How to Explain Your Tech Job to Your Family During the Holidays | Hacker News Reader

How to Explain Your Tech Job to Your Family During the Holidays

builttoadapt.io

38 pointsojhughes48 comments

Keep it short and simple within 1-3 sentences. Truth is no one really gives a damn, it's polite small talk. Ask your aunt about her rat-sized dog instead, you'll make a far better impression.

I'm definitely not setting it up with some bakery analogy.

Is this a US thing? I mean, talking about your job with your relatives and closed-ones. I'm asking because as an European I don't talk that much about my job whenever I visit my parents (in fact, I barely mention it, as in reassuring my mom that yes, my boss still likes me and that I'm not going to be out of a job anytime soon), and whenever I meet my other relatives (which is pretty rare, we don't care about each other) I never mention it at all.

Back to my discussions with my parents, we always end up talking about national politics and the international situation, I thought that was a thing that people do world-wide whenever they meet with their closed ones around a table, eating.

I don't know if it's just a US thing; in fact, I highly doubt it. But yes, "What are you doing nowadays?" and "How's the job going?" and the like is a common conversation starter among friends and family here, even if just for small-talk.

And, of course, politics is a topic of conversation too, though it will be mutually avoided if it's known it may cause unpleasant friction.

> Cloud: A big networked oven that helps make your goods available all around the world at fast speeds.

That's almost certainly the worst metaphor I've heard for explaining what the Cloud is. "Networked oven" indeed...

I guess it depends on how you would define "the cloud" without using a metaphor…

"Somebody else's computers."

I think he was running out of steam at this point, "ah whatever, a networked oven, that's good"

You own a bakery but somehow never bought an oven. You just rent someone else’s when you have stuff to bake.

You own a large bakery and bought a ton of ovens. Soon you realize, why do you spend time and energy creating the recipes, when you can just rent the ovens out.

Yeah, but customers don't need the ovens in order to eat your bread. They do need the cloud in order to use your software, though.

"I'm a web developer."

"So you design web sites?"

"No, that's a web designer. For example, on an e-commerce site, a web designer will design what the pages look like, including the 'Add to Cart' button. But I will write code that handles what happens when that 'Add to Cart' button is clicked. It usually involves changing various bits of data in a database."

"Oh, I see. Hey, Moshe, come over here and meet Cyberdog! He's a web designer now!"

Designers do a lot more than determine what pages look like. That’s graphic design or visual design . Design in general [should] determine how the website flows from one interaction to the next and what the experience is like (another subfield called UX design). There’s also interaction design that deals with e.g. animations when e.g. pressing the button.

In general though, design is how it works from the standpoint of the user; design decisions are things like “what does the user see when they first visit the site” and determining if that’s the best thing for whatever goals you have is the tough part.

Design is not the paintbrush, but this is a commmon misconception, even among engineers who work with designers. If you’re making websites at a company and designers are just giving you CSS to style elements and determine colors, you’re not taking advantage of design thinking: https://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking and are very likely making design decisions without realizing it, similar to how it’s possivle to be architecting systems without realizing it and without considering the large body of work in these fields that exists.

It pains me greatly that design is so misunderstood as ~”the paintbrush”, even / especially with engineers, as [a dearth of] design is almost always the cause of gripes like “it’s so stupid how {piece of software} works! Why did they make it like this?!”.

If you’re an engineer and you commonly think “this software really suck”, please check out http://www.designkit.org over the holiday break (if you get one). We desperately need more people who understand the need for and the realities of design in positions where decisions are made.

I do not disagree at all, but your arguments here run contrary to the idea of "briefly explain what you do to non-technical friends and family."

Suppose such a person asks you what you (who, I presume, is a "web designer" of some sort or other) do for a living. How do you respond without going into the weeds of various types and concepts of design for five paragraphs?

You don’t. Just let them think what they think, because its the least important conversation you’ll have all day

"Oh, I see. Hey, Moshe, come over here and meet seanp2k2! He thinks he's an artist now!"

Ah I get this all the time. I like how you explained the difference. I might steal this from you.

What I actually do: "I work on safety-critical software for autonomous vehicles."

What I tell people: "I make websites."

Because what I've learned over the years is that there's no faster way to kill a dinner conversation than explain any part of what I actually do.

This is why I love the valley; it’s possible to have dinners where people not only understand what the first one means, but are fascinated by it and would love to talk about it.

On the flip side the valley gets annoying because work is all anybody talks about outside of work.

I think most normal folks would be able to understand "I build software to improve the safety of self-driving cars."

You would think so, but still... <crickets />. It was one, admittedly very minor, thing I was kind of excited about when I got into it compared to my prior jobs in various shapes of distributed systems development (FinTech, ML, databases, etc).

I figured, "Well almost everybody has a car, and this kind of thing is in the news a lot these days, and it's pretty sci-fi-y, so unlike everything else I've ever done... surely self-driving cars won't be a thing where I'm at a table surrounded by blank stares... surely."

Sadly, no. "I make websites." works a lot better because then people just start talking about random stuff they do on the Internet and things carry right along.

  > Sadly, no. "I make websites." works a lot better because then people
  > just start talking about random stuff they do on the Internet and things
  > carry right along.

