Ask HN: Explain your daily job to your family

Software Engineer: When you open a website, I work on everything that's visible on the page. Sometimes I work on what's not visible, like with databases, passwords, etc.

Specific role at job: I work on a user dashboard and profile page. Users can set up X, can see what X they have, and can check the statuses of other things. My team's biggest problem is figuring out how to get users to do Y without getting stuck.

I write content that helps people move to Germany. Plain and simple.

My last corporate programmer job was harder to describe. I make computers do what people want them to. I turn people's needs into software they can use. Concretely, I helped computers read and understand PDF invoices.

My family knows I do work on the computer. That's it. We don't get into the details.

I just tell people that I am a professional computer nerd…they tend to understand that pretty well vs actually telling them what I do daily.

I work for a solar company, making a website for our installers that helps them keep track of their customers' home solar systems. A big installer can have dozens or hundreds of customers, and being able to monitor their status online means they can help homeowners troubleshoot problems remotely, only sending a technician out if they can't resolve it online.

For me, part of the joy in working downstream of tech proper (i.e., as a techie in a different vertical where software just supports the main business) is that my work is easily understood, and I can see its output immediately. I'm building the very thing that our users touch every day, not working layers of abstractions & services deep. It has immediate (if small & incremental) impact on our installers, homeowners, the renewables industry as a whole, climate change, etc.

On paper I'm an engineer of some sort, but I don't like that title because "web dev" is both more accurate (I never got an engineering license) and less pretentious (I don't have to make the kinds of hard decisions that real engineers and architects make, and my mistakes are easily fixed with a push and nobody dies). I've been more or less doing the same job since the late 90s; back then it was called "web design" (UX hadn't come into its own as a field/title quite yet) and now it's "front end," but it's still the same thing: Using HTML/Perl/ColdFusion/ASP/PHP/JS/CSS/XSLT/jQuery/Angular/React/Next to move text and images around on a document, with a light design & usability pass. I'm basically the digital equivalent of a business brochure designer. The tools may change over time, but the job is still the same.

Compared to other software engineers & architects, I think my job is very straightforward and simple. Web apps are still more markup than algorithm, with just a sprinkling of business logic and UI interactions on top. But I love my job. It lets me harness the power of technology towards a predefined goal, instead of iterating the technology itself (the good folks at Next and React do that on my behalf). Instead, I get to rapidly prototype a vision of some feature or screen and have it come to life in minutes and hours. The instant gratification is nice. My code is really just a means of realizing a design, and writing actual lines of code is maybe only 30% of my day to day work, the rest being design (of all sorts... UI/UX, product, graphics, type) and planning and way too many meetings.

But if it were up to me, my job would be automated away in 5-10 years' time... sketch something out on paper or Figma, show it to an AI, and have an interactive website created and hosted in a few minutes. That'd be cool, even though I'd be unemployed. In that case I'd love to change careers and do something as far away from the screen as possible.