Visualizing every job in the world | Hacker News Reader

Visualizing every job in the world

duarteocarmo.com

132 pointssurprisetalk21 comments

Here a map of all Germans: https://void4.github.io/allgermans/Germany.html

Of American workers: https://void4.github.io/allgermans/americans.html

International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) map (not so good looking): https://void4.github.io/allgermans/occupations.html

Labourers, artisans, merchants, warriors, teachers, princes, and priests.

Jobs classification is an ancient tradition.

I've looked at the US Census's classifications in the past. And though those have been becoming increasingly complex over recent decades, they actually saw their peak in 1920, with 587 occupations listed. An entire high-order category was devoted to railway occupations, with 13 subclassifications of that: Baggagemen and freight agents; Foremen and overseers; Laborers; Motormen; Officials and superintendents; Switchmen, flagmen, and yardmen; etc...

Adam Smith lists out at least 34 occupations in Wealth of Nations.

Discussed earlier: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230602220648/https://old.reddi...>

What are programmers, labourers or artisans? What are managers?

Programmers are what we now call technicians, so effectively artisans.

Managers would be priests or kings. Ruling / administrative castes.

There are a few other tweaks or additions which might be made. The professions, notably law and medicine, could be added, arguably administrative or artisan, though a professional class could be added. Some systems add in landlords, though depending on the historical system or context, that's usually some form of the nobility.

Keep in mind that all ontologies are mappings onto a complex reality. I find it interesting to see how different groups / times / cultures have mapped out different roles, the status which is assigned to these, and which seem most foundational to human cultures. If you look at the Reddit post linked (I'm the author), the various listings of occupations both vary considerably over time and share some similarities.

In this particular taxonomy, programmers are software developers [0].

The about-page [1] says ESCO is meant to work as a dictionary providing a common language on occupations and skills. That's all well and good. I just hope no one in the EU is tempted to use the ESCO classification in a formal manner (it reminds me of when I was a captain in the USAF, and my designated role was 3055 Comm-Electronics Engineer). They'll never keep up. For example, the Software Developer occupation lists a lot of programming languages and frameworks under "Optional Knowledge", but I was disappointed to see that the list doesn't include C, Go, or Rust. (edited for clarity)

[0]: https://esco.ec.europa.eu/en/classification/occupation?uri=h...

[1]: https://esco.ec.europa.eu/en/about-esco/what-esco

Thanks!

I'm somewhat familiar with the Confucian classification, and specifically that he placed the merchant class lowest on social status rank.

Overall I'd argue that this runs too far into lumping rather than splitting though ;-)

Using t-SNE, the 12th closest point to Data Scientist is Astrologer. Sounds about right to me.

I'm not 100% sure it knows what an astrologer is. Closest match is an astronomer.

I don't think it's a legit use of t-SNE. Distances in its space don't really provide anything except maybe local structure and are non-deterministic. After all, you can query raw vectors for a list of most similar ones.

The 3-dimensional PCA doesn't produce much clustering at all (just a big diffuse sphere), but t-SNE after a few hundred iterations reveals a handful of pretty clear groups.

I am surprised that data scientist did not appear at all in the list of jobs similar to economist.

ah, yes, T-SNE and then turning off spherize and looking for similar jobs to "security manager"

No sex workers. No porn actors. No strippers. Do they generalize these occupations into the "escort" occupation when they are so very specific everywhere else? These are all legal occupations where I come from.

https://projector.tensorflow.org/?config=https://raw.githubu...

Sex workers are generalized as "escorts", yes: http://data.europa.eu/esco/occupation/db20c08e-819e-4410-91e...

It's not clear to me how a porn actor or stripper would be categorized, unless incorporated in the more general categories of "actor" and "dancer" respectively.

Nothing relating to bus routing. You know, the people who plan bus routes, as distinct from the people who drive buses and the people who maintain buses. There's a sub-field for school bus routing, which was the concern of a company I used to work for, but it doesn't even seem like the main subject heading exists in this data.

(In fact, the company I used to work for was even more specialized, in that it sold software to allow school districts and private schools to do their own routing, but I know school bus router is its own job in larger districts.)

Transport planner?

They're usually called routers, but transport planner might be what this data set has them as.

No sugar babies listed either. Or my favorite, penguin flippers.

You see, in the vicinity of the south pole, a plane flying by is a very rare occurrence. Poor buggers can't help but look up at it and thus get stuck on their backs like a turtle.. so somebody has to go in there.. Of course it was only me and Sven Olafson during my time, bet these amateurs classified us as zookeepers or something. :/

The dataset seems a bit too specific in some places such as "cocktail bartender" and "green coffee buyer".

I moved my cursor around to see some of them in the animated visualization, and got... "ethical hacker". really?

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