This is the heart of conversational wisdom which is that in group conversations people don't usually want to know the details of one person. Rather, in group conversations each member of the group wants a chance to contribute something to the conversation and offering someting about yourself in terms that each member of the group can relate to is to advance the group conversation.

If the group conversation breaks out into smaller conversations, then greater detail might be warranted depending on the inclination and knowledgeability of the participants. But it's a balancing act.

So I don't think it's "Sadly, no" at all. It's actually great that you can say something to which people can relate.

As a math grad student, I really feel you on the crickets thing. My research is some obscure application of agebraic topology to general relativity.

Over the years I've played with all kinds of ways to relate what I do to people. These days I kind of feel that the storytelling is more important than accurately describing my research. So instead of answering with some compact three-sentence explanation, I'll take the opportunity to start telling stories about space and the mysteries of the universe.

I'm not sure people walk away with an understanding of what I do in any useful sense, but the conversations are often fun and I feel like they at least understand how I feel about my research.

FWIW, you job sounds pretty badass to me. :)

During college I got an internship at one institution that is better known for the general public as the provider of weather prediction to my country, although I had colleagues working on that department, I was in a completely different area.

When christmas came, my mother was proud telling my relatives that I was interning on that place, therefore, for a couple days after, all they asked was about the weather.

When I got tired, I started talking about what I really did, math + math + math translated to code, not a single line related to weather, they got bored pretty fast and I was fine with that.

The developer is the baker? No. The developer is the guy who writes recipes. The baker is the computer who executes recipes.

The difference is that our recipes are hundreds and thousands of pages long and some lines are references to other recipes of more thousands of pages. Also, we write recipes where hundreds of bakers have to work in parallel without confusing each other.

When a non-family member asks you what you do for a living, they usually either want to make small talk or they want to size you up and see where you fit relative to them on the ol' social totem pole. I usually just say I'm an exotic dancer, and that will most of the time get a laugh, break the ice, and subtly convey the message that it's none of their business. Works like a charm!

Years ago, I did a brief stint at a government agency which strongly discouraged employees talking about their work to anyone.

Made for some quite awkward Christmas party small talk that year. "So, I hear you landed this new job..." -"Yup. Public servant." "Oh. What do you do, then?" -"Public servant stuff."

Now, working in the marine industry, it is much simpler. "I get heavy, expensive stuff to the seabed. Oil stuff. Unmanned submarine stuff. On good days, I also get it back up again." "Oh, I see."

I do not think I will every be able to explain to my family what I do. Back in the day I worked for an ecommerce shop, my mother asked "Well isnt it finished?" Actually a very true question but too complex to answer.

I have tried different ways but in the end people didn't really get it so it wasn't very useful. Now I just say I am a software engineer and nothing else.

Sometimes I add some technical detail to a discussion like the Equifax leaks or net neutrality to clarify misconceptions. But that's only mildly related to my real work so people still don't know what I do :)

It's not the job that's hard to explain, it's explaining the willful lack of income that's hard.

"I'm part of a large, multi-organizational effort to put as many people out of work as possible."

This is every corporate job ever.

You must not be very good at your job if you can't explain it to people you've known your entire life analogically/in layman's terms. Furthermore, you definitely should not need a cookie-cutter metaphor from some article.

I used to work on a crowdfunded adult video game. That one was hard to explain to family.

Difficult, or awkward?

Both, really.

Describe the end goal of the company you work for is usually easy ("we provide software for the call center for 911").

Your actual role «development of master-master database cluster to ensure 99.99999% uptime" cannot be expressed in layman terms.

Alternative would be "I write software for Oracle database called Oracle RAC with a 1M$ price tag", which, while also true probably won't make sense.

Sticking to "I work in IT" is probably better than trying to explain the CAP theorem.

Not everything can be ELI5 without losing a large amount of important knowledge...

"I work in IT" is the fastest way to get a phone handed to you to fix an email account.

I typically explain that I work with communications. To the casual asker this typically suffices.

I'm pretty sure this is just a marketing article for pivotal, not meant to be taken seriously

"I work in data processing for a large corporation. How about you?"

Having used Chef, which completely half-arses the cookery metaphor, that's not one I'd choose. You got cookbooks and recipes and knife, but then the developers just couldn't be bothered any more so you also got nodes and run lists and data bags...

Those must be the worst analogies I’ve read in a long time.

Please avoid analogies if possible. They rarely help, and mostly just tell a story that sounds plausible but has nothing to do with what you are actually trying to explain.

Agreed. Analogies are like trying to compare a metaphor with a simile.

Don't explain it, let them piece together their own imagination from Hollywood depictions of tech workers and news reports about tech companies.

Sometimes the best inspiration is to imagine the alternative ;)

I avoid family in general. Too many self-interest mixed with alcohol andresentment, no thanks.

I stop bad guys from stealing people’s money from tbe bank (IT security).

Works well for kids and adults

Sooo… you're a security guard?

Just tell them you're a hacker and then evade any further questions.

Our product is mobile middleware, so I try to make an analogy to their business. To my dentist, I explain that it's kind of like supplying their tools or their filling materials.

If they're interested, there's probably a better way to explain it. If they aren't interested, a baking analogy isn't going to make them interested.

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