[dkarl]

I think most people look at skilled construction contractors and assume they could be just as good with a very small amount of study and practice. People see us as having a completely alien ability that they intrinsically lack. That makes us like Harry Potter wizards, people with an inborn gift that makes us capable of learning things that are beyond the reach of normal people. The difference between us and wizards is that everybody would love to be a wizard, but they look at us and think, "Thank god there are people who enjoy that stuff." If you knew a wizard you'd probably constantly wish you could do what he could do. I think the only time people wish they could do what I do is when they're trying to get their printer to work.

[b0rsuk]

That's quite true. When you say you're a plumber, people can at least ask half-assed questions or provide a story when they were doing that themselves. When you say you're a programmer, the conversation usually ends with "Oh.". They have literally no clue how to get into the area.

How many of you have girlfriends who are genuinely interested in your craft and regularly talk with you about it ? Say, once per week. But if you're a photographer, that's instantly understandable to anyone. Anyone can chime in.

This reminds me of the time when Charlie Chaplin said to his friend Albert Einstein: "People like me because everyone understands me. People like you because no one understands you."

[psyc]

I had a girlfriend with a CS degree from Princeton. She didn’t care much about code, and didn’t want to talk about it.

Another had an MIS degree. She loved my enthusiasm, but didn’t care much about the content.

Another was a photographer with a tremendous amount of curiosity about everything. She listened raptly for hours at a time to every word I said about every low-level or mathy thing. She took it all in and asked great questions. Then she learned programming and became a software project manager.

I believe the biggest factor in the difference in interest was the “cares about people” vs “cares about phenomena” spectrum.

In general, though, I would never even bring up the topic with friends or girlfriends.

[golergka]

Quite a lot of times, actually. It helps to work in gamedev, but I think a lot of developers can have interesting and meaningful conversations with outsiders about their work if they focus on the domain, things that they are building and problems they're solving, not the inner workings of languages and frameworks.

[icebraining]

What if you write kernels or compilers for a living? Talking about a business domain is cheating :D

[groby_b]

If you can't make a race condition in a device driver into an interesting story, you need to work on your story telling :)

And compilers are fascinating - you are, essentially, formalizing the act of translating between languages. Something anybody who speaks more than one language can understand.

You probably can't translate everything you do into a great story, but the basics of your field should be straightforward.

[mcguire]

I got to answer the question with "I write file system performance benchmarks" once. Got looked at like I said I played with spleens for a living.

[groby_b]

I love talking to my partner, even though she's got an MBA (and works as an artist. Long story :)

It helps me improve my communication and teaching skills. It's fun, because it highlights the parts I don't clearly understand as well. She cares about it because it's so fundamentally different from anything she does, it's an entirely different world. (Vice versa, too. She's given me beautiful explanations on color theory, for example)

Yes, it requires work, from both sides. But for me personally - if your partner doesn't care enough to ask (or you don't care enough to explain), why have a relationship in the first place?

(Sidebar: s/girlfriend/partner/g, please.)