Our Favorite Question?
By: Annabel Wang
Tags: Conversations, Relationships, Questions, Professional Development, Careers

I’ve noticed a curious habit of mine when responding to, what I consider, everyone’s “favorite” question — “what do you do?”

When I was a high school chemistry teacher, I used to say “Oh I’m a teacher… with Teach for America… I teach High School Chemistry…” Why couldn’t I just have answered “Oh I’m a teacher”? Why did I feel the need to add all those details about my profession?

Ironically, now that I’ve switched careers, I do the opposite. When someone asks me what I do, I say “Oh I’m a consultant.” No further details on the firm or on what kind of consultant. Why do I provide so few details of my career when I used to provide more details than required?

Upon reflection, I think shifting my response to “our favorite question” was my unconscious attempt to minimize misjudgment. There are many traits associated with being a teacher, and those traits shift when I mention Teach for America (as opposed to a teacher who went through a traditional teaching program), when I mention that I teach high school (as opposed to kindergarten), and when I mention that I teach chemistry (as opposed to History). Similarly, there are many traits associated with being a consultant with the pool of traits changing based on the firm you work at and the type of consultant.

It seems unfair to stereotyping someone based on their profession. Isn’t our inherent value greater than our jobs and our companies? Yet at the same time, are the predictions wholly inaccurate? Work is so central to American Culture, not just from the standpoint of time (i.e. the numbers of hours worked versus the number of hours doing other activities) but also in how we identify ourselves. We begin talking about “what we want to be when we grow up” before grade school. We make decisions on what to study in college based on what might be a “good” profession. Success is often tied to how much money one would expect to make and the company is a “good” company. These are just a few examples of how we modify our behaviors and patterns of thought around our profession.

Additionally, it’s only natural that an individual picks up traits from those they work frequently with, whether as simple as some of the language they use to adopting their beliefs and entire patterns of behavior. In the Bay Area, this diffusion of traits is compounded by the incredibly insular social network, where all your friends work at the same company as you. And then there’s the corporate culture, the intentional and the unintentional, unspoken set of rules, ways, beliefs that float through the halls (and now our Zoom screens?) into one's very being. With as much time we spend on work, at work, with friends from work, the question “what do you do” is looking better and better as a quick shortcut to gauge a person.

In full transparency, I dislike the question “what do you do.” I think it immediately shifts the conversation to turn towards work (does asking about work in a non-work hang out make me seem like a workaholic or an elitist?) and it can detract from truly getting to know an individual as it conjures up a host of stereotypical traits that may or may not be true for that individual.

Yet I can’t seem to break the habit of asking this question, which seems to sit at the tip of my tongue in any interaction with a new person. It takes conscious effort to bite back and the few conversations in which work has not come up have all been one-off conversations about a specific topic or activity. I just haven’t found a better question that allows someone to subtly signal their interests, traits, behaviors, mindsets, values, beliefs without engaging in a whole philosophical discussion of who you are at your core.

I suppose I could ask more directly “what do you value” or “tell me your story,” but it seems quite heavy for a first meeting and it does not allow for the individual to “duck” around the question if they are unprepared or uncomfortable to answer. Questions that directly ask individuals to reveal their inner workings might be great for a deeper conversation once trust has been established.

Perhaps it’s less about the question asked and more about how it’s answered. While it’s heavily implied, the question “what do you do” does not immediately point the conversation towards disclosing your profession. Someone could easily respond with what they do in their free time or their purpose; though this has never happened to me nor have I ever tried one of these more creative responses. For now, it seems that “what do you do” is the best option for inviting the other person to signal who they are in whatever way they want to signal. Until I find an alternative (crowdsourcing options), I suppose “what do you do” will remain my go-to much-cringed question in beginning to understand an individual.