It happens at a family dinner. Your aunt asks how the job is going, and you start to explain. You mention the platform team, the migration, the service you look after. Halfway through the second sentence you can see her eyes glaze over. Your dad steps in to help. He works with computers, he says. Something to do with the internet. Everyone nods, and the conversation moves on.
It is easy to laugh it off. But being able to explain your work to someone with no technical background is a genuinely useful skill, and your family are a good, forgiving audience to practise on.
Start with who it helps, not how it works. Nobody outside tech cares about the service or the database. They care about the people at the other end. I help build the system a supermarket uses to know what is on its shelves. I work on the part of a banking app that checks it is really you logging in. One sentence like that tells people more than a paragraph of detail.
Then use something they already know. If you work on reliability, it is a bit like being the person who makes sure the trains keep running when one breaks down. If you work on search, you help people find the one thing they want in a shop with ten million items. A comparison does not need to be perfect. It needs to give them a picture to hold on to.
Pick one story rather than a summary. Last month the app stopped working for an hour for people in one city, and I was the one who found out why. A story has a beginning and an end, and people remember it.
Watch for the moment they want more, and the moment they do not. Some relatives will ask a follow up question, and that is your invitation to go a little deeper. Others will be happy with one sentence, and that is fine too. You are not giving a presentation.
Be careful about what you share. It is natural to talk about your work, but some details about customers, security or upcoming products may be confidential, even at a family table. If in doubt, stay with the general picture.
Try the same sentence on a friend outside the industry and see whether it lands. Adjust it until it does. You will be surprised how often you use it afterwards, with a new manager from another department, with a customer, with a recruiter, or with a neighbour at a party.
And be patient when they still describe it wrongly. Your gran may go on telling her friends that you fix computers for a living. That is all right. What matters is that she knows you are doing something you care about, and that she asked.
– Asael Shinder
