This is only mildly related to the article, but does anyone else have difficulty imagining what others' jobs are? For example, I'm just young enough to remember a time when I thought a programmer was someone who hid in a closet to slam at a keyboard for nine hours a day, but that notion was only corrected by entering the workforce. What about my other misconceptions? There's no way to learn about all of them firsthand. I figure plumbers just travel between job sites to hit pipes for nine hours a day, managers just scream into phones and reply to emails for nine hours a day, and literary theorists ... sit ... in their offices ... for nine hours ...
That's the problem; I'm not possessed of a sufficiently creative (or informed) mind to fill in the blanks here. Dangerously, due to that programming knowledge, I also have the incorrect notion that everyone else could be replaced by either a handful of code and some lightly trained workers, or wholesale by mechanization. Clearly this isn't the case (or the market is doing a very poor job of finding exploitable niches), so what gives? What do people _do_? Because I'm at a loss and need to educate myself.