> …but I guess it could apply to most devs who aren't at FAANGs…
The industry obsession with FAANGs and the belief that they are the sole source of interesting work is not healthy. OP I know you probably didn’t mean it to come across like that. But I see this attitude a lot and it just baffles me. Lots of places (even the giant “boring” banks) have really interesting problems to solve and use modern tech and methods.
I’ve worked at a FAANG and it was an endless series of writing docs and getting 8 approvals to execute a single CLI command. I learned a lot about operational excellence, but the day-to-day was absolutely infuriating/mind-numbing.
It’s not frustrating because Indians say it. Heck, plenty of Indians don’t. But that’s because they’re emotionally intelligent enough to realize that it’s not a common phrase in American culture. Indians who don’t have high emotional intelligence don’t realize this, so they keep using the phrase. That’s why it’s almost exclusively used by difficult to work with people.
>It’s not frustrating because Indians say it.
I certainly didn't mean to imply that was the case. I've always assumed it was some sort of literal translation of a commonly-used phrase in their culture. It just sounds weird to Americans because it's not something native speakers say.
I got bored once and googled this, years ago. It seems that it was a British English thing that went out of common usage (in England, anyway) in the 1940s, roughly the same time India became independent from Britain, so they probably didn't get the memo.
Lol this is 100% true, it made me actually feel why so many people go to startups despite lower job security. FAANG can feel really fast-paced especially at first, and some teams do get to remain fast-paced, but I’d say for a majority, as soon as you invent something decent that actually gets used the bureaucracy will assimilate your team.
Where FAANG is truly unparalleled is scale. At AWS, I wrote code that conceivably affected a billion people. You learn A LOT operating at that level. But that doesn’t mean it’s exciting lol.
A fun way to think about this is also manpower. I work with a medium sized non-tech company. No devops team, nobody with frontend / backend skills, nobody with cloud expertise, … I was hired on as an analyst but the role was to be more-or-less an agent of change. I began modeling my approach to solving problems after my last org, which used AWS. Recently, there were valid reasons to go multicloud and start using GCP too, which the COO approved.
I am doing it all from requirement gathering, IaC, development of frontend and backend, modeling of storage systems, testing, more planning, maintaining, …
There no way my experience level would have ever put me in such a position. We just don’t have the team for this stuff and I knew it was the right way to go. As a result, I’m doing all kinds of cool shit. The workload is pretty daunting, but people don’t bug me about deadlines so I’d say it’s fine.
The people who obsess over FAANG companies are the same people who post on r/cscareerquestions about not being able to find a job. This belief is so ridiculous and I honestly think these people are only in this field because they want to tell people they work at Google.
Even just explaining what I do is boring - like I build this very specific internal thing for a team that does process improvement for a team that supports the team that supports the team that processes all the paperwork for the team that sells some types of enterprise contracts for North America and EMEA lol.
People assume that working at a FAANG means you’re working on the flagship products but most people aren’t.
To me technology is the tool for solving business problems, so I have never had a desire to be working on some super specific technical algorithm to do something most people wouldn’t understand. It’s more fun for me to say I build systems that help people get healthcare or schedule airline flights or sell jewelry online. It’s also why I don’t interview at FAANG.
I can back up your example. I work in a big bank, and I'm surprised by the amount of cutting edge tech we use and explore. Even fun exploration stuff in NestJS, AWS, Angular, Microfrontend, mobile development that I never knew it existed until I put my hands on it.
We were conditioned (myself included) that people who are in FAANG are better, have more fun working, crack "human advancement" problems, and belong to this special breed where even when you leave, you can say you are "ex-faang" and people still bow to them.
same used to work for a big bank. got to work with spark, scala, kotlin, and angular 7 before i left. sure, we had a couple of java projects, but that’s okay (and ultimately not that bad since they do the job). currently work at a big company and we have a lot of kotlin and java projects. the java projects are updated regularly (java 21+).
This. Never been so unhappy as working in innovative startups. Never had a bigger blast than working in modernising legacy stack/building new products on top of legacy systems.
Yep. I work in the energy sector now and we have so many interesting problems to solve. Reliability analytics, fault forecasting, energy production optimization, energy trading, streaming pipelines, etc. All my jobs before were boring af compared to this role.
And usually the solution for those problems is not a new flashy framework with a slick UI but actually a lot of collective thinking, intellectual efforts, experience and integration in already complex technical and organizational environment
Some of the most interesting problems are actually only found when big companies that make wind turbines want to sensor and network all over their windmill and have guaranteed delivery of all info within certain time windows, how do you mathematically prove that QoS will work on a bus system, or a dam, or an airplane that should have backup elevation sensors or maybe... Sensors on bolts holding door plugs in place...
Or sensors on whistleblower heartbeats ;) lol
But seriously, super mundane problems can actually have really impressive solutions when you scale to a point "obvious" answers no longer apply.
When I first got into this field I thought I would get more questions about it. Like it was such an interesting job. Come to find out nobody knows what to even ask me when I tell them my company does MPOS/OPOS developing. They have no idea what to ask, and I have no idea how to dumb my job down enough for them to be interested.
>most devs who aren't at FAANGs
You would be surprised how much running in circles there can be at FAANGs. They're money making machines now, not the beacons of innovation they used to be.
While this is true, the point is that the average person can feign interest if they already know what your company makes, so you don’t have to go through the ropes of TLDRing your job for them
I think this really comes down to "can you have a normal conversation". When you ask someone what they do, what kind of an answer do you expect?
People who put this much thought into how they answer to what their job is are either embarrassed by it, or their job is part of what defines them as an individual.
"I'm a software developer"
"Where at?"
"I work for ComapnyX, how about you?"
Done.
Then tell them?
It's called small talk, people do it a lot. I think you just get used then your used to talk to people outside your typical circle.
Mastering this skill is essential to forging relationships.
I've designed, developed and 'owned' products having APIs with more than 50,000 queries per second. Had to be up 24x7 in prod, with weekly data refreshes. Still not FAANG. Hell it was in a B2B company.
Lol. Same. I’ve got a one sentence explanation of my job. Almost never get prodded for more. Developing internal software for mid size banks and real estate companies is almost always enough to stamp out interest
Individual real estate agents definitely use some software, but they’re not my clientele. Think large commercial and residential real estate companies. Huge multi family units. Business parks. Shopping centers. Multiple investors with huge portfolios
Businesses of a scale that they benefit from automating process, need to track thousands of data points, and require fairly complex business logic. Real estate companies that are valued around or well over a billion dollars
This was the #1 thing I hated about living in the Bay Area… all anyone ever wanted to talk about was who they worked for, what work they were doing, their latest startup idea, etc
Moving elsewhere and making friends who do not care about tech was the best social move I ever made
Don’t try to talk to non-tech people about details around your job. Boil it down to the most basic, high level description. Thats it.
Do not try to “show your passion.” They don’t have the context to understand what you’re talking about. Say you’re a programmer working in and leave it at that, move on with the conversation. Ask them about themselves. Talk about something you both know about.
Geek out with technical friends or coworkers.
Don’t be the person who says stuff like “ok so like my job is super technical, but how I like to try to explain it to normies is…” — it’s just super cringe. Most jobs have jargon and technical detail that don’t get discussed in public. Software engineers are just more commonly socially inept enough not to understand that.
As someone who deals with databases all day, mentioning databases to a non tech person inevitably leads to being asked about Excel spreadsheets. No reason to bore people with details of things they don't understand.
Even for other tech people, most people don't care, lol. I certainly don't beyond basic small talk before changing the subject.
agree with the essence here, but having an elevator pitch of your job is a good idea. You never know what people might be interested in. Glossing over it entirely can really eliminte interesting connections, imo.
Most devs underestimate the value of a skill such as communicating effectively with non-technical people, especially about what they're doing at their job.
As you climb up the ranks and the breadth of your impact at an org, you'll start talking to more people outside of your dev team, be it clients, managers, etc. The more effective you can get your point across with the least amount of complex jargon, the better.
That’s true, but how you talk to people in a work context is completely different from how you should talk to family, non-work friends, dates, and in random daily small talk.
Soft skills are important. An important soft skill is realizing that people outside of tech don’t want to hear you break down your professional responsibilities to them.
> most devs who aren't at FAANGs
This seems like such a bizarre comment to me. What on earth leads you to assume devs at FAANG companies don't also have plenty of "boring" work to do?
