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.

Depends on wether I want them to understand. If I just say we are the ISP for universities and other schools of higher education then they mostly go, “Ah okay”, but it seems like no one has any idea what that means. I feel like despite using them daily people don’t even know what a network is sometimes.

Yes, I do. I’m a devops engineer and even “coding camp devs” have problems understanding what I do for a living.

Game Dev here. More specifically, audio director. Used to be tech sound designer and composer. I find it hard to explain even over here, among the geeks like me.

My job title is an acronym, inside the company no one seems to agree on what this acronym stands for. So yes, I just say I work in the Automotive industry.

I’m a public servant, so while it’s easy to tell people I work for The Government, it’s a lot harder to explain what I do. My job is a mish-mash of like three different roles in one of the least popular departments. When people ask, I say I work for (our version of) the DMV, and that’s usually good enough.

I used to do support for a trading application in an investment bank. My mother didn’t understand that this all happened in a reasonably normal office space and used to describe it to people as if I worked on the floor in the New York Stock Exchange, hand gestures and all.

Yeah, I work in cyber forensics where everything I do is confidential, so yeah, I can’t actually explain my job which makes it difficult to explain my job

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

Reading the first several posts… Is everyone here in IT? 🤣🤣

I recently told a seven year old that I am a wizard. I already have the beard and being a programmer, that is exactly what my customers feel about my work.

Trouble as in I’m in trouble if I do. I’m a formally educated it security engineer running my own incorporated software and infrastructure company. Firstly: people just hear “computer guy” and their second thought is “he can fix my stuff”. So I stay near to the truth and simplify it: I’m a theoretical electrical engineer. Boom, instant bored face and they leave as fast as they can. My neighbors love me, but I haven’t fixed a single of their computers in decades.

Also pro tip: the wife has the same qualifications as I, so she fixes her family’s stuff herself. My job is to lug stuff and the kids around at home.

Me: I’m in IT (trying to keep it simple)

Them: OK, but what do you do in IT?

Me: I’m a system administrator (again trying to keep it simple)

Them: I don’t know what that means. What does a system administrator do?

Me: I work on servers (again, trying to keep it simple)

Them: What’s a server?

Me: I’m in IT…

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.

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.