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.

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 teaching silicon rocks how to think

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’m a peasant just like you.

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

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

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.

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"

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.

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!

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 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.

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

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

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 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.

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'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'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!