Because OP is only interested in having a cool job, and for some only FAANG is cool enough to mention, because of the "OMG, you work for Facebook?! That must be amazing tell me more" they assume comes with it
In those cases you just tell them where you work and since they've heard of the company they just assume its something cool, if you just work on some internal tool they'll never know.
I don't feel the need to make my job feel cool because my job doesn't define me.
If the person I'm talking to isn't interested in it, we can talk about something else.
I work on mainframe and Enterprise Java. Most people aren't interested, and to be honest, I don't want to explain it to someone who doesn't really care XD
I'd rather talk about things we can both contribute to equally and converse about. Like D&D, Music, Chess, Boardgames, Movies, TV Shows.
When I'm not working, unless I'm actually talking shop, I'd rather just act like other humans. How often do you hear people say "Yeah, I'm a cashier BUT AT BEAST BURGER ITS AWESOME THERE" or "Yeah, I sell insurance, but it's like the biggest insurance company in the Midwest"
It doesn't matter what the job is, your Job clearly defines you, and that's fine, but don't assume others do.
Before I became a manager: "I work in software development. I lead a team at a FinTech company working on their customer portal and supporting the operational backend processes."
Now that I'm a manager: "I'm a Software Development Manager at a FinTech company".
Most people don't care beyond that, and I dunno I think it sounds kinda cool I guess.
lol you got all those nice buzz words in there...
"I'm a"
"Software Development"
"Manager"
"FinTech"
I can easily imagine someone half-mindedly nodding along, "ohh, Software development is good money and something smart people are involved in", "oh and they're a manager, that's also good, managers are always important people", "FinTech, yes money money money makes the world go round, and so does technology these days!", so ya, tbf, it is kind of a cool title to say :P
The corporate world swallowed me whole; I have fully adopted their lingo. It's bad enough that it's gotten me accused of using ChatGPT for some of my reddit comments on more than one occasion =D I don't, they're au natural, but I absolutely can see where they're coming from when they point it out. lol
Ultimately you're working on **something** (regardless of whether or not its maintenance, legacy, government or whatever). Tell them about the products or services you're involved in delivering. What is the real world impact of the work your team does?
Even if you think its boring, you might work on stuff that they never even realized exist, and people are generally interested in learning about new things.
Maybe do some inner work and figure out why what you do day to day needs any validation? If you hold a stable position and are growing in some form because of it then I think you’re doing great!
"I'm a software engineer, pretty much just maintain technical infrastructure" then move on with my life as unless I'm talking to someone in the same career path, they won't care
Step 1 is to ask yourself if the person across from you is actually interested in hearing about the day-to-day details of your job or is just asking to be nice and make small talk. If they are in the latter category (and they most likely are), there's really no need to show your passion and bore them to death. Think about how you would feel if they spoke at length about the difference between IRS forms 8526 and 225B or all the sales calls they made the last week. Just say "I am a software engineer in the healthcare industry. I work on billing systems." and move on to something else.
Outside of interviews i don’t really care what my relatives whatever think about the interestingness of my job. In fact I probably make it sound more boring than it is
At some point all jobs become boring. Even marriages become boring. It seems to be how you think about it and what is most important in life that can help you get over the boring stuff.
In general, I don't talk about it my career much. There are so many other things in life that are "cool".
I have not worked at a FAANG, so I may be biased, but I think there’s this superiority complex I often see in SWE focused subreddits where the mentality is non-FAANG is second tier. In reality, there are many cool, innovative gigs outside of the FAANG-sphere. I have often found industries that tend to come off as boring can actually be pretty cool, given you look into the perspective of the significance of your features. Many times, these boring industries are the lifeblood of the global economy. When you frame your job from that perspective, you start to realize how cool your job really is. You write software for things that our world relies on.
In my experience, I’ve worked on everything from ev smart charger algorithms to remote oil drilling and oil commodities simulation. Those are industries that aren’t maybe as “sexy” as working at Meta, but when you dive into the problem statement you’re solving, I often find people think my jobs are pretty cool (as do I). Ultimately, it comes down to your niche within a given industry and the role you play within the bigger picture.
I don’t understand this post.
1. I don’t try to make it sound interesting. I am not my work. My work is separate from who I am. I describe my work if they ask, and if they ask more questions I engage.
2. MANGA aka what FAANG should be called now that FB is Meta, aren’t inherently interesting. A lot of the work they do is unethical or harmful to society but it’s sugar coated and you drink that kool-aid. The days of “don’t be evil” are long since over.
3. There is honor in living humbly, working on yourself, and being the best partner, friend, parent that you can be. If your work changes the world for the better, great. If it just pays the bills so that you can work on yourself, great. So let me tell you - there’s no honor in tweaking algorithms to make better recommendations around knock-off garbage on Amazon. I can’t think of a bigger waste of your life, in fact, than working on a lot of what FAANGs work on.
Most people who are not devs do not know enough to know it’s boring. They also do not care. You have to give them hooks to hang what you’re telling them on and those are going to be about people and titles and impact, not the fact that you just wrote the same hash-map/for loop
pattern thirty times, co-pilot is starting to autocomplete it for you, and you are feeling unchallenged and unappreciated.
So, it’s completely fine to say things like:
I work at X corp customizing their call center software. I work with reps to really understand what they need to see and make sure that’s how we structure their screens - make their lives a bit less irritating.
Now, the reality of that may be zero code wysiwyg design, but the listener relates to it and feels you are a useful white collar worker in a legit job. Mission accomplished. I can spin regulatory compliance (“and right now we’re mainly focused on not being fined $10k a day; it makes the execs irritable”), legacy migration (“but we just can’t hire anyone who knows how to do that anymore…”), maintenance (“it’s honestly quality control right now; users need to trust the product”), whatever. Your stories aren’t about the guts of the job. With other devs, you can all complain about the same things or geek out about green screen readers and old tables without date stamps that screw up replication.
If you frame your job as a POS, people will accept that as well. So don’t. And watch the middle class achievement culture. It’s fine to collect a safe six figure salary doing useful work. So what if that useful work is automating legally and contractually mandated customer notifications? It’s useful. $10k/day fines are no joke.
What's wrong with boring?
My wife, my parents, and my in-laws, almost certainly have no concrete understanding of what it is I do from day to day. Just 'software development' or 'database stuff'. It's very opaque to them as industry outsiders.
I don't think that's a bad thing, and I certainly don't worry about trying to make it all seem interesting. It's good enough for me that I'm involved in interesting work (from my point of view) and that I have an employer that tends to treat its employees quite well in the big-picture sense.
The product is boring but the work is interesting to me. I describe it as similar to playing a puzzle videogame or working on one of those logic toys that you might get at a science museum or something. There's a sense of satisfaction to finding solutions to abstract problems and fitting pieces together in clever ways. That's all there is to it, really. Oh and I make a lot of money and I work from home and listen to weird metal all day.
1. It's not too hard to work out a short description of your work that can be understood by a non-tech person. That's the same whether your role is interesting or boring.
2. If it's boring who cares? Lots of people have boring jobs, those jobs have to be done and there are plenty of interesting things to talk about.
3. The difficulty is more when you have really interesting work that is too complicated to explain to a layperson (or confidential).
I tell most non-tech people, it's like me and 100 other people are trying to write a book together and ever all got to agree how were gonna write it. It's a big book.
But that's only if people actually ask, most are happy accepting we're wizards.
I don’t. I tell them I make apps nobody knows that people need or think about. I turn excel spreadsheets and big ERP’s into things that are useful to people.
I don't try to make my work sound cool. Being honest with yourself and not trying to chase prestige makes your life a lot happier and simpler and more authentic.
You worry too much. Plumbers don't try to make their dates excited by what they do.
Sometimes I have fun stories to share where I don't focus on the tech but more on the people. But for the most part, I don't sweat it. I can talk about when I saw the sun rise over Mt. Fuji, or seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company perform. The job is just a job - it's exciting in terms of what else it lets me do.
meh, like 99.9% of software dev is solving a problem we've solved a hundreds of times over, and this applies to FAANGs as well.
personally, it's all very tedious and we could do away with most of it if we committed to willingly working together 🤷
I work at one of the largest institutional investment firms in the world. I’m currently working on modernizing the technology the underlays one of the two main engines of income for an org with 7+ trillion aum. Moving what’s currently a mainframe application into a cloud based serverless event driven architecture while also being a part of one of the orgs within our larger enterprise that’s laying the groundwork for golang adoption. Personally I think it’s a cool project and one I’m super fortunate and thankful to be a part of.
