Hacker News Reader

Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

A bricklayer works with things. Daycare staff work with people. These are very clear-cut.

Then there are a lot of points along that continuum -- nurses and HR reps work mostly with people. Economists a little of both. Software engineers and carpenters mostly with things.

We may not agree on a complete ordering but we will get reasonably close to each other, I suppose.

View on HN

Yeah, I guess my point is that the categorization "prefer working with people" vs "prefer working with things" seems very weird. If I was a solo IT-entrepeneur I would likely work a lot with both! It does not even seem to be a scale between working more with things or more with people if you ask me.

And if there is so much grey zone that is open to interpretation, wouldn't that mean the study is rather measuring ones own perception of what they are working with?

Neithey daycare or bricklaying is something people often choose as their profession - ratger more like they end up doing because of a lack of options. Of course women would prefer bricklaying less as they are generally weaker. Daycare is a good luck call for getting hired as a man in the first place.

For jobs like nurses, the “people” they work with are not people they are things. The people they actually work with are their colleagues.

Some might say that both the patients and their colleagues are people!

You cannot not work with people, only the degree varies. And as soon as you are part of a larger organisation, and / or working on complex things, you work woth people as much as you work with things. Including brick layers.

Nurses work with people more than things? Im not sure how much face time a nurse gets in a day but Ive talked to a few and its a lot of paperwork… do accountants work with things?

Are you serious? Nurses are not secretaries. They work with people. Just because they have to fill forms, it doesn't give away the fact that their primary job is to tend/care people, help in operations, etc... mostly interacting with people.

An accountant can stay deep down in quicken for days, and it is ok. Just because they interact occasionally with an client, doesn't make them a people's job.

On the other hand, most Sales job are all about people.

I've spent at 10 days a few years ago working in a medical team in an hospital assisting nurses. They have a lot of workflow stuff to follow but that doesn't mean they chose this job for this reason and they mostly hate it. And they are still running left and right for patients all day. Plus their desktop is usually not hidden in an office but in a counter at the center of the service where they multitask between doing the paperwork and talking to patients/visitors/other members of the medical or technical teams

Reply on news.ycombinator.com