I don’t have trouble explaining. I keep it high level and generic because 99 times out of 100, people are just making small talk and want to know just enough about you to categorize you.
Describing my job? Yeah, sure. I do science.
Explaining my job? Hell no. Nobody is willing to read a 20 page lit review to start to understand the background of what I do
Nope. I keep the internet working.
People seem happy when I say that. Unless my internet at home craps out and my wife makes a cheeky joke about it.
Information Security is so hard to explain to old people who don’t know much about technology. My grandparents back then (late 2000s) never understood it no matter how I explained it, and they thought I was a security guard at the bank I worked at. You could also see the disappointment in their faces thinking how someone who took IT in college ended up as a security guard.
Yep.
Network engineer here. I can’t count the number of times my mom says I’m in programming.
After a few years, my wife figured out the best way to describe my job. Doctor of the internet. This was because I was working in operations at the time and would fix network outages regularly.
Did you put an SR to get thru her (mom’s) firewall first?
“I’m a stand-up comic.”
“Ooh! Heckle me!”
“I don’t know anything about you and don’t wanna say anything mean about you. Just enjoy the moment without getting a performer to do free work for you.”
“You’re no fun.”
“Don’t have to be on all the time, let me eat my burger.”
I imagine you get these questions all the time, but how did you get into stand-up, and how did you get the guts to get up on a stage and try to be funny?
I love the idea of stand-up comedy, but I’ve been to a few open mic nights and it almost always seems like drunk people showing off, people that are hilariously unfunny, or people in the crowd that try to shit on anyone remotely trying to entertain.
I started out as a quizmaster, telling quiz for a night a week. I’d open my show with a new 45-second bit each week, built audience numbers over time.
Then I realized I’d been doing this for years, and was an incredibly prolific comic! I had enough material I could just walk out onto a stage and just lengthen out my opening bits, cause I no longer had a quiz to tell that night!
When I say I’m a school librarian, most people can make a connection and have an understanding. And as long as their next comment isn’t some Fox News bullshit (which was real fun at my grandmother’s funeral), I can usually leave it at that.
But the actual day-to-day complexities of what I do isn’t going to be understood. Most days I am checking out over 400 books to students, which means my volunteers, me, and my para (assistant) are checking in and reshelving over 400 books each morning. That’s over 800 books scanned each day. Then, I am also teaching six 45-minute classes every day and I see each student in our school (over 700) twice a week in those classes. So I am planning and prepping for those classes, teaching those classes, and running the book checkout. Not to mention managing behaviors and helping some of our new students (especially kindergarten) understand the expectations of the library. I am currently planning our book fair happening in a few weeks, getting ready to start my after school club, facilitating a $500 per grade level order for books and supplies, fielding sales phone calls, balancing my ~$10K budget, and being the team lead which involves monthly meetings to attend, twice a month meetings to run, and many additional emails. So yes, I do read to kids and let them take books home, but that’s nowhere near the end of my to-do list.
I’m in DevOps, so anyone not in tech has no idea what I do/what that means. So, I end up just saying “I work in IT”.
My new doctor didn’t like that answer when we were making small talk and wanted a more detailed answer, so I tell him. He looks at his nurse and says: did any of that make sense?
Huh, I came to say pretty much the same thing. I’m DevOps, more or less, by I tell people I’m a programmer since that’s what I do
I’m a software developer. My default explanation to people who don’t know what that means is, “I whisper to computers, and sometimes they do what I ask”.
My experience is that it almost always does what I ask. The problem is that some times I don’t ask it to do what I want it to do in the exact way it will understand.
“Stop doing what I told you to do and start doing what I want you to do!” has been uttered in my office a few times.
As DevOps , I whisper to a room full of computers to do what you told them plus do what some others tell you to break what you did, then run a big hammer over it, and hand all the pieces back to you
I’m a florist. People understand what I do, they usually just don’t think it’s worth doing or paying me for my labor.
Nope. I do plumbing, home renovation, small construction jobs and property maintenance.
Unless it requires a permit or special training, I can likely do it.
What part of the world? I need to have a gas line run outside.
Northern europe. There are no gas lines going into people’s homes here.
What type of heating fuel do you guys use? Where i am its usually natural gas from lines or propane in tanks.
Older houses often to have oil boilers. Newer ones tend to have either geothermal or air heat pumps. District heating is quite common as well, especially on commercial and apartment buildings meaning the heat is transfered via hot water from the power plant.
Nope, most people are fine with “I’m a programmer”, the few times someone asked me what exactly did I program, I answered with the ELI5 version of what I do and that’s always been enough, e.g.
- I make computers see and understand what they’re seeing.
- You now site X? I work there
- You know game X? I work in the servers for it
Explaining my job is trivial compared to the insanity I cook up in my spare time.
Oh, so you like gaming? No, I’m actually not playing the game. I’m building a mod for it. Erm, okay, so this is for other players then? No, I’m mostly building it for myself. Ah, so you haven’t put a lot of time into it yet? Roughly 12 years. What? So what does the mod do then? It plays the game for me, and publishes in-game metrics to a monitoring application, so that I can see the progress of the game in an abstract form while I’m on the couch, thinking about how to optimize the automation further.
Regular fun stuff.
Kind of. I am a CEO (that’s the easy part) of a small consulting company in healthcare.
The hard part is to explain what we actually do: We do consult organisations about (healthcare related) disaster preparedness/risk management and contingency planning. So you call us if you want to have proper plans in case your hospital catches fire, COVID and monkey pox have baby or if you are a city and need to know how to plan for “the day X”. But as we work mainly on a systemic level you can also call us if you need a more intelligence focused plan e.g. “I am going to South Sudan, what do I do if I have an accident?”.
Additionally we also consult for ambulance services, e.g. how to plan vehicle allocation, etc.
No.