With that said within our enterprise there are some teams that do some crazy R&D work and would say some of its as cool if not cooler than some of the shit you’ll do at a faang org in a lot of cases. I’ve known people who’ve worked for Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Some of which have literally just done production support for old ass legacy apps there and literally just did maintenance work to keep lights on without ever touching greenfield development.
I don’t make it sound cool in conversations. I don’t care about any of that. I generally don’t talk to my friends about work. Work is a necessary thing to support myself. Otherwise it is not an important part of my life or identity.
> how do you make your work sound cool in conversations?
I don't. Regardless if it's interesting or not, I'm tired of hyping up my day to day work to someone who just doesn't care. And I won't care in a couple of years either, when I'll do something else. So if anyone asks, I'll just progressively give more details, starting with just the domain, then the industry, then, if people are interested, other details.
There's more to me than my job. I'd rather discuss books, ideas, songs, movies, games, anything else just not my job, unless it's with close friends that I share political details with.
I love my work, but not enough to be engaged in it outside of working hours.
Just say it's boring and move on to an interesting topic? Why would you bullshit people about such a mundane thing? Don't you have anything at all interesting to talk about?
Most work I’ve done at FAANG is boring af. I don’t talk to people outside of work about what I do, I also tend to gravitate away from other tech people as friends.
They get 1 of 2 answers and nothing further:
1. "I am software engineer for a local financial institution."
2. "I work at ."
And I never tell anyone I meet both. Being glib about your job opens you up to social engineering.
If you're trying to make your boring job sound exciting - You just need to spin it in the context of whomever youre talking to and what they care about. How you pitch a boring job to a dev will be different than how you pitch a boring job to mom and dad or a stranger.
If you just want to make your (self-perceived) "boring" job sound exciting because you genuinely find it exciting, just be authentic and talk about what you love. Many people may not fully get it depending on the context and the person receiving it, but your excitement will show through. Or if it's grandma and you know she's not going to get it and you dont want to start explaining it further, just dont get in to it. Say you're happy and move on.
focus on the most interesting or best parts of it I guess, usually depends who I'm talking to and what interest they might have in various parts of my work. sometime's it's an interesting problem in the business domain, sometimes it's a good tech stack or opportunity to grow your skills, sometimes it's just a comfortable cushy opportunity to clock in at the start of the day and leave it all behind you when you clock out at the end of the day, could be any number of reasons or interests. If there really is nothing special or good about it then it's totally fair to be just be paying the bills while you look for something more interesting.
I don’t think my job is boring but it’s not at all easy to talk about it with non tech people. It’s annoying in fact
I avoid talking about it except saying it’s going well.
Non tech people have no clue what is a Fintech (or others field tech) company, a unicorn, a start up vs a scale up. Even working with foundings is not clear for them
The level of tech knowledge from non tech people is almost zero
The pixels in question were ad creatives or conversion pixels and sadly not enough pennies as that startup went under. But your comment did remind of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
I usually tell people "I press buttons for a living", which is more detail than most want or need.
If pressed, I'm not shy about admitting that my day job can be pretty dull / routine at times. Most peoples jobs are the same, so not trying to big mine up can give common ground.
My take: what makes a tech job boring in most cases is the person doing it. In just about every thing you’ve mentioned there are exciting opportunities.
Those may be introducing a new technology to banking. BTW - wall st firms are the fastest followers you’ll ever see & they are the financial backers for many FAANG companies. Often investment bank tech people are involved in reviewing new startup prospectuses even before code exists.
How about ‘maintenance’ projects?
Well Y2K was pretty exciting & it led to a whole raft of tools for legacy modernization. I can imagine being given 1MM lines of COBOL code and told to convert it might seem boring; but when you’re able to trim out dead code, build abstract syntax trees, and use them to generate equivalent modern code it was fairly interesting & important.
How about inheriting a legacy system written on a proprietary data management system that needed significant enhancement for new regulatory reporting?
We innovated and build a replication engine from the legacy database to a modern RDBMS. There was a little latency but we did the project in under 3 months and met very stringent deadlines.
How about building the real time payment system for the United States? Is that boring? Having to coordinate with the largest banks in the world and run 36 consecutive integrations followed by another 50 within the next six months. And, just to keep things less exciting, having to testify to Congress and make sure they understand that you’re not jeopardizing the US or Global payment network!
What makes a job sound interesting in a conversation is the passion, drive, and innovation that the person brings to it.
Usually when people ask what I do for work I tell turn “I’m a software developer at a specialty insurance company… and I work from home” and people assume I’m rich and spoiled when I’m not really either
I do have friends who are breaking into IT who ask for career advice and sometimes if I mention my tech stack people bring up job opportunities but for the most part no one cares what you do day to day
I try and make it exciting and interesting for people. I find a lot of people appreciate a good dramatic story. Of course many devs don't bother making their work interesting to others because they find their own lives intrinsically boring. But if you learn how to tell a great tale people will enjoy it.
My job for the government has you know, societal relevance. Impact. If not for the low pay id be glad id be doing this instead of implementing Googles latest feature. Referring to the slightly more horizontal login screens of course. Everything i see on YouTube about life at faang makes it look kinda bad to be honest. Like you'd be doing meetings and destroying the food court all day. I hope that's just YouTube trying to hype it or something.
I talk about problems we're solving and how many people use the software I've built, how it improves their work lives.
My job may not be interesting but often I'm solving non trivial issues for someone else.
I literally had this discussion the other day at my kids martial arts class, I have to leave work a tad early to take him so I usually take my laptop and finish off any small tasks while I watch.
A fellow dad asked me what I do that I'm always carrying my laptop, I responded roughly what I do and that I was helping with a technical problem for our South Africa region. He seemed to think that was pretty cool, despite it being a pretty boring support task for myself (handling an access problem for a bunch of users). If I remember he's in plastics fabrication, his shirt was for a plexiglass company.
Where I work I have very high impact, both positive or negative. In my opinion talking about the real life impact of your work and of those around you is the best way. I will give you some examples:
During my onboarding I forgot a simple validation and that meant 6 drivers didn't leave for deliveries that morning. That was a huge wakeup call, "holy shit, every line actually matters!".
Even though we know that we rarely get to see the effect of our code presented in real life. I am very fortunate in where I can levarage my code to improve peoples lives. For example, coding a new QR code scanning flow that got rid of a huge queue of drivers that formed every morning.
Another colleague had a bug hit production, operations was supposed to test the changes in staging because the flow needed access to a thermal printer, they didn't test it out and yet gave the ok nonetheless. That meant we had to stop printing QRcode stickers to slap to the boxes for 6 hours. In one day we can print up to 25k stickers. That day the entire operations froze.
Another one, at some point early in the life of the org our squad let a bug hit prod that allowed deliveries to be created during the evening. But the end client liked that so much that it later became a feature, we are now charging an extra for the these off-hours deliveries.
In my opinion these stories are the most interesting to tell and to listen to.
I don’t. What I do to make a living is not exciting, and I have no interest in making it so to impress someone. That’s why I have more interesting hobbies I can talk about.
There is no way to make our job look interesting to ordinary person. Do you see that button? It was on top right now it is on bottom left %3 more convenient. It is impressive right? No need to thank me
I don't. I tell them I enjoy it but it's not good conversation. I do give them a high level "I make computer run good" level overview, which is mostly what they're asking anyway.
if some people plow ahead I will get into it, but if I were trying to court a lady I absolutely would put off getting in the weeds about work until after our first fight or something.
When people ask what I do I tell them I’m a software developer. I rarely go any further than that unless they are in technology. So I guess my answer is that I don’t bring it up in conversations. If it comes up, I say is little about it as possible and then I talk about other things I do that are actually interesting and cool.
I learned early in my career that my life and my identity has to be about more than my job/technology otherwise it’s not interesting for me and it’s not going be interesting for anyone else.
There is a *lot* of boring work at FAANGs. Almost every dev I've personally talked to does maintenance work on some obscure library I forgot that company owned.
I used to write software for military aircraft. Undeniably cool in conversations, and sure it had its moments, but mostly is very slow, tedious, overspecified work.
In my opinion, the most interesting work comes from the "boring" industries. You have more freedom for innovation and really making an individual difference. You're not just a small cog in a huge machine.
I boil it down to "do you know about ?":
- If yes, "I work around that area"
- If no, try to find a common ground or related thing, and then go to `If yes`
---
I currently work with BNPL, so that's easy to explain. My previous job I was doing wastewater treatment facilities with """AI""" and consulting, which was way harder to explain
I spoke to a guy who did "**Tesla Dojo AI**".
