To be honest I have experienced this a lot in San Francisco, where people ask first what do you do, second where do you work and then what's your name...in Europe it really isn't the central part of the conversation and most likely the job doesn't even get mentioned in a dinner or a normal conversation with someone you met in a bar/club/wherever. It always shocked me how "what you do" defines the start of the conversation over there.
It definitely is part of the conversation in (parts of) Europe, but not very central. I see it as part of finding common ground to continue the conversation.
I do notice a difference between north and south of Europe (more likely to be asked in the north) but it always felt more like "do you do an interesting job?" more than "can you be useful for my next startup?" :P
Certainly. Very few people ask about your job to see if they can get something out of it. It's small-talk at the level of "do you have children" or "what's the name of your dog".
It depends on who you're talking to in San Francisco, and everywhere, really. In my part of San Francisco, we don't ask the question what do you do, because that automatically slots you into one class or the other in the hierarchy, and so we intentionally avoid that in order to be able to interact without prejudice. Different scenes, same (tiny) city.
One day at farmers market i was buying tomatoes and the guy asked me what was my job (swe) and he started saying that he was only there to help his brother and that he works for a company that sells firewalls to other companies and tried to sell me the product, while putting tomatoes in a paper bag.
I think that depends on the city. In very international cities like London or Brussels you usually start the conversation with "so what brought you hear?" knowing that most of the time is the job. So you try to understand what someone is doing. I find that a very common opener with someone you're just meating.
I think in europe, it is even worse. Because, where you come from and which language you speak is the most important thing ever. Luckily, we have seen huge progress on LLMs and hopefully get rid of this nonsense.
