I'm a barista, coffee houses were a relatively new thing in 1700. People from the Middle East and East Africa would probably understand "I make coffee", and maybe some very trendy Europeans as well (Wikipedia says the first coffee house in Europe opened in 1645 in Austria.)

If they weren't familiar with coffee, I'd say I make a beverage with the opposite properties of beer. It's hot and perks you up where beer is cold and dulls your senses.

(Random thought: how did beer refrigeration work pre-industrial revolution? Were our ancestors chugging lukewarm beer?)

I wait tables, so, yeah.

I'm an archaeologist.

Back in the 1700s this wasn't really a thing. Although there were folk, usually educated people like vicars and wealthy land owners, who called themselves 'antiquarians'.

This mostly involved them employing the local unemployed to hack away at old burial mounds/tombs looking for treasure. Buggering up the archaeology for us future scientists in the process!

They had accountants in the 1700s. The principles of double entry bookkeeping remain the same, but the technology difference with computers and accounting software would make the day to day work unrecognizable.

I fix giant metal birds that light themselves on fire and scream really loud to fly across the sky. The kingdom heavily regulates who fixes them, how they fix them, and who flies them to make sure everyone is safe.

So basically we have these extremely powerful but terribly stupid machines that can basically do anything as long as you know how to talk to them and tell them exactly how to do what you want them to do. I'm that guy who talks to these machines and make them do what people want.

I'm always suspicious of these sorts of posts. Feels like the answers could be used to profile the users who reply. Maybe the internet has made me way too paranoid.

I build buildings

I think they would.

“I drive around giving people rides to where they need to go”

My work is similar to that of a librarian, except the library I work with is invisible and can contain more books and scrolls than any normal library ever could.
My invisible library has information about all kinds of things, the weather, the money earned and spend, and other things that are important for merchants, scholars and leaders to know.

It is my job to make sure the information arrives and is stored properly in this library. Also I have to make it easy for others to find and retrieve the information they need from this library.

Machining and welding existed in some form back then, but I'd have to explain some updates.

I design and quote Wi-Fi solutions for the hospitality industry, so probably not. I have a rough enough time describing it to my grandmother...

We made an automaton clerk. It has neither arms nor body, but it works all day translating physician's documents, so they may be stored with uniformity in a library that has neither shelves nor paper.

I'm a "blacksmith" using advanced machinery to aid in the process.

Yes, a doctor is probably one of the jobs that would be the best understood

I mean, yeah. The theater goes back to at least Ancient Greece. So they’d know what I’m talking about, even if the job duties have shifted slightly throughout the centuries.

Most likely yes, the organisation I work for would have been 200 years old at that stage.

I'm a postie.

I give people rides in my horse and buggy in exchange for cash and sometimes barter.

I am an expert in crops. I have traveled the globe to learn about them. I have created new varieties to plant. Landowners around the globe seek me out for knowledge and seeds.

Imagine an abacus. Now imagine that abacus to be very large, as large as the side of a building, with hundreds of rows, each row with 256 possible arrangements.

Now imagine making different arrangements of the rows in that abacus, such that they are directions on how to change the arrangements of other rows in that same abacus. Further, suppose that this abacus can follow a series of these directions itself, without a person needing to do it.

What I do is to write a series of these instructions in order to accomplish specific tasks on the rest of the abacus. Adding numbers together, search through rows to find specific numbers, copying them. Numbers might represent points on a map, accounts in a business, words in a book, even colors in a picture, like you might find in a tapestry.

But then imagine this abacus is the size of a whole city - that's the number of rows it has. But its elements are so small that the whole of it can fit in your pocket. And it uses the same energy to accomplish its tasks that is found in a bolt of lightning, but in very small amounts.

In my time, we’ve covered much of the world in a mesh of fine glass wires. We shine light through them to communicate over long distances. I edit the texts in the light emitting boxes to tell the light where to go.

I’m also largely responsible for cleaning up other people’s messes, like the day shift techs who generate shitty MOPs with a shitty tool that they don’t know is doing stuff wrong because they’ve never actually run a command in a Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel, Overture, etc. in their life and now I’m just ranting and rambling…

I do building maintenance. I might have to explain wiring and electrical to them. But plumbing has been around since roman times, so I think they would get it.

I fit suits and make custom clothing for people for a fine mens clothes store. That's been around forever.

I try to predict the future in order to find a way for us to invest the money universities have given us that ensures we can pay scholars a modest wage once they're too old to work. The goal is to not run out of money before the last scholar dies.

I'm a stochastic Asset Liability Modelling specialist in the financial and investment risk function of the asset management company of a pension plan for the university sector.

Stock markets and securities had already existed in various forms for centuries, but pensions and insurance are really more of 19th century phenomenon, as are probabilistic views of the world (closely related). Stochastic analysis is a 20th century beast, and multidimensional non-linear optimisation in financial mathematics is a relatively recent 21st century development!

"I write spells, but they work with technology, not magic. We have very advanced printing presses that are able to just to print words, but also do mathematics at an amazing pace and reproduce the printed word nearly instantaneously across oceans."

I make the horse poop smell and sound great coming out? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

The very broad strokes of it? Sure. The specific nature of it? Absolutely not. I'm in a fairly specialized branch of printing, and while I understand the basic principles, I couldn't explain, for instance, why it is that the printable CMYK gamut is so much smaller than the sRGB gamut, which is in turn far smaller than the visible color gamut. Nor could I explain why certain formulations of ink don't produce linear colors, and why inks for different processes tend to broadly be more or less linear.

Is your dad actually your dad, or is he your brother? Well my job uses your blood to find out these questions and more. We mix your blood with glowing ingredients, and compare the illuminated patterns that we see when we shine light on it with those of your family members, as well as compared to a rough reference mishmash of all blood we've collected so far.

Can you offer me your arm, please?