Nobody Knows the Difference Anymore

Last week I went to my business school's alumni night in a crowded pub off Liverpool Street. The room was shoulder to shoulder, badges and pints, and the talk kept circling back to the same few winners: AI, space tech, Nvidia's last earnings call, a Google benchmark someone quoted from a headline they had half read.

Jason was the most popular person there before I learned his surname. He works at Amazon. Booth MBA. He worked the floor the way alumni drinks actually run: hello, handshake. He did not say vice president of strategic launch partnerships or head of orbital go-to-market. He said, "I'm Jason. Space Guy." People laughed, leaned in, asked about Starship. Everyone got it. I was still holding sparkling water and a job title nobody could place.

I was by the bar when someone from an earlier year asked what I do.

"Product design."

The pub kept roaring. My answer did not.

"So you're in AI?" "You mean Figma." "Like Jason, but for apps." A woman in private equity leaned in. "So you're like Jony Ive." She meant it as a compliment. He is an industrial designer. ive-industrial-design Nobody asked what product design means. Everyone acted like the word was already settled. Nobody knew the difference anymore.

Space Guy Got a Noun

Jason did not earn that clarity by explaining himself. The room was already fluent in whichever headline was trending. Space on the feed. AI on the earnings slide. Nvidia on the chart someone had open on their phone. Product design got two words that each mean something else on LinkedIn. Product sounds like you designed the smartphone. Design sounds like you pick the blue. Nielsen Norman Group still has to publish articles separating UX from UI skinning because teams keep hiring for pixels and skipping the journey. nngroup-what-is-ux Say them together in a packed pub near Liverpool Street and people hear the person who shaped the glass and aluminium in your pocket, not the person who owns what happens after someone taps Buy.

Half the room is now a Something Guy or Girl. AI Guy. Space Guy. PE Girl. VC Guy. The person who name-drops Google or Nvidia before the second pint lands. The label works when the sector is hot and the work is invisible. Space Guy gets mythologised. Product Design Guy gets the failed tap. Nobody asks about the second one at drinks.

The Room Is Sorting, Not Listening

Alumni drinks are not a hiring fair. They are a sorting algorithm with beer. Nobody in that pub needed a taxonomy of craft. They needed a noun small enough to travel across a noisy room and land in the right mental bucket before the conversation moved on. Space Guy fit the bucket the market had already built. Product design fit three buckets at once and none of them well.

The instrument is not broken. It is aimed at the wrong coordinate, the same mis-aim I named in Meet the Harpers: measuring credit assignment, not capability. The room optimises for legibility, not accuracy, so your craft gets misfiled before you finish the sentence. A hot-sector label buys thirty seconds of fluent small talk. A craft label buys a follow-up question nobody wants to ask in public. Jason did not win because he was clearer about orbital mechanics. He won because the feed had already done the exposition and his two words were enough to collect the nod.

I Kept the Nod Because It Paid

I have called myself a product designer on proposals when the real work was a moodboard and a font choice. I have watched a client fall for a shiny homepage while the checkout that kept failing sat two tickets deep, unopened. I have banked the invoice. I let someone shrink my job to "design" and said nothing, because correcting a client costs the next contract, not just the conversation. I wear the mislabel because it rents well.

That nod was not surprise. It was a swallowed correction. I felt it lodge in my throat, right where the true answer would have sat. I could have told the room I deal dopamine, free at the bar, paid back later in attention. Lembke names that arithmetic in Dopamine Nation: the dealer, not the drug, decides the price. lembke I wrote the ledger version in Attention Is the Most Consumed Drug on the Planet. More accurate than product design. Less welcome than Space Guy. I said none of it. My throat still remembers the sentence it never got to finish. I took the nod.

The Comfortable Case for a Catchy Title

Give the objection its full weight. Adam Grant argues in Give and Take (2013) that generous contributors who help without immediate return often build the highest-trust networks. grant-give-and-take Networking is compression. You have thirty seconds, a handshake, and a room that cannot hold a lecture on information architecture without punishing you for it. A catchy label is kindness to the listener. Space Guy is efficient. AI Guy is efficient. Even Figma Guy would be efficient if anyone in private equity knew what Figma was. The whole point of alumni drinks is to reduce friction so the right introductions can happen later, in email, where nuance is allowed to exist.

That paragraph deserves its full strength because many builders want it to be true. It would mean Jason's intro was generous rather than vague. It would mean the woman in private equity had meant Jony Ive as praise rather than a category error. Grant's bridge-to-email logic, in Give and Take (2013), assumes a second conversation the pub never offers. The trouble is what compression optimises for: fluent nods, not accurate ones. Hot-sector nouns inherit mythology from the feed. Craft nouns inherit misunderstanding from LinkedIn. One sounds like ambition. The other sounds like decoration. Only one of those mistakes gets corrected in public.

What I Should Have Said

Someone asked again what I actually do. Here is what I swallowed. Dopamine Guy. The one label nobody in that room would clap for. I am the reason you check your phone mid-sentence. The two blue ticks under a message you sent an hour ago. The red dot you clear without reading it. I mapped those coordinates once in Someone Designed That Button. Then I built away from them. The failed upload that says try again, not your fault. The card decline that never calls you a fraud. The checkout a screen reader can finish. That is the craft I would defend at any bar. Most days I also build the blue ticks and the red dot: same research, same testing, spent on keeping you checking, not helping you finish. Nobody at that bar wanted to hear about that job either. The pub did not get quieter. It did not need to.

Jason's smile never changed. It had already moved past me, to the next name tag, before I got to the end of the sentence. Starship got him back, the feed got everyone else, and I got the sparkling water, the nod I had chosen, and a room that still could not tell the difference.