What do I do for a living?

What do I do for a living?  I’ve been asked that a lot recently and I don’t have a good answer.  Usually I just give the nebulous “software” answer, but that isn’t satisfying to many.  A long, detailed answer is probably not good for someone who isn’t in the industry.  I haven’t yet found a satisfactory answer that starts small and scales to the interest level of the asker; something that lends itself to expansion based on follow up questions.

When I started my career in software, I was a little more eager to describe my job.  That didn’t go over well.  I remember responding to this question once in detail only to be interrupted with a, “yeah, that kind of stuff,” dismissal.  I guess she was more interested in small talk, which seems to be the exchange of words, than in the exchange of information.  Since then, I’ve scaled back my answer. 

The drawback to this is that some people do want a little more detail in the answer.  That leads to that form of off-the-cuff ad-libbing often described as “conversation.”  That’s not really my forte.  Conversing with me has been described before, on more than one occasion, with the phrase, “pulling teeth.”  I’m left in an awkward situation.

Do you want the truth?  I’m a shit shoveler.  I shovel shit into and out of databases.  I solve problems on a schedule, even if the problems haven’t been fully determined by the time I have to get started, or even by the release date.  I shoot at moving targets.  I build houses out of modular pieces because you’re not sure if you need five or five hundred rooms and the number may change at different times of the day.  I have to be able to rearrange the rooms on the fly because at some point during the process you’re going to demand that the atrium (Didn’t I say we needed an atrium?  I’m sure that was in our original discussion.  No, we didn’t document that.) absolutely must be between the kitchen and the dining room, with bathrooms adjacent, regardless of where the plumbing has already been run.

What do I do for a living?  I write software.