Negotiating rank in casual conversations
Personally I would never expect anyone to be familiar with my work, but I feel that some profs do expect this of others, and I am looking for your advice and experiences navigating this in casual conversation or an informal 1-on-1 meeting.
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Perhaps I am over-thinking this, but it seems like a minefield. I had one experience of chatting with a very famous person who I asked, "what are you working on now" and they told me I should just read their work. That question also backfires on people who are no longer research-active.
If I ask, '"what do you work on" then that implies that I don't know who you are and haven't read all your very important articles, and of course some people take offense to that. This is easier if they are in a different area, but if their work is at all related to my area, they might be offended that I haven't heard of them.
So usually, I don't ask at all, but as a result I often end up in very one-sided conversations where they ask me what I (the lowly non-famous postdoc) do and I am too traumatized from past experience to ask them anything about their work.
If I have advance notice I'll be meeting someone, I will usually check out their website so I can come up with something vague like, "I am really interested in your work on X" or "can you tell me more about what you do with Y." But even then, some people have responded a bit defensively like, "Well, as I said in my Z article, ...." And of course there are many times you meet people without the chance to google them first.
[edited for the benefit of the "tl;dr" crowd]
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Perhaps I am over-thinking this, but it seems like a minefield. I had one experience of chatting with a very famous person who I asked, "what are you working on now" and they told me I should just read their work. That question also backfires on people who are no longer research-active.
If I ask, '"what do you work on" then that implies that I don't know who you are and haven't read all your very important articles, and of course some people take offense to that. This is easier if they are in a different area, but if their work is at all related to my area, they might be offended that I haven't heard of them.
So usually, I don't ask at all, but as a result I often end up in very one-sided conversations where they ask me what I (the lowly non-famous postdoc) do and I am too traumatized from past experience to ask them anything about their work.
If I have advance notice I'll be meeting someone, I will usually check out their website so I can come up with something vague like, "I am really interested in your work on X" or "can you tell me more about what you do with Y." But even then, some people have responded a bit defensively like, "Well, as I said in my Z article, ...." And of course there are many times you meet people without the chance to google them first.
[edited for the benefit of the "tl;dr" crowd]