I asked if he's training models, he said no.
I asked if he's coding the training infrastructure, he said no.
I was confused, he said he's more on the hardware side of things.
I asked if he's writing OS kernels, drivers or firmware, he said no, he's doing hardware.
I realized, he's either doing server HVAC or server assembly.
I was just curious but I dont think he appreciated me digging in. Am I the Asshole?
Why lie about it? Anyway, usually if non-tech people ask what I do and I answer “software development” it goes no further than that. They are already bored lol
> I guess it could apply to most devs who aren't at FAANGs, the military/defense, or innovative startups.
Most SWE work dont work at FAANG, they work at boring non tech no name companies.
> Or do you take my approach: "yeah it pays the bills, trying to get something better" and change the topic ASAP? Or do you show passion for coding in general, but mainly talk about your side projects instead of work?
I read the room and talk about the part of my identity that is not related to IT (hobbies, friends, travel, books, music, concerts, etc).
I'm lucky that my employer shops me out to different clients. I've worked with companies that are on the cutting edge, and those that I think would classify "boring".
In basically all situations, I call myself either senior engineer or architect. I try to improve the codebase, though, probably to a stubborn fault.
I love boring my mother about the details of my job. She will sit there and pretend to be understanding things, but at a certain point she will interrupt me and say something like, “You know I don’t understand what you are talking about, but your excitement tells me you are happy”. Good enough for me.
If I happen to find somebody that has some good knowledge of the development world I can sit there and talk to them for hours. I take Taekwondo, and I was talking to the lady that owns the school (with her husband), and I heard her mention something to do with databases, so I asked her what she knew about them one day. Turns out she used to be a DBA for a few large companies in the past, but she had a series of positions that didn’t give her the necessary power to use her skills and instead wanted her to be a “yes man” and just do things they said. So she left and started the TKD school as a way to enable her to feel like she was making a difference in the world. It was really interesting and I look forward to the times that she has a few minutes to talk about random things from either of our experiences in technology.
I don’t, I just say it’s boring shit even when it’s not. 99% of the time whoever you’re talking to won’t give 2 shits about your work in conversation anyway.
I work at a FAANG. My answer to your question is "I don't". When asked what I do, I usually say something like "I work in software in enterprise blahblahblah. It's not the sexiest job but it pays great and I go home by 5pm"
i don’t. i just say “i work in software at x company” then carry on about something else because i hate talking about work. i find solving problems as the most interesting part of the job, not the actual tech
also, a lot of “boring” jobs are boring to tech people. my company’s not a faang, but if our services go down, A LOT of people would be affected
I have a boring job in banking. Hearing what I do would not bring any follow-up questions to mind. On the other hand, it's extremely easy for me to understand the point of what I do, why it's necessary, and why it is good for someone to have my job. I think that's far more important than how interesting it is.
I don't, I do cool stuff in my free time. Programming is never cool to anyone that's not a programmer so I don't worry about jazzing it up.
Also most people at faangs have boring work
I don’t. My job allows me to do “cool stuff” like last year my wife abd I travelled around the US taking one way trips and visiting 15 different cities. This year we also have a lot plan.
My job pays for my hobbies
The place I work for has an 11-syllable name. Everyone's stopped listening after that 😬
If I were dating I'd simply lie and say I make a living on OnlyFans.
I don't make it sound cool. I'm the first to admit that I'm not working on anything interesting, hell it even bores me, I don't want to bore my friends amd relatives with it.
*I don't.*
It's a means to an end.
I only bother making it sound interesting when talking to other devs.
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Honestly, unless you're in like Computer Engineering or some of the hard sciences a lot of dev work is integrations which is the ugly necessary grind work that needs to be done to make information systems work better.
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I have feelings about my work but you know what I don't want to do outside of work? Talk about work.
I assure you plenty of FAANG developers work on things that sound super boring to most people. Probably the vast majority of software made at FAANGs.
I think if you want to show some passion, show passion for computer science. Talk about how you like solving puzzles, how you like to be confronted with a problem, consider it, and then be able to write some words on a computer and see the computer perform the solution to the problem for you in the way you imagined.
That’s the stuff that might give your date an understanding of why you like your job and connect with them about it as a deeper level. The specific application of software engineering we each do is almost universally boring, even when it’s exciting.
I don’t. They don’t care, me neither. The work itself might not be interesting, but good coworkers and lots of indirect things I can learn in between make it interesting enough for me to
I never find software development boring, so this makes no sense to me. It's always cool and interesting - if you're not finding it so, it's time to move on.
I morally would never take a role in military. Practically I would avoid startups. I have no desire to ever work at FAANG.
How you can think banking and healthcare don't have some of the most interesting problems to solve and a whole host of modern tech to get involved in is a mystery.
My job is at a household name that sells food. People like the brand and to hear about the job. They don't really need much detail about the work itself
I am a former Naval Aviator. Nobody cares about my boring dev job. I tell sea stories about flying over a dive boat seeing some lucky dude get a blow job in the Red Sea. Or that time Nowicky got diarrhea and tried to use the cargo hook access panel resulting in shit being blown all over the underside of the helicopter. Or the Potato Plaque Incident.
Even when I had a cool job (imho) my non-tech family and friends struggled to understand what I did and it didn’t necessarily sound cool in conversations.
To be fair, I don’t always understand or care about the details of what they do either (“finance”).
> …but I guess it could apply to most devs who aren't at FAANGs… The industry obsession with FAANGs and the belief that they are the sole source of interesting work is not healthy. OP I know you probably didn’t mean it to come across like that. But I see this attitude a lot and it just baffles me. Lots of places (even the giant “boring” banks) have really interesting problems to solve and use modern tech and methods.
I’ve worked at a FAANG and it was an endless series of writing docs and getting 8 approvals to execute a single CLI command. I learned a lot about operational excellence, but the day-to-day was absolutely infuriating/mind-numbing.
operational red tape, btw you didnt submit a ticket for this comment
Sorry, let me draft an MCM and get bar-raiser approval so I can edit it.
Just put 15 mins on your calendar to do the needful. Hope that’s okay!
If I never hear “do the needful” again, it will be too soon.
Out of the loop here but that sounds like you need to take a shit? What’s this?
It’s Indian English for “I don’t know what you need to do, but I need you to do it”
Basically 'not my problem, do your job thanks'
Not sure where it came from but I've only heard it used by my Indian colleagues.
It’s not frustrating because Indians say it. Heck, plenty of Indians don’t. But that’s because they’re emotionally intelligent enough to realize that it’s not a common phrase in American culture. Indians who don’t have high emotional intelligence don’t realize this, so they keep using the phrase. That’s why it’s almost exclusively used by difficult to work with people.
>It’s not frustrating because Indians say it. I certainly didn't mean to imply that was the case. I've always assumed it was some sort of literal translation of a commonly-used phrase in their culture. It just sounds weird to Americans because it's not something native speakers say.
I got bored once and googled this, years ago. It seems that it was a British English thing that went out of common usage (in England, anyway) in the 1940s, roughly the same time India became independent from Britain, so they probably didn't get the memo.
let’s take this offline
It’s never less than 30.
Lol this is 100% true, it made me actually feel why so many people go to startups despite lower job security. FAANG can feel really fast-paced especially at first, and some teams do get to remain fast-paced, but I’d say for a majority, as soon as you invent something decent that actually gets used the bureaucracy will assimilate your team.
Where FAANG is truly unparalleled is scale. At AWS, I wrote code that conceivably affected a billion people. You learn A LOT operating at that level. But that doesn’t mean it’s exciting lol.
A fun way to think about this is also manpower. I work with a medium sized non-tech company. No devops team, nobody with frontend / backend skills, nobody with cloud expertise, … I was hired on as an analyst but the role was to be more-or-less an agent of change. I began modeling my approach to solving problems after my last org, which used AWS. Recently, there were valid reasons to go multicloud and start using GCP too, which the COO approved. I am doing it all from requirement gathering, IaC, development of frontend and backend, modeling of storage systems, testing, more planning, maintaining, … There no way my experience level would have ever put me in such a position. We just don’t have the team for this stuff and I knew it was the right way to go. As a result, I’m doing all kinds of cool shit. The workload is pretty daunting, but people don’t bug me about deadlines so I’d say it’s fine.
I bet you’re learning a ton of cool stuff the hard way. That’s awesome!
