[catears]

The definition of working with people vs. working with things doesn't seem obvious to me. As a software engineer I am working a lot with my computer. Therefore I must be working with things! But... I am just as much working with my soft skills. Scrum retros, talking to stakeholders, discussions on design with fellow engineers, testing with end-users. Some days I don't spend even a minute working with "things".

I don't think the distinction of working with people vs working with things is clear enough to say wheter my job means I am doing the one or the other. So how could the participants in the study do the same? I'm assuming there are lots of occupations in this grey zone and even situations where in one company the same occupation is considered working with people while in another company it would be considered working with things.

I can see multiple issues the study runs into which would be interesting to see how/if it answers. A) Does it measure peoples perception of wheter they work with people or thing? B) Do the authors make their own interpretation of which occupations lands in which category? How do they then eliminate their own biases in what working with that occupation means? C) Did the authors observe the participants and make a judgement call based on their day-to-day activity? This would likely be the most accurate, but I can't imagine they did this because of the sheer cost of such an experiment.

[chongli]

I think it’s pretty clear to me. I am much happier to be quietly doing research, writing code, testing, writing documentation, fixing bugs, writing emails, etc. Now stick me in a meeting and I soon become very unhappy. Why? Because I’m really not interested in listening to people complain about stuff unrelated to my tasks or giving updates about random stuff or whatever.

Now I don’t mind socializing with people at work and making a bit of small talk but I have zero interest in the sort of collaborative work that involves daily meetings. I’m far more productive when I can be left alone to focus on the task and it drives me crazy when people constantly interrupt me.

[jstummbillig]

Here I would find some support for the parents point: There is a lot of room for interpretation.

To me, writing an email can be the most intense "working with people" thing, more so than any amount of small talk or doing manual labor with people. The amount of stress that goes into a hard to write email – mostly because it will also be a hard to read email and then also the anticipation of some sort of unpleasant reaction – and the amount of time you have to wallow in that stress, rivals few other social interactions in its intensity.

[chongli]

See, I find writing an email to be a totally straightforward, impersonal task. Like writing code, but in English rather than a programming language. Just the facts, no sugar-coating or other nonsense!

[bradlys]

Then you end up on the job market.

I know the emails they’re talking about. They’re not as simple as writing the facts. Writing an extremely complex technical email in jargon and ways for people who aren’t familiar with any of it - even slightly - and explaining each detail concretely is quite the process.

It’s annoying when I have to write a 6,000 word email that is easily misunderstood because most others barely have an idea of the subject matter but it happens more often than I’d like to say.

Tbh - I find the emails pointless but this is what happens in low trust (dysfunctional) organizations.

[Flenser]

It depends on the quality of the meetings. My last job I hated them for all the reasons you said. My current job they are enjoyable and productive. That's because the agenda is a "living" document that anyone can edit during the week, and the meetings stop when we've nothing left to discuss or need to get back to work

[chongli]

That's true. At my last job the meetings basically served as a way for the manager to broadcast stuff that could've just been sent out in an email and then collect updates on what everyone has been working on which also could be done with email. There was almost no back-and-forth to it at all, yet the damn thing took 2 hours per week. A huge waste of time!

[kqr]

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.

[catears]

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?

[heavenlyblue]

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.

[interactivecode]

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

[mhuffman]

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

[hef19898]

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.

[omeze]

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?

[ardit33]

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.

[prmoustache]

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

[Scarblac]

>As a software engineer I am working a lot with my computer. Therefore I must be working with things! But... I am just as much working with my soft skills. Scrum retros, talking to stakeholders, discussions on design with fellow engineers, testing with end-users. Some days I don't spend even a minute working with "things".

Yes but did you join the profession for the Scrum meetings or for the programming?

[noisy_boy]

Third option: money

(speaking for myself, it was programming; never thought would get paid so much to do what I already love doing)

[ajuc]

It's one of these "I know it when I see it" things. I don't think a definition is necessary, but if you need one - how about:

When you're working how often are you thinking about other person's state of mind vs a state of some inanimate (or abstract) object?

Ultimately almost all the jobs are done in groups, including stuff like coal mining. But people aren't your focus there.

[AlexTWithBeard]

> As a software engineer I am working a lot with my computer.

And with ChatGPT coming up we all will have soon to resort to a mixture of arguing, begging and threatening to make computers do what we want.

[foolfoolz]

software is an industry that supports both types of workers, and you probably can pick out amongst your working group which ones are the people who prefer things vs people. your job may ask you to do soft work, but that doesn’t mean you prefer it

[therealmarv]

I know some of my friends who would never like to work with people through things (like computers or the Internet). They prefer to have a real office or retail with actual persons around them and don't like working in solitude physically (and a co-working does not cut it for them).

[emsy]

This is a comment only an engineer could come up with. It's not a "grey zone" ffs. You compare talking to people in order to do your job with teaching a class of pubescent kids or wiping old people's asses. Those are not even remotely comparable.