Forums
Mar 07Saving a Few Nanoseconds
by in Feature Articles on 2007-04-30Last month, in Saving a Few Minutes, we learned about G.R.G.'s experience with RUNPROG, one of the earliest examples of The Inner-Platform Effect I've ever seen. RUNPROG lived on an ancient supercomputer with an operating system that lacked the concept of search paths. Instead of a simple, four-line enhancement to "search another directory," RUNPROG was a 100,000-line assembly program that essentially did everything that the operating system did.
Although RUNPROG was entirely unnecessary, cost an incredible amount of time and money to maintain, and caused programs to run and load a magnitude slower, the business did not mind. It saved them money in the long run in that it allowed them to bill out even more CPU-time to their timesharing clients. In fact, after three short months of production use, the business had already forgotten the pain endured to create RUNPROG. That was, until Black Tuesday arrived.
“Hey, you’re in IT, right,” a frantic fellow in a maintenance jumpsuit asked, barging right into G.R.G.’s cramped little office. G.R.G. shifted his eyes away from the project he was working on – some database for physics students and professors – and began to formulate an affirmative answer. Before he could even complete the word “yes,” the Maintenance Guy jumped in, “’cause, we have a serious problem.”
If you haven’t done so already, you will. Soon. It’s inevitable. No matter how careful you are, no matter how meticulous your check-ins, you will eventually be the developer who Breaks the Build. 
Last month, in 
"Wait a sec," whispered Chris’s coworker David, "he can’t possibly think this will solve the Build Problem? His idea is completely absurd!"
I was never able to wrap my mind around academic tenure. Though I certainly understand the desire for "academic freedom," a system that provides an "unfireable" designation, regardless of job performance, seems like it might have a bit of an impact on, say, job performance. Perhaps I’m just biased from my first experience with tenure: Yes Alex, we realize that 80% of students drop his course, and that he often misses lecture, and that he occasionally shows up smelling of bourbon, but please understand: he’s a tenured professor. And by the way, that did not make me feel any better about spending $1,400 on a completely worthless class.