When I did my PhD I hated it when (most) people asked about my research. It's not because I wasn't interested, it's because I'm really interested and was (still am) bad at giving concise summaries, so I felt like people who really didn't care and wouldn't listen to the answer were asking me to embark on a long explanation that required a bunch of preamble etc, just in order to make conversation.
Anyway, I feel largely the same about work. I love talking about what I do, but not with people who aren't listening and who are just asking to form an opinion of my social status. So 9 times out of 10 I just sort of mumble something and talk about something else, just like in grad school.
You can really just give your title and a little flavor. I generally say “Oh, I’m a software developer for an educational company. I work on a reading app.” and that’s usually all there is to that unless they ask follow-up questions; I would say that’s less than a third of the time.
Every once in a while you get the hyper-interested person who asks a ton of follow-ups but they’re at least usually actually listening.
That doesn't work if your field is super weird and niche. You end up giving the same elevator pitch over, and over, and over... I suppose it's a "nice problem to have".
I'd be very curious to hear an example that couldn't be summarized as "I am a <blank> doing <blank>".
Of people I know, the most niche I can think of is doing work with programming mitochondrial DNA and my answer for her job would simply be "I'm a scientist studying cells for <insert-medical-company>."
Being able to summarize is one thing, conveying any information is another. There are definitely jobs where giving even a remote sense of what you do takes more than a pithy statement. People either come up with a technically correct bromide like you suggest or some silly pithy "I help teams collaborate better" thing that sounds silly. Unless you're like a doctor or a fireman, it's not so easy to convey real information.
Here's the stumbling block - people aren't looking for "real information" when they ask what you do at a party, they're just looking to get a rough idea of who you are so they can find common ground to continue the conversation.
I try play a game when i meet a new person: see how long i can go without discussing work with them. The best new connections tend to take the longest to reach work, it’s often a signal of a lazy conversation starter and like you said just an attempt to size up our social status.
> it’s often a signal of a lazy conversation starter
But this is fine, no? If it helps start a more enjoyable discussion afterwards. When you don't know the ones you are speaking with at all.
Though I indeed avoid focusing on work when starting a conversation. I usually try to phrase the question as "What do you do in your life?", which is more general and allows answering hobbies. I'm more interested in what people like than what they are possibly forced to do to fund it, or their opinions. Usually people will answer their what they do for a living but they will get another, more explicit question. I'm interested in knowing whether they will indeed answer by what they do for a living though.
And if they do something meaningful or enjoying for their living, it's actually interesting.
I don't see a point of any questions like that, and somehow I always find things to talk about in a social setting. Stuff they do, place they were born etc can always enter a conversation if relevant, or not if they don't want to talk about that.
Asking these is always intrusive, you might not think so if you are fully comfortable talking about what you do or where you're from etc, but that's not all people.
it's a discussion starter. The point is to start the discussion. It often works.
> Asking these is always intrusive, you might not think so if you are fully comfortable talking about what you do or where you're from etc, but that's not all people.
Ok, that's another argument than "it's lazy". I can see it, especially when people are unemployed, they often feel ashamed.
On the other hand, isn't it a risk with any personal question? Aren't people used to handle these questions anyway?
(I otherwise agree that asking about the job is not the best thing to do anyway)
Anything can be a discussion starter, even "weather is nice", and a lot of it is less privileged/entitled/profiling/inquisitive sounding.
Actually, "what do you do" is as often a non-starter for me if the person tells me about something I am not interested in and it sucks to have to feign interest. It's much better to ask something pertaining to a shared interest. If you actually pay attention you may notice things around the person that reflect their interests, ask about that.
> On the other hand, isn't it a risk with any personal question?
Nah, only those that concern social status, something you cannot change about yourself (origin) or something that could put you in danger (where you live). In a casual setting I don't see any point of those questions except to assert oneself. If you don't expect it you would be uncomfortable but would have to suck it up and reply or be confrontational and reveal insecurity. Sure sometimes it's fun to think of creative ways of answering this questions without answering them but who are you to put me on the spot to do it in real time while watching me? We are all just trying to have a good time.
