Ornithogenic Turnover

Question

Peptiberg: Hello, friend. Why do you look so pleased?

Tippgeber: My friend just had a change of profession - from a divisive one to a constructive one.

Peptiberg: Was it a smooth transition?

Tippgeber: Yes, but it did involve being eaten up, digested and expelled by a bird.

Peptiberg: A real bird?

Tippgeber: A valid, full-fledged bird. That's what I sed.

Peptiberg: I have to admit I wouldn't expect that method of transition to work in this economy. Can this bird help me find new employment too?

Tippgeber: Probably not. It only works on very particular things, and my friend's vocation was quite niche within the field.

Peptiberg: Well, you seem to think this was overall a change for the better.

Tippgeber: Oh yes, the new job may be old-fashioned, but at least the sign above the door has name recognition in the high-tech Communications age.

Peptiberg*: You're breaking up. I think our connection just got cut off. I'm sure you can no longer hear me, but I wish to ask what the two occupations are! If only I knew what that bird was...

Hint:

The bird's designation is a full sed program.

Also a hint:

The professions aren't exactly on the top 18 lists. In fact, I've arguably never heard of either one being a profession per se, but they are reasonably within the realm of occupation.

A revival hint:

The puzzle is stated by the German one. @KateGregory has framed most of the solution but the anagrams are just for fun.

---

^{*This name is not a hint.}

^{I am not aware of any typos.}

Answer 1

Perhaps Tippgeber's friend was a

sow-butcher (divisive at least in the sense of dividing pigs into pieces)

and upon treatment by

snow-bunting

became a

stitcher (constructive, though rather unspecific).

In case it isn't clear,

snow-bunting here is a command to the Unix sed text-processing tool; the initial s is the "substitute" command; the character after it (in this case n) is used as a delimiter for the "old" and "new" strings -- s[n]ow-bu[n]ti[n]g, so we are turning ow-bu into ti; and the final g means to do the replacement globally, i.e., as many times as possible on the input, which in this case is just once.

Many thanks to

the OP for giving some useful hints, to the authors of a handy Wikipedia page that lists many kinds of bird, and to Mark Owen for his excellent qat tool into which one can enter Aow;buB;AtiB and get a list containing the desired answer :-).

Answer 2

I don't have an answer exactly, but I'm looking for

Two professions, one divisive, one constructive, that are anagrams

Because

their names are anagrams

and

the unix command awk 1 will probably be involved. "bird" and "sed" point to that.

Answer 3

Partial Answer:

As it was mentioned that "Peptiberg" is not a hint, it is reasonable to guess that "Tippgeber" is a hint, though I don't know how.

Also,

"niche" (instead of "nice") may be a hint, and thanks to @SteveV, "sed" is a hint