[estro]

You must not be very good at your job if you can't explain it to people you've known your entire life analogically/in layman's terms. Furthermore, you definitely should not need a cookie-cutter metaphor from some article.

[karambahh]

Describe the end goal of the company you work for is usually easy ("we provide software for the call center for 911").

Your actual role «development of master-master database cluster to ensure 99.99999% uptime" cannot be expressed in layman terms.

Alternative would be "I write software for Oracle database called Oracle RAC with a 1M$ price tag", which, while also true probably won't make sense.

Sticking to "I work in IT" is probably better than trying to explain the CAP theorem.

Not everything can be ELI5 without losing a large amount of important knowledge...

[5580]

"I work in IT" is the fastest way to get a phone handed to you to fix an email account.

I typically explain that I work with communications. To the casual asker this typically suffices.

[aalleavitch]

I used to work on a crowdfunded adult video game. That one was hard to explain to family.

[Terr_]

Difficult, or awkward?

[aalleavitch]

Both, really.

[ahussain]

I'm pretty sure this is just a marketing article for pivotal, not meant to be taken seriously