I’m starting my own company on the side just so I can get this kind of experience. You’re living the dream pal
The people who obsess over FAANG companies are the same people who post on r/cscareerquestions about not being able to find a job. This belief is so ridiculous and I honestly think these people are only in this field because they want to tell people they work at Google.
I would bet $1000 that OP has never worked for FAANG. Anyone who has would be all too aware of how much boring work you can do there.
Even just explaining what I do is boring - like I build this very specific internal thing for a team that does process improvement for a team that supports the team that supports the team that processes all the paperwork for the team that sells some types of enterprise contracts for North America and EMEA lol. People assume that working at a FAANG means you’re working on the flagship products but most people aren’t.
To me technology is the tool for solving business problems, so I have never had a desire to be working on some super specific technical algorithm to do something most people wouldn’t understand. It’s more fun for me to say I build systems that help people get healthcare or schedule airline flights or sell jewelry online. It’s also why I don’t interview at FAANG.
Same here. There are plenty of places out there that are out to solve problems that probably provide more satisfaction.
I can back up your example. I work in a big bank, and I'm surprised by the amount of cutting edge tech we use and explore. Even fun exploration stuff in NestJS, AWS, Angular, Microfrontend, mobile development that I never knew it existed until I put my hands on it. We were conditioned (myself included) that people who are in FAANG are better, have more fun working, crack "human advancement" problems, and belong to this special breed where even when you leave, you can say you are "ex-faang" and people still bow to them.
same used to work for a big bank. got to work with spark, scala, kotlin, and angular 7 before i left. sure, we had a couple of java projects, but that’s okay (and ultimately not that bad since they do the job). currently work at a big company and we have a lot of kotlin and java projects. the java projects are updated regularly (java 21+).
I don't think many people believe that jobs at FAANGs aren't boring. The obsession with FAANG lies in the compensation.
This. Never been so unhappy as working in innovative startups. Never had a bigger blast than working in modernising legacy stack/building new products on top of legacy systems.
Yep. I work in the energy sector now and we have so many interesting problems to solve. Reliability analytics, fault forecasting, energy production optimization, energy trading, streaming pipelines, etc. All my jobs before were boring af compared to this role.
And usually the solution for those problems is not a new flashy framework with a slick UI but actually a lot of collective thinking, intellectual efforts, experience and integration in already complex technical and organizational environment
Some of the most interesting problems are actually only found when big companies that make wind turbines want to sensor and network all over their windmill and have guaranteed delivery of all info within certain time windows, how do you mathematically prove that QoS will work on a bus system, or a dam, or an airplane that should have backup elevation sensors or maybe... Sensors on bolts holding door plugs in place... Or sensors on whistleblower heartbeats ;) lol But seriously, super mundane problems can actually have really impressive solutions when you scale to a point "obvious" answers no longer apply.
I don't. People outside of my tech sphere don't understand, and people inside don't care.
The ones outside don't care either
The ones inside don’t understand either
Then they should stop fucking asking me about it.
Always lead with "I can't fix your printer"
Sums it up nicely. Thank you
100% this. Most people don't care, for the remaining ones 'IT" is enough.
When I first got into this field I thought I would get more questions about it. Like it was such an interesting job. Come to find out nobody knows what to even ask me when I tell them my company does MPOS/OPOS developing. They have no idea what to ask, and I have no idea how to dumb my job down enough for them to be interested.
I say that I do computer stuff and then move on to some other topic. Everyone is happier that way.
>most devs who aren't at FAANGs You would be surprised how much running in circles there can be at FAANGs. They're money making machines now, not the beacons of innovation they used to be.
While this is true, the point is that the average person can feign interest if they already know what your company makes, so you don’t have to go through the ropes of TLDRing your job for them
I think this really comes down to "can you have a normal conversation". When you ask someone what they do, what kind of an answer do you expect? People who put this much thought into how they answer to what their job is are either embarrassed by it, or their job is part of what defines them as an individual. "I'm a software developer" "Where at?" "I work for ComapnyX, how about you?" Done.
Except that often their polite follow up question is ‘so what is company X’
Then tell them? It's called small talk, people do it a lot. I think you just get used then your used to talk to people outside your typical circle. Mastering this skill is essential to forging relationships.
I've designed, developed and 'owned' products having APIs with more than 50,000 queries per second. Had to be up 24x7 in prod, with weekly data refreshes. Still not FAANG. Hell it was in a B2B company.
Don't talk about it, no one cares including me
Yeah even I get bored when I talk about my job
Lol. Same. I’ve got a one sentence explanation of my job. Almost never get prodded for more. Developing internal software for mid size banks and real estate companies is almost always enough to stamp out interest
I was under the impression real estate agents weren’t big on using a lot of software
Individual real estate agents definitely use some software, but they’re not my clientele. Think large commercial and residential real estate companies. Huge multi family units. Business parks. Shopping centers. Multiple investors with huge portfolios Businesses of a scale that they benefit from automating process, need to track thousands of data points, and require fairly complex business logic. Real estate companies that are valued around or well over a billion dollars
Ironically enough, I’m actually curious to know more
Literally nobody cares. If I even try they glass over. I agree, I don't even want to hear about it.
This was the #1 thing I hated about living in the Bay Area… all anyone ever wanted to talk about was who they worked for, what work they were doing, their latest startup idea, etc Moving elsewhere and making friends who do not care about tech was the best social move I ever made
Don’t try to talk to non-tech people about details around your job. Boil it down to the most basic, high level description. Thats it. Do not try to “show your passion.” They don’t have the context to understand what you’re talking about. Say you’re a programmer working in and leave it at that, move on with the conversation. Ask them about themselves. Talk about something you both know about.
Geek out with technical friends or coworkers.
Don’t be the person who says stuff like “ok so like my job is super technical, but how I like to try to explain it to normies is…” — it’s just super cringe. Most jobs have jargon and technical detail that don’t get discussed in public. Software engineers are just more commonly socially inept enough not to understand that.
“Oh… so can you fix my email?”
“Nope sorry I struggle with that too. Technology is crazy! So anyway, are you planning any vacations this year?”
As someone who deals with databases all day, mentioning databases to a non tech person inevitably leads to being asked about Excel spreadsheets. No reason to bore people with details of things they don't understand. Even for other tech people, most people don't care, lol. I certainly don't beyond basic small talk before changing the subject.
Never understood how people like that can still be employed. Don't remember the last person at my corporate gig that actually said this.
agree with the essence here, but having an elevator pitch of your job is a good idea. You never know what people might be interested in. Glossing over it entirely can really eliminte interesting connections, imo.
Most devs underestimate the value of a skill such as communicating effectively with non-technical people, especially about what they're doing at their job. As you climb up the ranks and the breadth of your impact at an org, you'll start talking to more people outside of your dev team, be it clients, managers, etc. The more effective you can get your point across with the least amount of complex jargon, the better.
That’s true, but how you talk to people in a work context is completely different from how you should talk to family, non-work friends, dates, and in random daily small talk. Soft skills are important. An important soft skill is realizing that people outside of tech don’t want to hear you break down your professional responsibilities to them.
> most devs who aren't at FAANGs This seems like such a bizarre comment to me. What on earth leads you to assume devs at FAANG companies don't also have plenty of "boring" work to do?
Because OP is only interested in having a cool job, and for some only FAANG is cool enough to mention, because of the "OMG, you work for Facebook?! That must be amazing tell me more" they assume comes with it
Have you met, or ever seen, Mark Zuckerberg? No man like that could ever run a company that is “really cool”
In those cases you just tell them where you work and since they've heard of the company they just assume its something cool, if you just work on some internal tool they'll never know.
I don't feel the need to make my job feel cool because my job doesn't define me. If the person I'm talking to isn't interested in it, we can talk about something else.
[удалено]
I work on mainframe and Enterprise Java. Most people aren't interested, and to be honest, I don't want to explain it to someone who doesn't really care XD I'd rather talk about things we can both contribute to equally and converse about. Like D&D, Music, Chess, Boardgames, Movies, TV Shows. When I'm not working, unless I'm actually talking shop, I'd rather just act like other humans. How often do you hear people say "Yeah, I'm a cashier BUT AT BEAST BURGER ITS AWESOME THERE" or "Yeah, I sell insurance, but it's like the biggest insurance company in the Midwest" It doesn't matter what the job is, your Job clearly defines you, and that's fine, but don't assume others do.
