How do you explain your technical job to someone that is not technical?

Question

Closed as 'Exact Duplicate' of: How can I explain to a non-technical person what I do for a living?

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It sucks trying to explain your job to someone and they give you a blank stare in return. Any remedies?

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My best answer is "I am like Micheal Bolton on Office Space"

Answer 1

Move on. You aren't going to teach them CS in an hour. Try to tell them what you do on a higher level perhaps.

Answer 2

Nope, your best bet is to find an BBC documentary that explains it, like they do it to explain string theory to common people. You on the other hand are too technical to do this.

Answer 3

I've found it's a good idea to skip the details and use a very broad brush. Among people in the same field, I might say I do FPGA design with VHDL and algorithm modeling with matlab, but to the public at large, I design electronics.

Answer 4

People can vaguely understand business if not technology. Discuss what you code, not how.

Answer 5

Why not an analogy to a builder?

Answer 6

This is a very common communication challenge. Here are some ideas that I have found useful:

1. Get to know the non-tech person. If they're into sports, use (judiciously!) sports analogies where you can. Or basket weaving, or music, or whatever they can relate to.
2. Try to remember how you learned the topic. You have a mental model for the topic you're discussing- deconstruct it as much as you can and rephrase it with suggestion #1 in mind.
3. Be aware of the role of the non-tech person. Executive management isn't interested in method naming conventions. Project management doesn't need to understand the pros/cons of the framework you're using (that's your job!) Target the discussion to their primary interest and do not include information that is not relevant to their job responsibility.
4. DO NOT BE CONDESCENDING!! Your job is difficult, takes long hours, and lots of study and trial and error. It's a rough gig. Tough. Nobody else at your company cares except your peers. Be available, open, honest, and forthright. If a non-tech person it having trouble understanding you, that's your problem not theirs. Try ONCE to completely rephrase your explanation (don't just speak more loudly and/or slowly.) If that doesn't do it, research for a better explanation or ask a peer for help.

Answer 7

It's an art you should try to improve. It's called the elevator pitch, how to tell a stranger in 30 seconds what do you do in words she can understand, whatever her background.

I've found that talking about what do your programs mostly do (the what) is more helpful than what do you actually do (the how). This is a bit counterintuitive, because for us the how is the most interesting part (holy wars, learning new technologies, etc.)

For instance, instead of "I use .NET Remoting to call Web Services that deliver the stock quotes via a Java Application Platform that is down a lot of the time" go "I design systems to help my company get stock quotes"

Answer 8

Very slowly...