Ask HN: What do you tell kids when they ask "Where are IT skills used?"
This might be partially due to the confusion around "IT". To teachers here, and therefore students, it means "anything computer related". Their parents often think of IT as administrators of off-the-shelf soft- and hardware in enterprises. Using software engineering to solve interesting and/or valuable problems by building or extending software is something that is somehow outside their awareness. Especially because I tend to interact with a demographic in the UK that is quite removed from the silicon valley phenomenon.
So I struggle to give a concise answer because the real answer is: "Everywhere", "Software is eating the world" etc. But those answers are not satisfying because they dont really mean anything to the kids, nor their parents.
An option would be to try to give them a list of all the things I have built in the past, or all the software that they are interacting with, from websites to OSs and research projects etc. But that would be a long list and is either oddly specific or overly vague.
I worry, if it is too specific, kids might not identify with it and think CS / IT (whatever you call it) is boring. If it is too vague it does not really answer the question either.
So my question is, how would you answer this question if you had 1 minute, 5 minutes or 10 minutes? Apart from hackernews, are there good resources for the uninitiated (parents and kids) to get an intro into what software is used for in the real world that they can catch up with at home?