What do you do ?

The Intercity Express was speeding towards Bangalore when my neighbour asked, "So, what do you do? ". I was happy to remark, after four years of ambiguous answers, that I was a student doing my M.Tech. It was another matter that I struggled to explain when I was asked what specialization I'm working on.

For the last few years my travels have seen me giving an array of different explanations for this question, "What do you do?". It ranges from absurd to brilliant and have brought a range of expressions of smile, anger, confusion and what not. Many different reasons can be stated for this, ranging from the ability of the person who asked the questions to my own knowledge of what I do. But invariably, it has only caused me to rethink how I identify myself.

The old day perception about the term 'engineer' and 'engineering' to the common man was civil engineers running around in the construction of bridges and dams. There have been a couple of instances, while traveling in villages during my college days, I have had to rush to rescue myself being labeled a 'builder'.

Today things are changing and any working engineer is labeled to be staring at the idiot box all the time writing software codes. But in Villages things may not still be so, though they may not necessarily term you a builder. For they might have heard some of their relatives studying strange engineering courses like instrumentation or telecommunication in the ever growing pool of engineering colleges. Once we had been trekking in the western ghats of Kodagu district of Karnataka with a number of IT friends. We were passing a village when a villager joined us for a chat. The initial introduction contained the familiar question, "What do you all do?" (Of course in Kannada!). One of the friends tried to give the answer in a clumsy way with terms of computer thrown here around when the villager remarked, "So you guys are in IT?", he continued, "I know a friend's son working as software engineer in Bangalore ...."

If the case with the general public can confound, then learned people can perplex you. I have had hard time to convince that I spent four years in an IT company without writing a single line of software code. I don't know if they think that I lie, but hey, I'm not lying, please believe me! (Well, I'm bullish here not to consider assembly code as a software code)

Forget about others, our own team mates can sometime confuse you. Often, a hardware design team member like me would be approached with some astonishing requests, by the software guys who write code which run on this very hardware. "Hey, I have a hardware problem for you to solve", would he (or she!) come with the 10"x12" PCB, "This board won't work". "What happened?", I would ask for which would come a perplexed reply, "I thought you can find that out" as if I was a magician. And then, there are cases we could be mistaken for repair center workers, "My team member says there was some smoke and this board doesn't work after that, can you make it work ?"...

After all this, you can still be disappointed. Returning from a tedious affair at work, my manager took me for dinner at his house. We were welcomed by his wife (who is a doctor) with a strict instruction, "You people go and wash your hands properly. I know the lead in the soldering station is very dangerous". We could only give a wry smile and remark, "We do a lot of things apart from soldering".

Even after so many years, I haven't figured out how to answer this question "What do you do?". I doubt if I will ever.

PS: Inspired by Robert Lucky's 2002 article under the same title in IEEE Spectrum Reflections Column.
PPS: This article is deliberately incomplete, especially in its inquisitiveness to explain specific situations.