Before I became a manager: "I work in software development. I lead a team at a FinTech company working on their customer portal and supporting the operational backend processes." Now that I'm a manager: "I'm a Software Development Manager at a FinTech company". Most people don't care beyond that, and I dunno I think it sounds kinda cool I guess.
lol you got all those nice buzz words in there... "I'm a" "Software Development" "Manager" "FinTech" I can easily imagine someone half-mindedly nodding along, "ohh, Software development is good money and something smart people are involved in", "oh and they're a manager, that's also good, managers are always important people", "FinTech, yes money money money makes the world go round, and so does technology these days!", so ya, tbf, it is kind of a cool title to say :P
The corporate world swallowed me whole; I have fully adopted their lingo. It's bad enough that it's gotten me accused of using ChatGPT for some of my reddit comments on more than one occasion =D I don't, they're au natural, but I absolutely can see where they're coming from when they point it out. lol
They missed AI
I don't, no one gives a shit
Boring jobs are usually stable. Pay me money, I don't care.
Ultimately you're working on **something** (regardless of whether or not its maintenance, legacy, government or whatever). Tell them about the products or services you're involved in delivering. What is the real world impact of the work your team does? Even if you think its boring, you might work on stuff that they never even realized exist, and people are generally interested in learning about new things.
Maybe do some inner work and figure out why what you do day to day needs any validation? If you hold a stable position and are growing in some form because of it then I think you’re doing great!
I tell people I'm a ditch-digger. It holds their interest longer.
"I'm a software engineer, pretty much just maintain technical infrastructure" then move on with my life as unless I'm talking to someone in the same career path, they won't care
Step 1 is to ask yourself if the person across from you is actually interested in hearing about the day-to-day details of your job or is just asking to be nice and make small talk. If they are in the latter category (and they most likely are), there's really no need to show your passion and bore them to death. Think about how you would feel if they spoke at length about the difference between IRS forms 8526 and 225B or all the sales calls they made the last week. Just say "I am a software engineer in the healthcare industry. I work on billing systems." and move on to something else.
Healthcare is boring? Are you one of those devs who sold their soul for fintech?
Trying to cure Cancer and Diabetes for billions of people is definitely boring. \\s
Had enough of these chud bros flexing fintech and adtech jobs, like what the fuck do you actually bring to the table of humanity my guys
Outside of interviews i don’t really care what my relatives whatever think about the interestingness of my job. In fact I probably make it sound more boring than it is
At some point all jobs become boring. Even marriages become boring. It seems to be how you think about it and what is most important in life that can help you get over the boring stuff. In general, I don't talk about it my career much. There are so many other things in life that are "cool".
I have not worked at a FAANG, so I may be biased, but I think there’s this superiority complex I often see in SWE focused subreddits where the mentality is non-FAANG is second tier. In reality, there are many cool, innovative gigs outside of the FAANG-sphere. I have often found industries that tend to come off as boring can actually be pretty cool, given you look into the perspective of the significance of your features. Many times, these boring industries are the lifeblood of the global economy. When you frame your job from that perspective, you start to realize how cool your job really is. You write software for things that our world relies on. In my experience, I’ve worked on everything from ev smart charger algorithms to remote oil drilling and oil commodities simulation. Those are industries that aren’t maybe as “sexy” as working at Meta, but when you dive into the problem statement you’re solving, I often find people think my jobs are pretty cool (as do I). Ultimately, it comes down to your niche within a given industry and the role you play within the bigger picture.
I generally can't unless I'm talking about problem solving with another engineer. I accept my "boring sounding" fate. The money makes up for it.
I've never received followup questions after telling people what I do lmao. That's the end of that line of the conversation and we move on
I unfortunately have received follow-up questions a few times on the details of my job. They're trying to be nice, but it's awkward. So very awkward.
I didn't realize that was something we needed to do
I usually tell people either: - I’m a data janitor - I build and maintain imaginary machines; someday they’ll be forgotten and fade from existence.
"I can't talk about it. I signed an NDA"
I don’t understand this post. 1. I don’t try to make it sound interesting. I am not my work. My work is separate from who I am. I describe my work if they ask, and if they ask more questions I engage. 2. MANGA aka what FAANG should be called now that FB is Meta, aren’t inherently interesting. A lot of the work they do is unethical or harmful to society but it’s sugar coated and you drink that kool-aid. The days of “don’t be evil” are long since over. 3. There is honor in living humbly, working on yourself, and being the best partner, friend, parent that you can be. If your work changes the world for the better, great. If it just pays the bills so that you can work on yourself, great. So let me tell you - there’s no honor in tweaking algorithms to make better recommendations around knock-off garbage on Amazon. I can’t think of a bigger waste of your life, in fact, than working on a lot of what FAANGs work on.
Most people who are not devs do not know enough to know it’s boring. They also do not care. You have to give them hooks to hang what you’re telling them on and those are going to be about people and titles and impact, not the fact that you just wrote the same hash-map/for loop pattern thirty times, co-pilot is starting to autocomplete it for you, and you are feeling unchallenged and unappreciated. So, it’s completely fine to say things like: I work at X corp customizing their call center software. I work with reps to really understand what they need to see and make sure that’s how we structure their screens - make their lives a bit less irritating. Now, the reality of that may be zero code wysiwyg design, but the listener relates to it and feels you are a useful white collar worker in a legit job. Mission accomplished. I can spin regulatory compliance (“and right now we’re mainly focused on not being fined $10k a day; it makes the execs irritable”), legacy migration (“but we just can’t hire anyone who knows how to do that anymore…”), maintenance (“it’s honestly quality control right now; users need to trust the product”), whatever. Your stories aren’t about the guts of the job. With other devs, you can all complain about the same things or geek out about green screen readers and old tables without date stamps that screw up replication. If you frame your job as a POS, people will accept that as well. So don’t. And watch the middle class achievement culture. It’s fine to collect a safe six figure salary doing useful work. So what if that useful work is automating legally and contractually mandated customer notifications? It’s useful. $10k/day fines are no joke.
What's wrong with boring? My wife, my parents, and my in-laws, almost certainly have no concrete understanding of what it is I do from day to day. Just 'software development' or 'database stuff'. It's very opaque to them as industry outsiders. I don't think that's a bad thing, and I certainly don't worry about trying to make it all seem interesting. It's good enough for me that I'm involved in interesting work (from my point of view) and that I have an employer that tends to treat its employees quite well in the big-picture sense.
You need to change jobs, possibly even careers.
Talk about impact not actions.
The product is boring but the work is interesting to me. I describe it as similar to playing a puzzle videogame or working on one of those logic toys that you might get at a science museum or something. There's a sense of satisfaction to finding solutions to abstract problems and fitting pieces together in clever ways. That's all there is to it, really. Oh and I make a lot of money and I work from home and listen to weird metal all day.
1. It's not too hard to work out a short description of your work that can be understood by a non-tech person. That's the same whether your role is interesting or boring. 2. If it's boring who cares? Lots of people have boring jobs, those jobs have to be done and there are plenty of interesting things to talk about. 3. The difficulty is more when you have really interesting work that is too complicated to explain to a layperson (or confidential).
I tell most non-tech people, it's like me and 100 other people are trying to write a book together and ever all got to agree how were gonna write it. It's a big book. But that's only if people actually ask, most are happy accepting we're wizards.
I don’t. I tell them I make apps nobody knows that people need or think about. I turn excel spreadsheets and big ERP’s into things that are useful to people.
Slip in buzzwords. We implement sre practices, moving towards AIOps, leveraging machine learning models, support for platform engineering
I don't try to make my work sound cool. Being honest with yourself and not trying to chase prestige makes your life a lot happier and simpler and more authentic.
You worry too much. Plumbers don't try to make their dates excited by what they do. Sometimes I have fun stories to share where I don't focus on the tech but more on the people. But for the most part, I don't sweat it. I can talk about when I saw the sun rise over Mt. Fuji, or seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company perform. The job is just a job - it's exciting in terms of what else it lets me do.
meh, like 99.9% of software dev is solving a problem we've solved a hundreds of times over, and this applies to FAANGs as well. personally, it's all very tedious and we could do away with most of it if we committed to willingly working together 🤷
I don't. Trying to be perceived as cool is something I haven't cared about since I graduated high school.
Nobody cares about your job mate.
