So, what do you do for a liv­ing?

—Hard­est ques­tion ev­er

When­ev­er I am speak­ing with peo­ple who don't know me [1] that's the ques­tion I dread.

If some­one asks my wife what she does, all she has to do is say "I'm a lawyer". If some­one asks my moth­er, she'd say "I am a re­tired teacher". Ev­ery­one un­der­stands what a lawyer does, or what a re­tired teach­er did.

If some­one asks me... oh, boy, that's hard. I usu­al­ly weasel out by say­ing "I work with com­put­er­s" but that has sev­er­al prob­lem­s:

• They as­­sume I re­­pair PCs

• They start telling me how their win­­dows box was slow un­til they in­­stalled some kropotk­i­­na which su­per­­gar­bled their frob­noz­­zles [4], then ask me my opin­ion on frob­noz­­zle gar­bling. For or again­st?

It's re­al­ly hard to ex­plain that yes, I work with com­put­ers ev­ery day, but I al­most nev­er open one (in fac­t, I have a pol­i­cy of not touch­ing my cus­tomers com­put­er­s), and I have no idea what a frob­noz­zle is.

I have tried say­ing "I work on serv­er side things, like mail servers and such. I in­stall them, sup­port them and al­so con­sult­ing work, ex­plain­ing com­pa­nies what the best ways to im­prove their ser­vices are.".

That one usu­al­ly gets glassy eyes and a gen­er­al "what?" look.

I could lie and say I pro­gram for a liv­ing, but that's not true. While I pro­gram a lot, it's usu­al­ly not for mon­ey, and what lit­tle I do for mon­ey is just us­ing pro­gram­ming as a sysad­min tool.

I could say "I'm a sysad­min" but most peo­ple have no idea what that is. It does tend to end con­ver­sa­tion­s, though, so it has one thing go­ing for it.

Nowa­days I could say "I have a com­pa­ny", which is true (we are awe­some, you should hire us to do what­ev­er it is we do, more de­tails at http://www.net­man­ager­s.­com.ar )

So, I usu­al­ly man­age to work around this ques­tion, but I have a prob­lem: I'm not telling the truth, or if I am, I am not telling the truth in spir­it be­cause I am not con­vey­ing what my work is, but on­ly what I do.

So, this post is about try­ing to ex­plain what the hell I do for a liv­ing, in an­oth­er way, which is more ... in­ter­nal­ly true, so to speak. This is re­al­ly hard to do, so I am try­ing to just let the writ­ing flow, maybe you can un­der­stand what I do even if it's not clear­ly ex­plained.

I work with com­put­er­s. I make them do what I want them to do. When­ev­er a reg­u­lar us­er sits be­fore his key­board, he tries to make his com­put­er fol­low his or­der­s, which vari­able rates of suc­cess. I al­ways suc­ceed.

Some­times, I am logged in­to a com­put­er that man­ages da­ta for thou­sands of peo­ple. They all are on my care. No, it's not their lives at stake, but a lit­tle part of their fun, or work is un­der my care. I help them. I care about them, and I want their fun, their work to be smooth and pleas­an­t.

Of­ten the com­put­er will not do what they need. I will try with my craft to make it hap­pen. I will write lit­tle pro­gram­s, search for oth­ers on the In­ter­net, care­ful­ly piece to­geth­er a puz­zle and make their needs be ful­filled.

I will write or in­stall and con­fig­ure those pro­grams and do it well, be­cause I am skilled, I have lit­er­al­ly decades of train­ing and ex­pe­ri­ence, but I will most­ly do it be­cause I like or­der and func­tion. I like when things flow unim­ped­ed, I like when serendip­i­tous ac­ci­dents make things just click to­geth­er.

I do those things for a liv­ing, yes, be­cause I need to make a liv­ing. And lat­er, when I'm off the clock and my boy is asleep and I have my own time, you know what I do? I do the same things be­cause they are fun. And I will both­er writ­ing a 1300 word post about how I mi­grat­ed my blog's com­ments from one site to an­oth­er be­cause it was fun.

Yes, I know, to most peo­ple that would not be fun at al­l, it would be a bor­ing job, and they would hate do­ing it. And that's one of the many rea­sons I am a lucky man [5]: I have fun do­ing un­usu­al things. That's re­al­ly luck­y, be­cause if my idea of fun was watch­ing "Gos­sip Girl" I would nev­er have found any­one to pay me to do that!

But go­ing back to what I do for a liv­ing, I cre­ate things. I don't cre­ate large, im­pres­sive things, I am not a bridge builder, an ar­chi­tec­t, I cre­ate smal­l, use­ful things and try to do it with a cer­tain taste or el­e­gance. I am more like a sil­ver­smith do­ing cut­lery. Sure, I'll try to make it nice to look at, but it must cut a chunk of beef first.

Yes, I work with com­put­er­s, but how does that con­vey what I feel when af­ter a sol­id day of work I can see that what was a lot of stupid com­put­ers and ca­bles are now a work­ing ma­chine that can make 50000 phone calls a day?

How can I make any­one see the beau­ty in 3 hard lines of code that do noth­ing but print a bunch of num­ber­s?

How can some­one who makes a liv­ing any oth­er way un­der­stand that I think things and they be­come re­al? No, not re­al as in a puff of smoke and there they are, but they be­come re­al through work and ef­fort and think­ing and curs­ing, which is what makes them re­al­ly re­al.

I know most of this will sound like mys­ti­cis­m, but it's not, it's my hon­est truth, I re­al­ly feel all these things as I work, all these things are my work. Some­times when I crack a hard prob­lem I want to fuck­ing sing [7] that's how awe­some it feel­s.

So, that's what I do for a liv­ing. I work with com­put­er­s.