I understand where your friend is coming from, as some people use the term with an insulting tone, but I have mixed feelings towards overcomplicating normal descriptive job names by replacing them with ambiguous names just to be politically correct these days. If I ask someone what he does and he says "city worker" or "salary man", I still don't really know what he does and my question is left unanswered, possible leaving the whole conversation with a less personal feel.

When I just started out, I used to work as a servicedesk/it support employee . Being embarrassed, I started saying I worked in IT. But I noticed I had to explain anyway that it was servicedesk, when people asked more questions, so I just started owning it and said servicedesk.

But George explains this better.