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The Job You Tell People You Do vs. the Job You Actually Do 

At a wedding, somebody asks what you do.

You say “I run a marketing agency.” Or “I’m a software engineer.” Or “I work in HR.”

The aunty nods politely and moves on. Five minutes later, you overhear her describe you to her husband as “the girl who does the Instagram things” or “the boy who makes apps.” 😂

She isn’t entirely wrong. She’s also not entirely right.

Welcome to one of the great unspoken comedies of modern working life.

The job you tell people you do, and the job you actually do, almost never match.

The title is for the wedding. The actual work is a slightly unhinged improv act that nobody outside your team would recognise. 🎭

Take any job title and put it under a microscope. The results are always funnier than they should be. 🔍

“Marketing manager”

• spends 40% of her week mediating arguments between sales and product,
• 20% writing decks nobody will read,
• and 10% explaining to her CEO why the Instagram aesthetic matters.
• The remaining 30% is actual marketing, mostly squeezed in between 6pm and her dinner reservations. 📊

“Software engineer”

• spends most of his time writing Slack messages to non-technical stakeholders.
• The actual coding happens between 9pm and 2am when nobody can interrupt him with another “quick question.” 💻

“Doctor”

• handles ten times more paperwork than actual diagnosis.
• The medical degree was, in retrospect, a long and expensive prerequisite for becoming an unpaid receptionist for the insurance industry. 📋

“Founder”

• spends most days on customer support,
• hiring,
• and replying to LinkedIn messages from strangers offering web design services.
• The strategic vision the title implies gets about seven minutes a week, usually in the shower. 😂

“CEO” of a 12-person startup

• is also the office manager,
• the conflict mediator,
• the head of marketing,
• the IT support,
• and the unofficial therapist for at least three of the employees.
• The title says CEO. The job is closer to slightly stressed parent. 😅

Why this happens is funnier still.

Job titles are designed to fit on a business card. Business cards are about three inches wide. Three inches is not enough space to capture the full chaos of an actual work week. 📇

So companies pick the least-embarrassing word that summarises what the role looked like five years ago, slap it on the card, and hope nobody asks follow-up questions at dinner parties. 😂

All of which is fine. Until it isn’t.

The trouble starts when the wedding-version of your job is the only version anyone knows.

• Your team evaluates you on the title.
• Your investors fund you based on the title.
• Your family worries about you based on the title.

Meanwhile, the actual work, the 80% of it that doesn’t fit on any card, is invisible to almost everyone except the people sitting next to you in the office. 👀

This is why so many working professionals secretly feel like impostors. The title says “senior marketing director.” The reality involves crying once a quarter, drinking tea while putting out fires, and rewriting a deck at midnight. 😭☕

The internal experience doesn’t match the external label, which produces a low-grade anxiety that the person isn’t qualified to be where they are. In fact, they’re doing approximately five times the work the title implies.

For founders specifically, this is a marketing opportunity hiding in broad daylight. 💡

The most engaging content from founders almost always comes from closing the distance between the official version and the lived version.

The CEO who posts about the unglamorous reality of building a business gets ten times the engagement of the CEO posting about strategic vision.

Real beats polished. Every time. By a lot. 🔥

What can you do about your own version of this?

Try this.

Open a Google doc. Write down everything you actually did this week.

• The meetings,
• the fires,
• the conversations that took twice as long as they should have,
• the decisions you made on the fly.

Don’t edit. Don’t make it sound more impressive. Just write it.

Now compare that list to your job title.

Notice anything? 👀

Most people find the list is about three times longer than the title implies. They find themselves doing things they were never officially asked to do, and being slightly heroic in ways nobody outside their team has noticed. 🦸

The job you tell people you do is for parties. The job you actually do is where the value lives.

The good news is that the second version is almost always more interesting, more impressive, and more worth being recognised for than the first one.

At Mirra Digital, half of what we do for founders is help them tell the world about the second version of their work.

The version that doesn’t fit on a business card.

The version that’s been hiding inside their LinkedIn bio for years.

Sometimes the most useful career move you can make is being honest about what you actually do all day.

The aunty at the wedding might still misquote you. 😂

At least the rest of the world will finally get the right idea.