that whole little world collapses down to "school bus driver" and that's it. The companies which make the software I mentioned advertise, sure, but not to individuals, and school districts have no reason to advertise how, precisely, the sausage gets made, so this little world stays mostly hidden, unless the district offers parents branded software so they can track their children to and from school.
sethammons 7y ago
I wish that there were better ways to expose all this to high schoolers. Career fairs or guest speakers don't cut it.
- kqr 7y ago
  Maybe read them I, Pencil or whatever that essay is called?
kedean 7y ago
Similarly, the sheer number of auxiliary jobs. Kids are rarely told about the less prestigious jobs that surround and support doctor/lawyer/vet/etc, and if they are it's often as a fallback. This leads to a lot of high schoolers having no idea what to do if they aren't ambitious enough to want to enter the high octane kinds of jobs with years of training. I firmly believe it's a huge contributor to kids heading to college to delay figuring out what to do with life.

by jl6 7y ago

badtuple 7y ago

Not only that, but the incredible depth of pretty much every field. Not every practitioner dives deep, but the masters of any job leave me speechless.

collyw 7y ago
Having worked filling shelves in a supermarket, I disagree that it applies to every field.
- jcbrand 7y ago
  I would imagine the depth there is in determining what goes where on the shelf. You as shelf-filler probably didn't get to make this decision though.
  - HenryBemis 7y ago
    There is a "science" behind shelf placement decisions and it has to do with height, location on the aisle, colors, lights, and of course the "fee" that the outlet asks for the premium spots. Someone who just fills shelfs (I've done that for a toystore a few decades ago, for a a couple of months). Depends whether someone gets to just fill the shelf as per plan or has the curiosity to ask "WHY", noticing why X things fly off the shelf why Y things two shelves lower stay there forever. This curiosity builds the critical thinking 'muscle' and can motivate a shelf-filler to switch into marketing (hypothetical scenario has to do with a 17yo working part time and then deciding to studio marketing)(I didn't study marketing) :)
    - HenryBemis 7y ago
      too late to edit "studio" = study phone's autocorrect, sleepiness, and fat fingers is a nasty combination :)
- inopinatus 7y ago
  Having dated someone who specialised in developing and enforcing visual merchandising guidelines for an international cosmetics brand, I have to suggest that it just might.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Well it doesn’t, given that it only takes one example to negate “every field”.
    - NullPrefix 7y ago
      Are you going to provide that example?
    - jcbrand 7y ago
      Someone working in the very bottom rung of a field not having to deal with any of the complexity of that particular field is not a valid negation.
- cryptoz 7y ago
  There is a massive differences between a well-stocked shelf and a poorly stocked shelf. The science behind the product decisions, brand placements, etc, is well-studied and practiced. The store-shelf-stockers themselves have a major impact with their level of detail-oriented work. I'm sure you could measure it financially, and that a nicely done shelf stock makes more money than a poorly done one.
- keiferski 7y ago
  Don't confuse job in the hierarchy of an industry with the industry itself. For example: a ticket clerk at the train station isn't aware of the complexity of train engines, route planning, economics of public transportation, and so on. It doesn't mean that train transport is simple.
- roenxi 7y ago
  People can master nearly anything and stand out; boring physical labour is actually one where there are obvious things to be amazing it. It may not earn people a pay raise, but there will be a noticeable and impressive difference between an expert shelf-stacker and someone killing time for money. That being said there are a lot of jobs where I have difficulty imagining what mastery looks like; say in an automated, low choice style field like bus driving. I couldn't recognise an expert bus driver from a relative novice. But that probably only reflects my lack of knowledge about bus driving.
  - necovek 7y ago
    When driving a car, I tend to optimise (my wife would say overoptimise) for everyone's efficiency, and I am sure a lot of that can be applied to bus driving — for instance, many of them will stop too close to a red traffic light, so cars in adjacent lanes can't see them when they are only on the that side of the street.
  - bykhun 7y ago
    I fell in love with driving after that scene in Parasite movie where we takes this very-very smooth turn. I now try to roll my Skoda like it's Mercedes: I stop and start smoothly, I turn wheel so that people don't spoil their imaginative coffee. It makes me feel like I'm guiding a spaceship!
    - __initbrian__ 7y ago
      Skoda Electric Bus https://www.skoda.cz/en/references/elektrobus-s-rychlodobijenim/?from=prod https://www.skoda.cz/en/references/elektrobus-s-rychlodobije...
  - prometheus76 7y ago
