Will you be my Wingman?

Software Engineer: Professional Joke                                                                                                  SP    Will you be my Wingman?                                                                            East Brunswick, New Jersey                                                                                                                                            October 28, 2020

Informant Data:

SP was born in Bharuch, India on December 6, 1978. He completed his undergraduate education in chemistry, with a concentration in organic chemistry. After deciding that he did not enjoy it too much, he decided to pursue a master’s degree in computer science. He moved to the States in 2008 a few years after his marriage, and he has been working in the computer science field ever since he moved here. Although he has been working in different companies, he has always remained in IT. He has two young children, a five-year-old daughter and a fourteen-year-old son. He has now been working at JP Morgan Chase & Co. as a software engineer for six years.

Contextual Data:

Cultural Context: JP Morgan Chase & Co. is a multinational investment bank that is headquartered in NYC. By total assets, it is considered the largest bank in the United States and the seventh largest bank in the world. It is also ranked as one of the best companies to work for. In the company, there is a hierarchy of different roles that you can have, including investment banking analyst, equity research associate, and software engineer, making it a very versatile company. SP’s branch, the software engineering branch, deals with the structural programming backbone of the company’s banking system. In other words, it is very nitty gritty and usually deals with just different codes and programming languages.

Social Context: SP used this joke in two different contexts: both in graduate school in India and in his current job at JP Morgan Chase & Co. here. It is a joke that he often shares with his coworkers, but this time, it is not directly related to the programming language itself. Rather, it is based on the use of databases in data science. In graduate school, the joke was used to refer to somebody who was a wingman, or not really relevant to the major story. Here, it is used to call somebody a novice, a newbie, or a helper. It is funny to those who share the joke, but it would be considered offensive/slightly insulting to the subject of the joke.

Item: 

“Oh, he’s such a foreign key!”

Collector’s Notes: 

In data science, there is a set of keys/special terms used in databases: primary key, secondary key, foreign key. Foreign key is the least relevant, which is why it is used for those who are irrelevant, new, or of lower rank and would only make science to those who are familiar with this system in data science.

Tags:

  • Jokes
  • Verbal folklore
  • Verbal humor
  • Computer science/IT

Khevna Joshi

Dartmouth College

RUSS 13

Fall 2020