Ask Slashdot: How Can Programmers Explain Their Work To Non-Programmers?

Slashdot reader Grady Martin writes: I disrespect people who describe their work in highfalutin terms... However, describing my own work as "programming solutions to problems" is little more than codifying what just about anyone can perceive through intuition. Case in point: Home for the holidays, I was asked about recent accomplishments and attempted to explain the process of producing compact visualizations of branched undo/redo histories.

Responses ranged from, "Well, duh," to, "I can already do that in Word"...

It's the "duh" that I want to address, because of course an elegant solution seem obvious after the fact: Such is the nature of elegance itself. Does anyone have advice on making elegance sound impressive?
An anonymous Slashdot reader left this suggestion for explaining your work to non-programmers. "Don't. I get sick when I hear the bullshit artists spew crap out of their mouth when they have no idea wtf they're talking about. Especially managers..."

But how about the rest of you? How can programmers explain their work to non-programmers?

Comments

Waste of effort

[inflex]

Don't even bother, waste of effort. If you want to expend energy, then focus it back on yourself and learn to accept that unless you're talking to peers you're always going to be misunderstood, not out of malice or intent, but simply because there's almost always a large collection of context and assumptions that you simply cannot impart on to those who ask the question.

Just keep it simple even and deal with accepting that it'll grind your soul. Same applies to a lot of other fields of work. Try hard and you'll just come off as self-important.

Like a Medical Doctor

[djbckr]

Like a medical doctor would explain a disease to you in layman's terms, you would describe what you do in layman's terms. Since they aren't professional, they wouldn't know anything about visualizing branched undo/redo histories. Use common words in contexts they understand. They won't understand the depth of what you do, but as long as the get the gist, that's all you can hope for.

Re:Like a Medical Doctor

[LesFerg]

Precisely that. If you can't explain the convenience or purpose provided for the end-user of your software in layman's terms, maybe you shouldn't be writing the software.
My relatives are happy to hear something like "I reduced the amount of copying and re-typing that nurses have to do when producing a discharge summary to be sent to the patient's doctor".
Nobody needs to know the complexities of database retrievals and layout crap that goes on in the code. Why would they want to know the details? They only ask what you have been doing to be polite, be polite in response.

I say its like cooking ...

[perpenso]

I say its like cooking. A program is like a recipe. Its a series of very detailed instructions on how to take a bunch of ingredients and turn them into something else. For the computer program the ingredients may be numbers, letters, pictures, sounds, keystrokes, mouse clicks, ... all sorts of different things; the instruction are how to manipulate those numbers, letters, pictures, sounds, etc. Bugs are like a recipe where something was written down incorrectly or left out and you end up with something that tastes bad.

Yes its dumbed down and oversimplified but people usually get it. Its how the professor explained it on day one of the "Introduction to Computer Programming" class.

Re:Need no explanation

[sycodon]

"What do you do?"

"I'm in computers"

"Ahh...ok"

Then the conversation proceeds about other, more important stuff, like what to have for dinner, what time to meet for the movie, trip, etc.

Nobody really wants to know what other people do in detail unless they are considering a career change into that field.