Seriously. And how else are you supposed to navigate the conversation to those things with a complete stranger you just met? Be a mind reader and know those things about them and ask them explicitly? I don't understand why these questions are getting so much hate, for me they're just a starting point when I have no obvious one, and it's a great and easy way to get a general sense of what someone's all about. A getting the ball rolling kinda thing. And having used "so what do you do" as my default ice breaker for years now, I have always felt it put people at ease more than anything, especially people who seem kinda shy. It's open ended and they can go where they want with it. They gotta cool project they're working on they'd love to talk about? They can jump right to it for all I care, sounds good to me!
Or maybe my southerner is just showing super hard in this thread, ha.