[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.