    When I was a young man, I was working at a children's museum, and one of our guests got sick by the front door. I was dispatched to clean it up. While cleaning, (no customers were around at the time), I flippantly said, "Where's the dignity in this?" An elderly woman who was working as a volunteer at the museum overheard me and said, "The only dignity a job has is the dignity you bring to it."
- jsjw7sbw 7y ago
  Having worked with filling shelves, that job felt sometimes a lot more complex than my development job nowadays. The store I worked for didn't in general allow anything extra to be stored in the warehouse. This lead to the filling load sometimes having excess products that you had to fit somewhere. I really enjoyed making space by moving and rearranging products on the shelves. The products came in wrapped in big rollers that contained random products so looking at the roller product list and how they were packaged you had a puzzle to find a nice path that visited all the correct shelves. Occasionally you would have campaigns and such where you could be quite creative in setup and arrangement. It was the job I have been most satisfied with in my working life. However, I did only do it for 8 months for 6 hours a day. Maybe in the long run it gets more boring. The variety between shelf filling between different store brands and even different stores of the same brand made me really think no two jobs are the same.
  - gonzo41 7y ago
    I used to have a job in the back warehouse of a white goods store. I was moving around fridges all day long. It was a really good job. The best part was I couldn't take any fridges home with me in the evenings. I'd get home and my fridge would be already where it's meant to be. Also no one wanted me to do a fridge moving side project in the evenings.
    - o-__-o 7y ago
      this comment wins the thread. so apropos.
    - CyberFonic 7y ago
      When I had my pickup truck, friends would ask me for help in moving fridges when moving between rentals. Typical payment was beer and pizza so not too bad.
      - nkrisc 7y ago
        You weren't paid in beer and pizza options that vested after four years?
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Supermarket logistics, which (or seems to me) system is built to put things on shelves in the way that creates most profit, is surely one of the essential defining advances in the last few decades of retail? I'm thinking short logistics chains and JIT? Not my field, but perhaps you need to widen your view a little. I'll bet there was someone at your store who was the Shiva of Stacking too? I only worked checkouts (pre barcode scanning, other stores had it).
pengstrom 7y ago
I worked a stint in fast food. I thoroughly underestimated the skill ceiling. Everything from burger wrapping, cleaning, taking orders and inventory could be optimized for time. It took almost a year before I was comfortable and by then I was doing things quickly, consistently and a few at the same time.
- kqr 7y ago
  Similarly, I once talked to a person who worked at a major airport. Their job? Optimising and overseeing the transport of cutlery. From airplane, to cleaning, replacing broken parts, back to airplane. These things move great distances and they have to be delivered during very narrow time windows. And this has to Just Work for all arrivals and departures. Such a small thing yet so important and incredibly complex.
  - nwallin 7y ago
    The biggest problems faced by most companies are logistical problems. Doesn't matter if it's cutlery, bits, people, or shit. Your company's biggest problem is probably ensuring the right stuff is in the right place at the right time, while also ensuring the 7 other combinations of right/wrong stuff/place/time don't happen. But most companies don't realize that. They try to frame logistical problems as business problems and try to have fresh MBAs solve it. Half of all startups are some guy trying to solve a general logistical problem for a specialized audience using the cloud. Old guy at my old job. Retired Navy Chief. Never seen him smoke, but can't imagine him without a cigar in his mouth. His saying was "The important part is getting the logistics right. Everything else is logistics."
- bonestamp2 7y ago
  I worked at a McDonald's in high school that was adjacent to a major highway so we were always packed. Even now, getting in the flow of programming when everything is going right and I'm making huge progress, that feeling pales in comparison to being in the zone when working drive thru with 8 orders on the screen and each of them is in a different state as you build them as fast as possible as different components are coming in from different stations all at once. When you tame that chaos, and it's saturday afternoon when all the best people are there and everyone is on their game... I've never experienced anything like it. It's like when you see a really amazing play in your favorite sport, but that same amazing play goes on for a couple hours. I imagine it's like being an air traffic controller or maybe a stock broker on the trading floor where you can talk to everyone and it's productive chaos at its glorious peak.

