Not a bit. I can’t discuss my job in anything more than generalities with SWMBO because I have a secret clearance. And even though I used to work on the project she has years ago, she can’t discuss it in more than generalities with me because of HIPAA concerns.
It seems to me it’s easy for almost everybody to talk about general “stuff that happened while I was at work today” without violating any confidentiality agreements. Even something like, “Man, the guy in the next office was doing jumping jacks for 2 hours, and it really pissed me off!” or, “Damn, the water cooler was buzzing about [latest newsworthy incident] today, talk about a bunch of bullshit!” or, “My computer was SOO SLOW today, argh! Let’s hottub and take my mind off it!” or, “I got a good parking spot this morning, and my day was pretty easy. I’m in a great mood, let me fix dinner today.” or, “I locked my keys in the lab! Goddamn I’m an idiot.” or, “I got a really sweet ergonomic mouse, my wrist doesn’t hurt as much as it did before.”
Are there really people who aren’t capable of talking *about *work, without getting into industrial/personal specifics? I can bitch about my computer’s slowness and being tired of dealing with stupid callers, without discussing the details of anyone’s specific claim (not that I like to talk about work, but I could, if my partner wanted to know about my day). Or I could talk about how x coworker who I usually don’t get along with said something nice today, for a change… etc. It’s not that hard to make nice about work. People who constantly fall back on, “Sorry, can’t talk about work, it’s confidential,” simply lack imagination.
Do I need to hear the gory details, names, faces, account numbers, addresses, secret passwords? No, and I probably don’t care.
What would bother me, slightly, is if there were no stories at all coming from work. Come on. You can’t genericize a really average typical workplace rant just so you have a story from work? “Man, I have this coworker who won’t stop sending glurge. I went to the boss to gripe about it so he made the other person read all the glurge aloud in the lunch room while we all pointed and laughed. That was so epic.” Or “Great day today! I had this patient I was sure wasn’t going to pull through, but he did. I think he’s going to turn out fine. Good thing we tried that last-ditch strategy I was thinking about. I wasn’t too sure that would work, but it did.”
See how that works? No details, just some generalizations with a small point, like “Today was crap,” or “Today was awesome.”
I have a friend who is an x-ray tech at a mental hospital. He regularly texts me with updates on the strangest things he finds in people’s bodies. Nutcases swallow all manner of crazy things! I don’t know their names, what their diagnoses are, and my friend does not actually send me a copy of the x-ray, although I would like that. He just hits the highlights, gets a laugh, and we move on conversationally.
Upon preview, what Rachellogram said.
Nope, wouldn’t bother me a bit. My wife and I barely discuss work with each other even though neither of us have sensitive jobs. Actually, it would be great to have a solid reason to not even be able to discuss it.
My wife and I work in the same field, although we do different things, and we work for competitors. So, although what we do isn’t really top-secret stuff, we can’t talk to each other about it.
I’m fine with this. My wife, however, believes that there’s an implicit husband-wife exception to the expectation of confidentiality. I do not share this belief. That makes for the occasional tense moment, either when I clam up about something or I tell her I don’t want to hear what she’s about to tell me.
Not really, though I’d be a bit dubious that they couldn’t tell me anything at all. I’ve known people who have worked on top-security projects at Los Alamos, nuclear stuff.Due to treaties and whatnot pretty much all of that defense research is simulated nowadays. Despite this stuff being high security, I’ve gotten some pretty in-depth descriptions. It seems like you can give people the high overview pretty freely, it’s just once you start getting into implementation details like “Oh yeah, I just developed this new nuclear simulation algorithm that does XYZ and did you know that if you explode a nuclear bomb in a chamber made of orichalcum…” that you start getting into trouble. And honestly? For pretty much any company they won’t be happy with you if you start telling people company secrets like how your amazing new proprietary algorithm works.
Now, that’s just comp sci, I could see some things being more secretive “hey honey I just got finished contracting that new missile silo in the Alps OOPS.” But I’d be just a bit dubious if they said they literally cannot talk about a single facet of their job. I mean, if they don’t want to talk about their job, just tell me, I suck at talking about my day, I understand, just be honest with me.
Fake edit: Looking above, I see a lot of people saying they can “only talk in generalities.” And before anybody confronts me on what I said, that’s what I’m talking about. I’d be okay with it if they only talked to me in generalities.
My wife and I advise each other on work issues all the time. Not much of the actual work itself, but planning, dealing with people, finding resources, etc. Of course we did work together for many years. We both have to deal with confidential information, so there’s often some hedging about details. I don’t really know if it would bother me if we didn’t talk about our work.
Back in the late '40s both my parents worked in Oak Ridge, TN. Family legend has it that my father was becoming more secretive than usual, with stranger hours. Must have been really noticable since both my parents were bootleggers on the side and “clandestine” was a given. My older brother told me that after our mother found some cryptic messages in the glove box of their car involving their work location, she finally went off. (She suspected a work-place affair.) My mother could be crazy mean and probably threatened to flip every quonsit hut on the site till she got some answers. So, even tho they were working on the Manhatten Project, my father was given special permission to reveal certain info to her. Turned out that what he was doing for the government pertained to some of the connections he had made thru running liquor. My mother understood “business,” so let it ride.
Did they get the memo that prohibition was over? 
It seems to me that it’s easy enough to talk about work without breaching any confidentiality or revealing state secrets. Even on this board, we have some individuals who really can’t give us details about their workday, but they still come out with some great stories and insight for us about their careers. Qadgop comes to mind as a good example.
I’d be uncomfortable knowing nothing about my husband’s work. As it is, I don’t understand the details of what he does, because he’s a computer programmer and that’s beyond the scope of my experience. But he’ll tell me an occasional story about a project he’s working on, or a coworker who had a baby, or the surprisingly good sushi he picked up in the cafeteria for lunch. If I got no stories, I’d start thinking he was living a double life and the job was a cover.
My ex-hubbie worked at no such agency.
It didn’t bother me that he couldn’t talk about his work, it did bother me that he would smirk about not being able to tell me all the great big secrets he knew and just wasn’t able to share with poor little ole ignorant me.
When I worked as a computer programmer I was expected to keep quiet about what I was working on, sometimes even from co-workers. It probably would have bored the hell out of anybody listening anyway.