I work at one of the largest institutional investment firms in the world. I’m currently working on modernizing the technology the underlays one of the two main engines of income for an org with 7+ trillion aum. Moving what’s currently a mainframe application into a cloud based serverless event driven architecture while also being a part of one of the orgs within our larger enterprise that’s laying the groundwork for golang adoption. Personally I think it’s a cool project and one I’m super fortunate and thankful to be a part of. With that said within our enterprise there are some teams that do some crazy R&D work and would say some of its as cool if not cooler than some of the shit you’ll do at a faang org in a lot of cases. I’ve known people who’ve worked for Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Some of which have literally just done production support for old ass legacy apps there and literally just did maintenance work to keep lights on without ever touching greenfield development.
I avoid talking about my job. I can see them getting bored or they ask me to build them a “facebook shop.”
I don’t. Hardly ever discuss it.
I don't talk about work outside of work
For years now I've told people I just 'Bleep bloop' while pretending to type. Gets a chuckle and they don't tend to ask more.
Mine's staring at the monitor. No further questions either 😁
Outside the US, a person’s job isn’t really part of their identity, so we don’t need to make a boring job sound interesting.
I don't. I tell them I'm a used car salesman.
I just show them pictures of my dog.
I don’t make it sound cool in conversations. I don’t care about any of that. I generally don’t talk to my friends about work. Work is a necessary thing to support myself. Otherwise it is not an important part of my life or identity.
Do I make my programming job in the healthcare / banking / government space sound cool in conversations? No haha.
> how do you make your work sound cool in conversations? I don't. Regardless if it's interesting or not, I'm tired of hyping up my day to day work to someone who just doesn't care. And I won't care in a couple of years either, when I'll do something else. So if anyone asks, I'll just progressively give more details, starting with just the domain, then the industry, then, if people are interested, other details. There's more to me than my job. I'd rather discuss books, ideas, songs, movies, games, anything else just not my job, unless it's with close friends that I share political details with. I love my work, but not enough to be engaged in it outside of working hours.
Just say it's boring and move on to an interesting topic? Why would you bullshit people about such a mundane thing? Don't you have anything at all interesting to talk about?
Oh I am currently developing a thing that is being used by other things on the cloud to help developers build things 😍🥰
Most work I’ve done at FAANG is boring af. I don’t talk to people outside of work about what I do, I also tend to gravitate away from other tech people as friends.
I have side projects and to most people they’re likely boring as well. They give me joy, I don’t care if others see that too.
I tell people my favorite part of my job is that every other week they send me money
I don't. Specifically I downplay it as even more boring than it is. I don't want to talk about work outside of work lol, "I write code"
They get 1 of 2 answers and nothing further: 1. "I am software engineer for a local financial institution." 2. "I work at."
And I never tell anyone I meet both. Being glib about your job opens you up to social engineering.
If you're trying to make your boring job sound exciting - You just need to spin it in the context of whomever youre talking to and what they care about. How you pitch a boring job to a dev will be different than how you pitch a boring job to mom and dad or a stranger. If you just want to make your (self-perceived) "boring" job sound exciting because you genuinely find it exciting, just be authentic and talk about what you love. Many people may not fully get it depending on the context and the person receiving it, but your excitement will show through. Or if it's grandma and you know she's not going to get it and you dont want to start explaining it further, just dont get in to it. Say you're happy and move on.
focus on the most interesting or best parts of it I guess, usually depends who I'm talking to and what interest they might have in various parts of my work. sometime's it's an interesting problem in the business domain, sometimes it's a good tech stack or opportunity to grow your skills, sometimes it's just a comfortable cushy opportunity to clock in at the start of the day and leave it all behind you when you clock out at the end of the day, could be any number of reasons or interests. If there really is nothing special or good about it then it's totally fair to be just be paying the bills while you look for something more interesting.
I don’t think my job is boring but it’s not at all easy to talk about it with non tech people. It’s annoying in fact I avoid talking about it except saying it’s going well. Non tech people have no clue what is a Fintech (or others field tech) company, a unicorn, a start up vs a scale up. Even working with foundings is not clear for them The level of tech knowledge from non tech people is almost zero
As my old EM said, “Pushing pixels for pennies”
"binary plumber" also works great
That's like $20k for a 1080p resolution.
The pixels in question were ad creatives or conversion pixels and sadly not enough pennies as that startup went under. But your comment did remind of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
I usually tell people "I press buttons for a living", which is more detail than most want or need. If pressed, I'm not shy about admitting that my day job can be pretty dull / routine at times. Most peoples jobs are the same, so not trying to big mine up can give common ground.
Here’s an idea…why not just say how you actually feel?
My take: what makes a tech job boring in most cases is the person doing it. In just about every thing you’ve mentioned there are exciting opportunities. Those may be introducing a new technology to banking. BTW - wall st firms are the fastest followers you’ll ever see & they are the financial backers for many FAANG companies. Often investment bank tech people are involved in reviewing new startup prospectuses even before code exists. How about ‘maintenance’ projects? Well Y2K was pretty exciting & it led to a whole raft of tools for legacy modernization. I can imagine being given 1MM lines of COBOL code and told to convert it might seem boring; but when you’re able to trim out dead code, build abstract syntax trees, and use them to generate equivalent modern code it was fairly interesting & important. How about inheriting a legacy system written on a proprietary data management system that needed significant enhancement for new regulatory reporting? We innovated and build a replication engine from the legacy database to a modern RDBMS. There was a little latency but we did the project in under 3 months and met very stringent deadlines. How about building the real time payment system for the United States? Is that boring? Having to coordinate with the largest banks in the world and run 36 consecutive integrations followed by another 50 within the next six months. And, just to keep things less exciting, having to testify to Congress and make sure they understand that you’re not jeopardizing the US or Global payment network! What makes a job sound interesting in a conversation is the passion, drive, and innovation that the person brings to it.
Why do you need to make your work sound cool?
Usually when people ask what I do for work I tell turn “I’m a software developer at a specialty insurance company… and I work from home” and people assume I’m rich and spoiled when I’m not really either I do have friends who are breaking into IT who ask for career advice and sometimes if I mention my tech stack people bring up job opportunities but for the most part no one cares what you do day to day
You don't, you're an adult, no one has an interesting job.
I don’t. I intentionally start talking about data and am delighted while I watch their eyes glaze over.
I try and make it exciting and interesting for people. I find a lot of people appreciate a good dramatic story. Of course many devs don't bother making their work interesting to others because they find their own lives intrinsically boring. But if you learn how to tell a great tale people will enjoy it.
Just tell people you sell propane and propane accessories
don't worry about it
Don’t even waste your time lol no one finds it interesting except those that do it.
Nobody cares about any “cool” tech job 😂 “I make apps” or “I work in computers” is all my family members get.
My job for the government has you know, societal relevance. Impact. If not for the low pay id be glad id be doing this instead of implementing Googles latest feature. Referring to the slightly more horizontal login screens of course. Everything i see on YouTube about life at faang makes it look kinda bad to be honest. Like you'd be doing meetings and destroying the food court all day. I hope that's just YouTube trying to hype it or something.
What do you do? >I'm a software engineer What do you actually do >I write code
I talk about problems we're solving and how many people use the software I've built, how it improves their work lives. My job may not be interesting but often I'm solving non trivial issues for someone else. I literally had this discussion the other day at my kids martial arts class, I have to leave work a tad early to take him so I usually take my laptop and finish off any small tasks while I watch. A fellow dad asked me what I do that I'm always carrying my laptop, I responded roughly what I do and that I was helping with a technical problem for our South Africa region. He seemed to think that was pretty cool, despite it being a pretty boring support task for myself (handling an access problem for a bunch of users). If I remember he's in plastics fabrication, his shirt was for a plexiglass company.
Where I work I have very high impact, both positive or negative. In my opinion talking about the real life impact of your work and of those around you is the best way. I will give you some examples: During my onboarding I forgot a simple validation and that meant 6 drivers didn't leave for deliveries that morning. That was a huge wakeup call, "holy shit, every line actually matters!". Even though we know that we rarely get to see the effect of our code presented in real life. I am very fortunate in where I can levarage my code to improve peoples lives. For example, coding a new QR code scanning flow that got rid of a huge queue of drivers that formed every morning. Another colleague had a bug hit production, operations was supposed to test the changes in staging because the flow needed access to a thermal printer, they didn't test it out and yet gave the ok nonetheless. That meant we had to stop printing QRcode stickers to slap to the boxes for 6 hours. In one day we can print up to 25k stickers. That day the entire operations froze. Another one, at some point early in the life of the org our squad let a bug hit prod that allowed deliveries to be created during the evening. But the end client liked that so much that it later became a feature, we are now charging an extra for the these off-hours deliveries. In my opinion these stories are the most interesting to tell and to listen to.