I think the reason i say it’s lazy is because I often end up feeling like they didn’t care, they just asked to fill the void. I’d love to have a real conversation about anything really. Ask me about my favourite place to eat, what my opinion is on a new product on the market, tell me about a book you’re reading and why it’s interesting…all works for me. The what do you do thing, it’s loaded with other elements; who makes more, who do you know, should i respect you. I could brag pretty hard if that’s the game we are playing, but honestly for new authentic connections, I’d like to stay away from that stuff at least for a while. It’s unavoidable, it’ll come up, but i love trying hard to delay it.
I have some anxiety so I recognize it as people looking for a safe topic in hopes of striking some common ground. It is still lazy conversation skills and boring for everyone involved. I wish I wasn't like that, but inferring from past events I won't change any time soon.
I can't hold conversations about drinking in a pub discussing girls for very long. They seem insignificant.
However I did make lifelong friends by accidentally talking about Europe's energy policy, satellites and also the MySpace effect on youth.
Sizing social status is painful - I totally agree but when people are genuinely interested in going into depth of topics which highly resonate it produces an amazing effect.
I play a variant of this: how long until a stranger asks me "what do you do?"
Over the last decade or so, I've found that I'm asked this question far lass than I used to be. I don't know if the times have changed, or if it's that I'm older and so generally am meeting older people now.
I was at a dinner party and asked someone what they do. They ran a research lab, and I was really interested, and asked questions. He was surprised I actually liked chemistry and was interested in his research. He said normally people just joke about how they hated chemistry in high school, so he normally avoided talking about it. He said people don't realize it's really rude to basically tell someone that their life's work is boring and they hated it when they were 16. I'm now much more careful about how I respond to what people do for a living, even if it's not something that I'm interested in.
> people don't realize it's really rude to basically tell someone that their life's work is boring and they hated it when they were 16
They generally do, but when you drop something like "I'm a research chemist" on them, they freeze up. In most jobs, there's a certain commonality of experiences. Oh, tell me about your craziest customer stories, or the worst meeting you ever flew across the country for, or whatever. When you have a job that doesn't fall into an "office work" category... that isn't going to work out. Since most people aren't great or even good conversationalists, they're going to fire off a lame joke and hope it's not a total disaster.
I'm an anesthesiologist. If I never hear another family member say "you're going to need a really big hammer to knock him/her out", I'll join the church of whatever god made that happen. In purely social situations, though, I know it's a conversation-killer, because most doctors don't know much about what I do, let alone laymen. So I have a small repertoire of ways to redirect the conversation back to "let's get to know each other a bit" topics. I think anyone in an unusual (but not, on its face, fascinating) job does.
This seems like something you could work on instead of implying it's other people's fault for asking you about a topic that they don't know they aren't interested in yet.
If you have a punchy 20 second description, and then ask what they do, you'll have pivoted away unless they want to bring it back.
To be fair, I think the parent commenter is aware this is not the fault of the one who asked.
Though when doing a PhD, it's a worthy goal to be able do give a quick description. It also forces you to think about the goal / meaning of your work. Some topics are more easily summarized, but still.
We do science for people, it's only fair to be able to present them your work more or less roughly.
I had something for people not into computers, like: "I work on a method to find and understand computer bugs quicker and better." (Familiar with bugs? you don't like them? So you know it's useful!)
And then I could develop for the curious.
"Programs are written with code that tells the computer what to do, step by step. Like a cooking recipe. There are tools to see programs do things step by step so you can notice some step is wrong. On big programs this gets tedious. My approach helps starting this step by step investigation closer to the problematic step."
If still curious: "How? There's another method that looks at the step that looks at these steps and check they are correct with respect to some given rule. For instance, if you have a bag of objects, no step should try to remove an object if the bag is empty. This technique usually tells you something is wrong but does not tell you why it happen. I combine the first method with the second one: when some rule is broken, you are left exploring the program step by step at the point the rule broke, which is way better than doing it from the beginning". And go further / present the caveats if I feel whoever is listening is still curious.
For the people who already actually interacted with some code, I would also drop the technical words that are probably familiar to them. If you don't know whether they already actually know some stuff, they usually say the technical words themselves, to clarify.
For people who asked politely, they would receive the one sentence summary but often they want to know more if you piqued their curiosity. I had something like a progressive image of the thing that gets more and more precise to stop at the right time.
By the way you probably started skipping paragraphs in my comment at the point yours was satisfied. I made several paragraphs to allow you to do so.
