Back when I got started in programming, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I worked with a guy whose sister told him that she did the same thing he did. She was a keypunch operator (remember them?).
not complete ignorance, just very close to.
I think that statement highlights the very different priorities that our respective countries may hold. I mean, you are almost suggesting that the myriad things people do outside of their worklife are not enough to keep conversation going. That seems pretty surprising to me. The non-work stuff is absolutely and always is the focus of conversation when we get together. Work, if it gets mentioned at all, will take the form of the following exchange as something of an afterthought…
sibling “how’s work?”
me “nowt fresh, much the same…you?”
sibling “same old”
Then onto more interesting topic such as family, holidays, music, nostalgia, cars, booze, animals, politics, gossip etc.
And actually, Americans don’t talk all that much about their work, either, at least in my experience. My friends all know broadly what I do, because that’s what Americans ask when we meet new people. But most of what I do at work would be rather dull to other people, and a lot of it is confidential. So my work mostly only comes up if I have changed jobs, was laid off, am overworked with a new project, got a new and better boss, switched to part-time, or something like that.
The other time what I do might come up is if my expertise and perspective – from my job – is relevant. I’m an actuary. My friends sometimes ask me about stuff their insurance companies do. When we were all speculating about the spread/impact of covid I had more tools in the chest to estimate it. When we are meeting in a classroom and someone wants to stack the extra chairs in front of a fire-egress door, and I don’t let them, they joke that it’s because I’m an actuary. That sort of thing. But my actual, day-to-day work? I guess I was once chewing on an algorithm and thought my CS friends might be able to give me some insight, and ran it by them. That’s about all I can think of.
I can answer this in the case of my brother - we talk about his son’s sports teams. This is where he devotes all his time and energy. Occasionally we talk about cars and life.
I know a lot about the company he works for because I use its products and follow it in the news. I know works in the home office and that he knows the president. I know he cares about new products, shipping delays from China, and packaging. He works a lot but he doesn’t travel much (it would conflict with his coaching schedule and the kids’ games). He still goes into the office every day (despite the pandemic) but when they thought he was exposed, he was able to work from home without disruption. I don’t know if he works in a warehouse or a penthouse office. I couldn’t tell you his job title, whether he supervises anyone, and I could not even guess at his salary based on what I know. If that counts as knowing what he does, then I guess I do. But I can definitely tell you how my nephew batted in four runs in the game that would have advanced them in the playoffs had they not lost by one run in the ninth.
There was a paper reprinted in the IEEE Management Review in 1997 that quantified exactly this. It was called “The $200 Hour” IIRC, and wasn’t available online the last time I checked. As someone mentioned above, the vast amounts of mistakes and thus rework created by overwork meant that after about 60 hours a week you were decreasing the effective number of hours worked.
I wrote about it at the time in my column because my company at the time was making all the mistakes the paper pointed out.
I’m with you. My daughter works in project management. I know what she does because I’ve worked with them in the past. My wife, who hasn’t had that pleasure, knows her title but has no real idea of what she does during the day.
She’s a writer so the number of meetings she has to attend is quite limited, lucky for her.
Even “middle manager” might not be correct in today’s weird flat “matrix” lean agile organizations.
I think that’s a big problem with corporate jobs these days. I can’t tell what, if anything, they do. I’m trying to find a new job and I don’t know if I should be looking to get hired as a project manager, program manager, product manager, agile coach, engagement lead, customer success manager, delivery executive, account executive, or whatever. And the descriptions all read like someone just randomly generated a page of bullshit. And they seem like each company views each one as a completely different thing.
I had an interview last week at Microsoft for a Customer Success Account Manager job and it seemed like each interview described the job in a completely different way. It didn’t seem like it was “sales” although it did have a quota attached to it. Having a PMP was a requirement (which I have) but it sounded more “program management” than “project management”. But it was really more about making sure the customer was happy so is it more an account manager? And really what’s the difference? It’s a lot of talking to customers and planning stuff out. I’m still going to need to learn exactly how Microsoft does this compared to previous places I’ve worked.
Even just in the narrow confines of the “project manager” job - Like what does Voyager’s daughter actually do (because I am in a similar role)? I didn’t catch what industry, but what sort of projects? IT? HR? Something industry specific like a new product release? What “skills” does she have? Making Gannt charts? Creating Agile “user stories” in Jira and knowing the various Agile ceremonies (meetings)? Do they transfer to other industries or companies? Is it something she can make a career at at her company or is it like one of those jobs where you have some guy from India blasting you with an offer to be a contract PM for 6 months in Wisconsin?
I’ll tell you this - knowing what I know now, I might have jumped at the chance to work 100 hour weeks putting together pitchbooks and financial models or whatever just so I would never have to navigate this sea of ambiguous bullshit paper-pushing nonsense jobs. Then again, maybe doing that for consulting firms and tech companies is what got me here in the first place.
That’s how the infamous Rita Crundwell got caught. I don’t think the time off was mandatory, but she had taken it, and that’s when her colleagues started finding out what was really happening to their city’s tax dollars.
I was a keypunch operator when I took my post-HS Gap Year in the early 1980s. The department was rapidly phasing out the card machine, and moving to magnetic tape.
The keypunch department itself was completely gone by the time I took another job with the same company in 1987; its employees had transferred to other departments, including the one where I worked.
My little precis on the subject:
America, writ large, is somewhat analogous to some organized religions: your actions are motivated, in no small part, by the omnipresent threat of severe consequences.
Stray from the path and some religions tell you that eternal fire and damnation await you.
Not cool, right ?
Stray from the path and American Exceptionalism and Rugged Individualism tell you that you’ll be cold, tired, starving, homeless, powerless, and sick.
