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Does Your Job Fail “The Cocktail Party Test”?
What you do for a living is sometimes a tough sell to outsiders
Imagine you are at a party, and someone comes up to you and asks you what you do for a living. What they say next after your reply is what I like to call “The Cocktail Party Test”. Do they say something like “Wow, cool! What is that like?” Or do they just smile and vaguely say “Oh.” and then move on to something else?
I had a friend from school who was an aeronautical engineer, and she ended up working at McDonnell Douglas, designing jet fighters. This job is a great example of an engineering job that passes the cocktail party test. I and anyone else who started talking to her would want to know a lot more about her job, once she sprung that “I design jet fighters” line on us.
My job by contrast is working as an Engineer in the EDA industry, which supplies software needed to design electronic systems. This is a business-to-business type thing, and as such most end-consumers have never heard of it. And when you try to explain it to a fellow partygoer, you begin to see their eyes glaze over, right around the part about it being “software used to design hardware for electronics”.
My uncle recently asked me how things were going at the bank, and it dawned on me that in spite of working in…