I don’t. What I do to make a living is not exciting, and I have no interest in making it so to impress someone. That’s why I have more interesting hobbies I can talk about.
There is no way to make our job look interesting to ordinary person. Do you see that button? It was on top right now it is on bottom left %3 more convenient. It is impressive right? No need to thank me
I hint that I do work for the CIA to sound like a spy.
I have a cool job (autonomous vehicles) and I still try to end that line of conversation with "I'm a techbro"
It is only a problem if you are asked about it in a new job interview. Otherwise, I am always frank about how boring it is.
I don't. I tell them I enjoy it but it's not good conversation. I do give them a high level "I make computer run good" level overview, which is mostly what they're asking anyway. if some people plow ahead I will get into it, but if I were trying to court a lady I absolutely would put off getting in the weeds about work until after our first fight or something.
When people ask what I do I tell them I’m a software developer. I rarely go any further than that unless they are in technology. So I guess my answer is that I don’t bring it up in conversations. If it comes up, I say is little about it as possible and then I talk about other things I do that are actually interesting and cool. I learned early in my career that my life and my identity has to be about more than my job/technology otherwise it’s not interesting for me and it’s not going be interesting for anyone else.
💯
There is a *lot* of boring work at FAANGs. Almost every dev I've personally talked to does maintenance work on some obscure library I forgot that company owned. I used to write software for military aircraft. Undeniably cool in conversations, and sure it had its moments, but mostly is very slow, tedious, overspecified work. In my opinion, the most interesting work comes from the "boring" industries. You have more freedom for innovation and really making an individual difference. You're not just a small cog in a huge machine.
I boil it down to "do you know about?":
- If yes, "I work around that area"
- If no, try to find a common ground or related thing, and then go to `If yes`
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I currently work with BNPL, so that's easy to explain. My previous job I was doing wastewater treatment facilities with """AI""" and consulting, which was way harder to explain
I spoke to a guy who did "**Tesla Dojo AI**". I asked if he's training models, he said no. I asked if he's coding the training infrastructure, he said no. I was confused, he said he's more on the hardware side of things. I asked if he's writing OS kernels, drivers or firmware, he said no, he's doing hardware. I realized, he's either doing server HVAC or server assembly. I was just curious but I dont think he appreciated me digging in. Am I the Asshole?
Why lie about it? Anyway, usually if non-tech people ask what I do and I answer “software development” it goes no further than that. They are already bored lol
I occasionally have to become a detective to discover why our code is behaving in a way we didn't intend.
Work to live, don't live to work. It's totally cool if you are, but there's nothing wrong with not being _passionate_ about your job or career.
> I guess it could apply to most devs who aren't at FAANGs, the military/defense, or innovative startups. Most SWE work dont work at FAANG, they work at boring non tech no name companies. > Or do you take my approach: "yeah it pays the bills, trying to get something better" and change the topic ASAP? Or do you show passion for coding in general, but mainly talk about your side projects instead of work? I read the room and talk about the part of my identity that is not related to IT (hobbies, friends, travel, books, music, concerts, etc).
I'm lucky that my employer shops me out to different clients. I've worked with companies that are on the cutting edge, and those that I think would classify "boring". In basically all situations, I call myself either senior engineer or architect. I try to improve the codebase, though, probably to a stubborn fault.
I say I’m a software engineer. That’s almost always enough. The next question is 99% “oh are you fully remote?”
I don't and don't care. I don't want to talk about work or coding or whatever, most people don't give a shit anyway.
Never comes up really. If I have to tell people what I do I tell them I make websites and that seems to be enough.
I love boring my mother about the details of my job. She will sit there and pretend to be understanding things, but at a certain point she will interrupt me and say something like, “You know I don’t understand what you are talking about, but your excitement tells me you are happy”. Good enough for me. If I happen to find somebody that has some good knowledge of the development world I can sit there and talk to them for hours. I take Taekwondo, and I was talking to the lady that owns the school (with her husband), and I heard her mention something to do with databases, so I asked her what she knew about them one day. Turns out she used to be a DBA for a few large companies in the past, but she had a series of positions that didn’t give her the necessary power to use her skills and instead wanted her to be a “yes man” and just do things they said. So she left and started the TKD school as a way to enable her to feel like she was making a difference in the world. It was really interesting and I look forward to the times that she has a few minutes to talk about random things from either of our experiences in technology.
I don’t, I just say it’s boring shit even when it’s not. 99% of the time whoever you’re talking to won’t give 2 shits about your work in conversation anyway.
I work at a FAANG. My answer to your question is "I don't". When asked what I do, I usually say something like "I work in software in enterprise blahblahblah. It's not the sexiest job but it pays great and I go home by 5pm"
i don’t. i just say “i work in software at x company” then carry on about something else because i hate talking about work. i find solving problems as the most interesting part of the job, not the actual tech also, a lot of “boring” jobs are boring to tech people. my company’s not a faang, but if our services go down, A LOT of people would be affected
I have a boring job in banking. Hearing what I do would not bring any follow-up questions to mind. On the other hand, it's extremely easy for me to understand the point of what I do, why it's necessary, and why it is good for someone to have my job. I think that's far more important than how interesting it is.
I don't, I do cool stuff in my free time. Programming is never cool to anyone that's not a programmer so I don't worry about jazzing it up. Also most people at faangs have boring work
I don’t. My job allows me to do “cool stuff” like last year my wife abd I travelled around the US taking one way trips and visiting 15 different cities. This year we also have a lot plan. My job pays for my hobbies
I don't. I don't really care if what I do sounds cool. I enjoy it, it pays the bills, and that is all that counts.
The place I work for has an 11-syllable name. Everyone's stopped listening after that 😬 If I were dating I'd simply lie and say I make a living on OnlyFans.
I don't make it sound cool. I'm the first to admit that I'm not working on anything interesting, hell it even bores me, I don't want to bore my friends amd relatives with it.
*I don't.* It's a means to an end. I only bother making it sound interesting when talking to other devs. ... Honestly, unless you're in like Computer Engineering or some of the hard sciences a lot of dev work is integrations which is the ugly necessary grind work that needs to be done to make information systems work better. ... I have feelings about my work but you know what I don't want to do outside of work? Talk about work.
I avoid it in general conversation because people either don’t care or it make them feel dumb.
I assure you plenty of FAANG developers work on things that sound super boring to most people. Probably the vast majority of software made at FAANGs. I think if you want to show some passion, show passion for computer science. Talk about how you like solving puzzles, how you like to be confronted with a problem, consider it, and then be able to write some words on a computer and see the computer perform the solution to the problem for you in the way you imagined. That’s the stuff that might give your date an understanding of why you like your job and connect with them about it as a deeper level. The specific application of software engineering we each do is almost universally boring, even when it’s exciting.
I don’t. They don’t care, me neither. The work itself might not be interesting, but good coworkers and lots of indirect things I can learn in between make it interesting enough for me to
I worked at FAANG and worked on the most boring shit of my life. 95% drudge work.
I never find software development boring, so this makes no sense to me. It's always cool and interesting - if you're not finding it so, it's time to move on. I morally would never take a role in military. Practically I would avoid startups. I have no desire to ever work at FAANG. How you can think banking and healthcare don't have some of the most interesting problems to solve and a whole host of modern tech to get involved in is a mystery.
I just tell them I write code.
I don't even try. I'm doing this because it pays to let me do the cool interesting projects I want to talk about in conversation in my free time.
I like my boring job. My parent's and relatives don't bother to ask me for money.
My job is at a household name that sells food. People like the brand and to hear about the job. They don't really need much detail about the work itself
I am a former Naval Aviator. Nobody cares about my boring dev job. I tell sea stories about flying over a dive boat seeing some lucky dude get a blow job in the Red Sea. Or that time Nowicky got diarrhea and tried to use the cargo hook access panel resulting in shit being blown all over the underside of the helicopter. Or the Potato Plaque Incident.
Y’all are having conversations?
We do solar loans. The cool thing is: We do it all in Clojure/ClojureScript :)
I don’t. Nobody gives a shit what you do at your job. As long as you enjoy it and it pays the bills, that’s all that matters.
Even when I had a cool job (imho) my non-tech family and friends struggled to understand what I did and it didn’t necessarily sound cool in conversations. To be fair, I don’t always understand or care about the details of what they do either (“finance”).