If a person from 1700 asked you your job, would they understand your answer, and if not, how would you explain it to them?

yeah because I have a real job (retail) not whispering to the lightning through the haunted frame like yall

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.

I'm a chemist, so I'd just tell them that I'm an alchemist.

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.

Few people from 2024 understand what I do, so no.

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.

i'm teaching silicon rocks how to think

Merchants have become so powerful that I, a serf, have been taught number solely to account for every penny they make. For this, I'm allowed to live an okay life. I do it with magic (Excel) because they are so big and don't want to hire many of me. They still act like the Dutch and East India Companies, with slightly fewer atrocities.

I’m a peasant just like you.

As a programmer, I'd just tell them "I configure contraptions to perform tasks for people"

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.

I barely try to explain my job to people today, particularly family.

I try to make rocks think with electricity and then cry when it doesn't think the way I want it to (software engineer)

Our customers are people who work on (redacted for privacy)

We help them keep track of if their work is on schedule.

Pause to explain the Internet here.

"The Internet is complicated. But imagine you're holding a long string and I'm holding the other end. If I pull on the string, you'll feel it. We could then have an agreed upon code like one hard tug is yes, two short tugs is no. Maybe certain patterns form letters , so we can spell words out for each other. Now we can communicate from pretty far away.

Now imagine if instead of me holding the string, it's connected to a machine. Maybe that machine moves chalk over a chalkboard based on how you pull on your end of the string. I can then read this chalkboard at my leisure.

The Internet is much more complicated than that, but for my job that's close enough. It's a way to send information from here to there without anyone actually going there in person and telling someone.

My job is to work on the chalk machine. I help make sure it is set up right so it doesn't fall over, and the code stuff like 'one short tug is a, two is b, etc' is agreed on and interpreted correctly"

Backend developer.

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'm currently in college to go into GIS (Geographic Information Systems/Science) and lemme tell ya I think more people in 1700 would understand "cartographer" than they would today.

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.

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"

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.

Mine's pretty easy- I'm a bard!

No, I'd just tell them I'm a wizard.

I steer gigantic metal birds pulled by armies of horses carrying dozens of people, to the antipodes... in less than one day... using dead animal juice.

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 tell employers how to prevent their workers from getting killed, and of they don't listen, I tell the government to make sure the employer can't work like that.

And most of the workers find me annoying for it.

I can barely get my wife to understand virtualization/containerization and she’s very intelligent, let alone someone from the 18th century who couldn’t even comprehend what a computer was.

This likely has more to do with my shitty explaining ability than anything else. 😊

I used to work. Now the kingdom pays me to just be.

I'm a lot like a guard. But, it's now much easier and more profitable for the criminals to steal or hold for ransom information. So, instead of guarding a warehouse or office, I guard that information.

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 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.

I wait tables, so, yeah.

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!

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?)

They had accountants in the 1700s. The principles of double entry bookkeeping remain the same, but the technology difference with computers and accounting software would make the day to day work unrecognizable.

I fix giant metal birds that light themselves on fire and scream really loud to fly across the sky. The kingdom heavily regulates who fixes them, how they fix them, and who flies them to make sure everyone is safe.

So basically we have these extremely powerful but terribly stupid machines that can basically do anything as long as you know how to talk to them and tell them exactly how to do what you want them to do. I'm that guy who talks to these machines and make them do what people want.

I think they would.

“I drive around giving people rides to where they need to go”

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.

Machining and welding existed in some form back then, but I'd have to explain some updates.

I build buildings

I'm always suspicious of these sorts of posts. Feels like the answers could be used to profile the users who reply. Maybe the internet has made me way too paranoid.

I'm a "blacksmith" using advanced machinery to aid in the process.

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.

Yes, a doctor is probably one of the jobs that would be the best understood

Most likely yes, the organisation I work for would have been 200 years old at that stage.

I'm a postie.

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.

I design and quote Wi-Fi solutions for the hospitality industry, so probably not. I have a rough enough time describing it to my grandmother...

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.