Asklemmy

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

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 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.

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

I’m a peasant just like you.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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"

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

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 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.

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

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 wait tables, so, yeah.

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'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.

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

I'm a postie.

I think they would.

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

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.

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.

I'm in Product management. Even my own family don't really get what I do

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.

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'm a magister, scholar, and merchant. (I own a technology company).

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 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 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.

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?

I build buildings

I sell drugs and drug accessories, I doubt it would be hard to explain.

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...

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