These uber capitalists referenced in the OP have made a bit of a deal with the devil along with an actuarial bet. They’re willing to gamble their health, quite often along with suspending any sense of morality or ethics, long enough to ensure they make it to Safety.
Safety is where, in America, you make enough money that you have a near zero chance of ever being cold, tired, hungry, homeless, or sick, and – if you get sick – the actuarial bet means you’re betting that you’ll get an affliction that Wealthy People Health Care (ie, the best in the world) can fix.
I saw this the other day. A prosecutor’s case (a la Michael Moore), to be sure, but rather insightful:
“The older I get, the more I realize just how much we’re all being manipulated.”
–My mother 
That’s actually the whole point; it’s not about money in its own right- it’s about having high status, and money buys you that. They’re not buying $2000 suits because they’re more comfortable or more durable, rather they’re buying them because they want to be seen in them. Same for the big house, nice car, implants, etc… It’s not even about the money itself- nobody actually sees their account balance, but people see all that other stuff.
That’s why so many people go into debt about this stuff- they don’t have the actual money, but want to have the status. Many (most?) people value that enough that working 100 hours a week seems like a bargain to make $250k a year. I wouldn’t do it, but I’m kind of curmudgeonly when it comes to status items; the clothing fashion stupidity in middle school broke me of that.
Sounds to me like they don’t know what they’re doing themselves. Which is a great opportunity for you, because if you go in there confident, cite your experience when necessary, they will consider you a genius as you sort out what the hell is going on.
Sounds to me like Customer Success Management is more support than sales. I’ve been a customer for this type of person from EDA companies. But I could be wrong.
My daughter, since you asked, has worked in airlines and now in cable. Most of her projects are IT but some were things like making sure pilots were assigned properly. She has no IT background - I helped her with her CS101 class in college and the closest thing it came to programming was copying three lines of JavaScript into a file and running it. (Pitiful.) She is organized and is a people person (unlike me) and that seems good enough.
BTW Customer Success (instead of support) reminds me of how AT&T used to publish org charts upside down to make us peons feel better, and with customers on the top. Which led to a guy who worked for me to say that when an exec left for more time with his family that he got promoted to customer.
It could be if they made me an offer, which they did not. Although they said they might have something else, but this was a week ago.
That sort of ambiguity and chaos is the last thing I need. Because in my experience, I’m not going to sort shit. I’ll get caught in the middle between various executives and their agendas in some bullshit Kobayashi Maru test of trying to get stuff done under impossible constraints that no one will budge on.
I had to figure this out on my own. Sometimes I’d stay very late trying to debug something, and I’d finally give up and go home. Nine times out of ten I’d come in the next morning and get rid of at least half of what I’d done the night before. And very often I’d fix the bug in a small amount of time, too.
Re: keypunch. I actually used one for a little bit because the TPTB wanted us to know what it was like.
And have you ever seen a largish COBOL program on punched cards? Heh, I’m really dating myself here. 
Amen! I tend to think that in the non-technical side of IT they’re more akin to pay and responsibility grades than actual job titles these days. In my career I’ve mostly held the job titles of “programmer analyst” and “business analyst”. As a programmer analyst I did the following:
- Software developer
- Business Analyst
- PC support person
- Network tech
- General IT support
And at the workplaces I’ve worked at, that title also covers software application support specialists and literal programmer / analyst blends.
As a business analyst, I’ve done the following:
- Classic business analysis
- Software application support
- Project management
- ETL programming
- A whole lot of SQL query development
- Product management/business relationship management
- Software QA/test case development
So you can see that while the titles are more or less specific, the actual duties performed are all over the map. I have a feeling most places are like that, and in lieu of a specific technical job like “Python developer” or “Unix storage administrator”, they’re more descriptive of your level in the non-technical IT hierarchy.
I’m kind of curmudgeonly about not having a $200k+ job anymore. The idea that (as kenobi_65 put it) I might now be someone who “has to change careers / got side-tracked out of the management/leadership track” fills me full of a sort of overriding rage and disgust.
I recall hearing a story a while back but don’t recall where. It could have been one of the NPR weekend shows, but haven’t had luck finding it.
A man worked for a company where it was expected to work 80 + hours a week. At the end of the day he would clock out at 5 and never went over 40 hours a week and didn’t go in on the weekends. The execs couldn’t fire him because he got all his work done.
Minor tangent … but not entirely OT:
When people talk about hours worked and the tendency to overstate, I think there are a substantial number of people who are either pretty spot-on with hours that would make Torquemada blanche, or … maybe even understate the case.
Because …
My last job was a dot-com startup. When I got there I quickly and loudly announced that their (mission critical) data was a closely-guarded secret. Nobody really had any access to it and database resources were always tasked to keeping the ship afloat.
There were a few rudimentary and antiquated canned reports available through the Back Office but they were pretty darned useless by the time I arrived.
And reports were subject to the IT Priorities meeting process, competed with anything and everything else, and very little value was (initially) placed on them.
Barns were on fire, after all.
Dot-com.
So I learned SQL and began writing no end of queries in order to generate the data I needed in order to do my job.
OFF the proverbial clock, primarily – ie, before 7:30 AM and after 7:30 PM, and weekends.
For months/years at a time.
I don’t know if everybody who has to do similar – work from home, on their phone, ‘just check and return emails from home’ – really counts those hours, but those hours definitely count.
I loved SQL. I was scheduling queries, and then programmatically dumping them into Access or Excel and emailing reports to myself that arrived daily before I awoke.
Cool tool.
Back to you in the studio, Jim … 
I’m a big fan of SQL. It always manages to stay useful for me. Plenty of times SQL saved me from a much longer workday of manually crunching Excel data.
Yup, SQL’s cool.