What No One Understands About Your Job
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Several weeks ago, I asked readers to tell me what people don’t get about their jobs. I thought we might receive several dozen replies. Instead, we received several hundred. We heard from teachers and professors; from opera singers and orchestra musicians; from corporate executives and tech workers; from screenwriters, playwrights, and book editors; and from sailors and summer-camp directors.
Last week, I read all of your emails. Today, I’m presenting more than two dozen replies in alphabetical order—from A(id workers) to T(impanists for metropolitan orchestras). I’ve provided a one-line summary of each respondent’s answer to the prompt followed by an edited and often condensed quote.
I hope you have as much fun reading these answers as I did. You’ll learn that humanitarians aren’t as nice as you dreamed; that some pastors prefer funerals to weddings; that chief executives still have bosses they’re afraid of; that many pharmacists are anti-medication; and that for screenwriters, talking is a more important skill than writing.
Aid Worker
It isn’t about charity. It’s about politics and stability.
International aid is almost never handing out bags of food or clothes to people. It is about working with national partners and hosting governments to build systems that deliver better for people. It is a lot more complicated than giving stuff away.
International aid is not charity. It is an investment in geopolitical stability. And it is less than 1 percent of the federal budget in the US. And many other countries devote higher percentages of their GDP than the U.S. Think about that in relation to military spending when things fall apart, and you see it’s really a bargain.
Book Editor
It’s a sales job.
A book editor spends 90 percent of their time working on selling a book, that is, publishing, and only 10 percent of their time working with its author to make that book the best it can be, that is, actually editing.
Chef
It’s not like being a visual artist with food. It’s more like being a middle manager (with food).
As a chef, most people assume that I spend my day eating food and making up new dishes. The reality is that I am a middle manager who spends most of my time managing my employees, writing schedules, completing checklists, and placing orders. So much less glamorous than most expect.
Corporate Communications Executive
People think the job is just writing. Nope.
I work in corporate communications for a Fortune 500 company, and people often think they can do my job. They think it’s just writing and they can do it themselves. Uh, no. Yes, strong writing is required as part of the job, but corporate communications is more than that.
As communication professionals, we communicate company strategy and purpose to our employees, protect its reputation among the public, and connect employees to company culture through our work. Great communicators are thought leaders to senior leadership who intimately understand the business to develop and deliver communication strategies that result in increased employee awareness, adoption, or engagement.
We can work long hours, sometimes under tight deadlines with colorful personalities or in stressful situations. It’s not for everyone, but hey, I love my job.
Data scientist No. 1
STEM jobs are creative too.
I’m writing as a data scientist and wanted to give the common misconceptions about AI/machine learning more broadly:
It’s just math, not magic. A lot of in machine learning. ML is effectively math. All of these algorithms—even the complex deep-learning neural nets—are a mix of linear algebra and nonlinear equations. In middle school/high school, we learn to fit lines given data with the equation y=mx+b. This is what is called a parametric equation—we have to solve for two parameters: m and b. It’s a relatively simple equation, one that we can often do by hand or with minimal calculations. AI fits equations like this, but instead of simple equations with two parameters, these can be insanely complex and have millions or billions of parameters. The emphasis on in is the fact that these equations are just too complex for people to do by hand, so we rely on computers to do all of these calculations at speeds that no person could ever dream of doing on their own. So to summarize: When people refer to machines “learning,” they are referring to a computer filling in the appropriate parameters to a complex mathematical function; these parameters are determined from the data used to train this function.
