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Comment by mosdave | Hacker News Reader

> and avoiding talking about work entirely

fuck, is this not SOP for everyone?

conversation order of operations: work < people < things < ideas

Not for me. Work is interesting. Attempting to build some dogmatic hierarchy of which things are OK to talk about is silly.

Here in the DC metro area, pretty much the first question you get upon meeting someone is: "So, what do you do?"

Unfortunately, it's not SOP everywhere.

I've never understood the problem with that question. It's been a normal thing to talk about everywhere I've ever been. Work is a defining feature of one's life, the single activity people spend more time on than any other; what's wrong with asking about it when you want to get to know someone?

Your job can imply your socioeconomic status. When it's the first thing you ask, it can come across as deciding whether you're worthwhile or not. Maybe you're not worth the connection because you're a fry cook at McDonalds, but the doctor over there in the corner is.

Learning what someone does for a living is, to me anyways, far less important than learning what they like to do, what interests they have, etc. I can be friends with anyone where there's common ground, not just fellow software folks.

Talking with work is fine, it just can be interpreted as rude if it's one of the first things you ask.

I think the difference is if you like your job or not. If you don't, then you don't like talking about work and you act like it's rude. If work is your passion, then you do like talking about it.

I realize that it can be interpreted as rude, I just don't understand why. It's not a question about socioeconomic status, it's a question about "what [you] like to do, what interests [you] have, etc.," as those characteristics are expressed in the activity you've chosen to spend at least half your waking hours on.

A large fraction of people in the "developed" world (perhaps a majority?) work as something like a cashier, for an employer they don't really care about. And they are all aware that most other people they meet are working similar jobs. So they don't ask, because they know they'll probably get a reply like "I stock shelves in a department store", which isn't going to lead anywhere interesting.

Because of this, if someone does ask them what they do, they can be pretty sure right away that that person does something "better" than what they do, and (wrongly or rightly) it can make the situation uncomfortable for them.

Obviously the extent to which this is relevant depends on the demographic of the group in which you're socializing at a particular moment.

You're replying to someone who explained to you that that question is, in many quarters, a question about socioeconomic status, and your reply is "I don't understand why it's rude, it's not a question about socioeconomic status." Yes, it is about socioeconomic status. You may not think it should be, you may not like that it is, but it is, otherwise people would not take it as such. The reasons are historical and cultural, and if you study the (American, though not exclusively) relationship between work and sociological sense of self of the 20th century you are surely more than capable of divining the details, but it exists, and your further confusion about rudeness will probably continue until you accept that the measuring tools of rudeness are not yours to calibrate.

The #1 dating horror story among women I've dated in SF is the introverted engineer who could only talk about work, engineering, or video games and otherwise required Charlie Rose levels of questioning to engage on other topics. I'm wondering if I can get funding for a Personality-as-a-Service startup in SF.

I wonder how many of those engineers have horror stories about women who can only talk about <insert bland, socially approved topic here> and refuse to discuss anything interesting, like engineering or video games.

Are you saying that all women want to talk about is bland socially-approved topics, or that everything other than engineering and video games is bland and socially-approved? I like talking about work and videogames sometimes but if that's all you can talk about without getting bored, it's pretty bad.

I read this the other way. That the post you're replying to here was saying 'flip the table around and try to read the experience from the other side'. Are the engineers really flat and without life, or is it that the venn diagram of their mutual interests has a very small overlap and neither is particularly good at figuring out how to engage the other?

I meant more what mjevans said. Sometimes two people just don't have anything in common, and that's too bad, but too often blame is placed 100% on the nerdy guy for having the "wrong" interests, when really it's nobody's fault.

Remember a while back when someone wrote an entire awful clickbait article about the horror of discovering that the guy she was on a date with played Magic: The Gathering? Not that he was unpleasantly obsessed with it, not that he couldn't talk about anything else, just that he was a frequent player.

To clarify, an important part of these date horror stories is literally "I could not get him to talk." Like long, awkward pauses until his interlocutor asks him about work/engineering. The problem is not "having the wrong interests", it's not being able to communicate your interests to female humans unless presented with a direct question that can be answered with a factual response, like "What do you do at [Company]?"

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