Nursie 7y ago

I fixed my mum's computer a few years back (cleaned up some adware and other stuff that was making it awful to use) and did a bunch of virus scans and cleanup etc. After a while she asked "Is this what you do for a job?" The conception of what happens inside our industry just isn't present in the wider population, and I imagine we're not unique in that.

jethro_tell 7y ago
Yes, this is a thing we see over and over. With all this extra access to learning and advancements in fields, that previous generations didn't have, there's a bit of a gap in truly understanding the complexities of various fields. We see this attitude a lot that kind of assumes anyone who isn't digging ditches is playing dress up, and anyone could put on the outfit and do it. That's why we have things like anti-vax, and people taking these incredibly simplistic views of complex fields. Assuming that anyone who puts on a lab coat can have the same valid medical understanding as the field that has been learning for hundreds of years and learned how to condense that down into a few years of school and an internship. It's the same reason older generations think you can just show up on time and move to the top of your field, sure it helps, but catching up to the baseline of knowledge in a lot of fields is a huge gap, you don't just sweep the floor in a factory anymore and learn how to program the robots over serial port. There's a big jump there that didn't used to exist. (though I assume there was a similar gap in the industrial revolution when we started mechanizing work). People can't even wrap their mind around real automation, they still assume it's going to be mechanization from the industrial revolution with computers. And there's so much else in this industry that people can't even understand that affects them in every day life situations.
- pro-duct 7y ago
  > People can't even wrap their mind around real automation, they still assume it's going to be mechanization from the industrial revolution with computers. And there's so much else in this industry that people can't even understand that affects them in every day life situations. Terrifying, isn't it?

Toenex 7y ago

Very true. Therefore I always suggest people look at the organisation more than the specific role and learn how to evolve the starting position.

Kye 7y ago

I see this any time some fresh tech person claims AI will end music as a career. They think it's as simple as generating some nice melodies. Maybe some harmony, if they even know what that is. They don't consider all the sound design, concept, and personality that goes into making and selling music. You might persuade a computer to generate a set of passable songs for a discerning and skilled musician to choose from as a starting point. But I think I'll be dead before they're good enough to be better than just banging a few chords and presets together to see if it sounds good. Melody and harmony are what most of these efforts focus on, but that's the easy part for any experienced composer.

prometheus76 7y ago
And I think it would be naive and idealistic to think that the composer/songwriter/musician/performers don't have a roll in selling the music. Do I want to go to a concert where a computer is rolled out on stage and I hear amazing music, or do I want to see a performance with lighting and a performer working the crowd? The performance and the personalities of the performers are as much a part of the musical experience as just hearing sounds in headphones, in my opinion.

the_cat_kittles 7y ago

while i agree the content is never in the title, i think there lots of jobs are basically the same, and there are only a handful of genres of job. and two people with the same job title can be doing different jobs

msla 7y ago

For example: Have you ever thought about how school buses are routed? Every school day, every bus has to pick up some number of children, and then drop them off at a school on time. Ideally, the correct school. Some children have to walk to meet the bus, which must be taken into consideration because you don't want a young child walking close to dangerous areas, and then there are disabled children who need special buses. Deciding who walks, who gets to take a bus, and who in is some special circumstance is a logistical-legal interface which gets quite involved. Making that all happen isn't just one job, it's multiple, especially taking into account the fact there's software to help which must be made, tested, and deployed, and which users must be trained on. My point is, to the average person, adult or child, that whole little world collapses down to "school bus driver" and that's it. The companies which make the software I mentioned advertise, sure, but not to individuals, and school districts have no reason to advertise how, precisely, the sausage gets made, so this little world stays mostly hidden, unless the district offers parents branded software so they can track their children to and from school.

sethammons 7y ago

I wish that there were better ways to expose all this to high schoolers. Career fairs or guest speakers don't cut it.

kqr 7y ago
Maybe read them I, Pencil or whatever that essay is called?

kedean 7y ago

Similarly, the sheer number of auxiliary jobs. Kids are rarely told about the less prestigious jobs that surround and support doctor/lawyer/vet/etc, and if they are it's often as a fallback. This leads to a lot of high schoolers having no idea what to do if they aren't ambitious enough to want to enter the high octane kinds of jobs with years of training. I firmly believe it's a huge contributor to kids heading to college to delay figuring out what to do with life.