Recently my mother asked me what exactly I do for a living. As she is not type of computer person I had to create definition which would be easy to understand for normal people. And as from time to time people asks me same question here is what I told her.
When hardware vendor builds new hardware and want to sell it to end customers he cames to us to get help on software side. As my part is building whole systems rather then single applications I took her phone as example of device and told:
Your phone is able to do many things:
- make, receive and reject calls
- send/receive text/voice/video messages
- make/show/send photos/videos
- has addressbook
- has calendar
- has menu to choose functions etc…
Each part is handled by separate application and my job is to build them into something what hardware vendor can put on a device before shipping it to end customer.
She was happy with that explanation, even my wife told that it is nice summary of what I do for a living. Of course there are more things which I do at work, but how to tell that I am fixing badly written software or do some testing of new ways to build it…