The Work Question Narrows A Room Without Anyone Noticing
Asking what someone does sorts before it opens.
Asking a new person what they do for a living feels like the safest question available. It is specific, it is answerable, and it hands over a whole category of follow ups. It also does something less useful. It sorts. The moment someone names their occupation, both of you have a rough estimate of income, education and status sitting on the table, and the conversation adjusts to it whether you want that or not. The person whose work is going badly, or is dull to explain, or is not what they would like to be doing, now has to manage your reaction before they have decided whether they like you.
The narrowing is real even when nobody means it. Someone whose job is easy to describe gets an easy run. Someone between jobs, caring for a family member, retired, studying late, or doing several unrelated things to make the rent has to compress all that into a sentence for a person they met ninety seconds ago. Watch the shoulders when it happens. Some people brighten, and those people were always going to enjoy the question. Others give a short flat answer and wait for you to move on, which is the polite version of declining to play, and it is worth learning to hear.
None of this makes the question forbidden. Work is a huge part of most lives and people often want to talk about it. The suggestion is only to stop leading with it, and to let it arrive when the person steers there themselves. Ask instead about the day rather than the career, about how someone came to be in this particular room, about what has been taking up their time lately. Those questions cover work comfortably for anyone who wants to talk about work, and they leave every other door open too. The difference is who chooses which door, and it should not be you.