I felt the same thing watching my partner working this morning. I’ve been with him 10 years and I still can’t explain his job beyond its title because as far as I understand he oversees people as well as works on software that’s developed, deployed and managed by another company, but they don’t manage software or services or develop anything but they deploy it, but that’s not not his team, and it’s this one specific program, but it’s actually 12 integrated programs, and he’s working on one that’s in development but he’s not a developer, but is not part of anything they’re actually doing yet, and that’s not his main role.

Everytime he explains it, I get more lost…

What is this job? It’s obviously stressful, a lot of other companies rely on on whatever this service is, and my partner, as of this year, makes 8x my income, so it must be important… Right!?

Right!? He’s not making 8x my income pushing pencils…right!?

I teach General Education at a community centre for people who missed out on formal schooling.

My job is 3 words “I teach SOSE”, and you know almost exactly what I do you can picture the main tasks and also picture my output (educated graduates)

His job did not exist 15 years ago, the concept of a job like his in software for the masses did not exist 50 years ago, a desk job to this degree of pencil pushing did not exist 100 years ago.

Sometimes I think about how my job is technically one of the oldest in the world, but never a well paid one.

Sometimes I consider a pencil pushing job for a few years, to just get my retirement fund sorted, but if I don’t even understand what the job is how can I expect myself to do it?