I worked on combining Interactive Debugging with Runtime Verification (and we called it Interactive Runtime Verification).
Interactive debugging is the usual step by step debugging you know, offered by your standard IDE or debugger like GDB.
Runtime Verification evaluates properties from a stream of events, the program execution being usually seen as a sequence of events (there are ways to represent concurrency / parallel executions too, a bit more complicated than a mere sequence in this case).
GDB offers a comprehensive Python interface [1] that lets you add breakpoints, watchpoints and catchpoints to inspect what's going on during the execution, and you decide whether to suspend the execution on conditions you evaluate. In our cases, the conditions are the runtime verification properties. See this like conditional breakpoints on steroids.
For instance, take a program that manipulates a queue. One property you don't want to break is "the program never remove an element from an empty list". Another one is "the program never pushes elements to an already full list". To evaluate these properties, you describe the property in terms of parameterized calls to functions new_list(n), push() and pop().
In a C program, the calls could "succeed", the execution continues but with a memory corruption. Which could be hard to detect. So instead, you have this runtime verification stop the execution for you at the point where the bug happens, instead of the likely crash.
So we implemented this idea, with features like checkpointing (thanks to the (limited) native experimental GDB checkpointing feature, or CRIU (Checkpoint and Restore in Userspace - the thing behind Docker container checkpointing and migration) [2], which does this very well) as a Python extension to GDB. This implementation theoretically supported any language supported by GDB, including C and C++.
Building on this implementation, we made a second version that supported distributed programs, and also supported Java programs. The debugging capabilities of the JVM are awesome / endless.
These implementations allowed benchmarking. Unfortunately, we focused on benchmarking the performance of the instrumentation, but what would have been very useful is to validate the method itself with human studies. This PhD should have been at the edge between computer science and human studies. It's not. Instead, it's very theoretical, with some formalism trying to define an interactively verified execution, and doing proofs that the instrumentation does not affect the execution.
Sounds amazing? What's the catch? Finding actual properties that relate to day to day bugs is hard. When developing a program, specifications are not given as LTL properties by the client, it's more like "I need this, be creative", and it's team work, and more often than not bugs are created by misunderstandings, moving targets, not having the full context when making changes, unforeseen interaction between more or less complex, more or less supposedly unrelated stuff, etc. Those can probably be seen as formal property violations but that's probably a bit far fetched. I guess a bunch of researchers loving formalism or performance evaluation having no clue about software development were not going to go very far in this. Still, it's a topic probably worth researching nonetheless.
See:
- the git repository of the implementation (it's free software) [3]
- the first "serious" paper presenting the idea [4]
- the PhD manuscript if you like verbosity. It's also the only place where we speak about the distributed version, I could not manage to publish this part [5]
Yeah, when someone asks about you research as a casual conversation they're only looking for extremely high level summaries. Something like "I research plant metabolism."
I could see how a conversation could go very sideways if you're responding to "oh what do you research?" with details that are "in the weeds."
Yes, if you do a monologue, it's likely just plain boring even to someone curious anyway. The same info given in a interactive manner is likely more enjoyable to everyone involved.
This reminds me of a time when I asked someone where they lived and they started giving me detailed directions to their house. The context of the conversation and our relationship made me expect a town name or maybe neighborhood. The unexpected over-sharing made me get really uncomfortable and I thought of a reason to end the conversation immediately.
I'm familiar with the idea of a punchy 20 second summary. I worked on consulting where everyone had something like that to introduce themselves with in a meeting. I haven't been able to bring myself do do it, even if I understand why people do and what the advantages are.
This is also good practice for when you need to find a job, which often requires interfacing with people that have little familiarity with your PhD topic but have access to those that do (e.g., recruiters, business owners).
So what? I lose opportunities to gain "valuable skills" all the time. There are better ways to acquire those skills than this, especially since it's a huge mood drain
I enjoy talking shop a great deal -- but I absolutely hate it when I've been going on about something that has caught my fancy and then notice that I've been boring the person I'm talking to to tears.
So I mostly don't talk about my work unless I'm just with other software people.
Anyway, I feel largely the same about work. I love talking about what I do, but not with people who aren't listening and who are just asking to form an opinion of my social status. So 9 times out of 10 I just sort of mumble something and talk about something else, just like in grad school.