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Oct 08I Can't See What You're Saying
by in Feature Articles on 2008-11-26
"Why won't this stupid thing just... just... graagh!" The salesman clutched the edges of his massive keyboard tightly, his knucles white. While he looked angry, he wasn't actually angry; rather he was frustrated approaching angry.
The year was 1984, and the PC was finally moving out of the "early adopter" range and companies started sending them out into the field. Ricky happened to be working at a help desk during this exciting time, aiding in the rollout of the shiny new PCs to various teams in the company. Unfortunately for him, one of the first teams that needed the PCs most desperately was also one of the departments least able to understand and use them – sales.
The billing application was slow. And not slow in the taking-30-seconds-to-start-up sense, but slow in the ridiculously-freaking-slow sense. Loading an invoice took between ten and fifteen minutes. Updating a line item on an invoice took up to a minute. And saving the invoice back to the database took even longer than loading it in the first place. Clearly, things couldn't stay this way – a minimum of 25 minutes to update a single invoice was completely unacceptable. They needed an expert. They needed... The Optimizer.
Back in 1998, at the Department of Informatics at the University of Umeå in Sweden, the professors had decided that instead of the final exam being solely a regurgitation of knowledge gleaned from text books and lectures, it would be a good idea for students to venture out into the real world to complete their bachelor's degrees. In teams of two, they would spend time with a local business, learn how Information Technology fit in with their daily work, and present it back to the professors.
This year’s Corporate Technology Expo was no different than the ones for years previous. Various departments gathered in the company’s large, wood-paneled group meeting hall and highlighted their top projects and initiatives that were completed during the past year. There was everything from the ASP-to-ASP.NET upgrade of the customer portal to the enterprise-wide implementation of COGNOS 7. The scene was a three-hour, seemingly unending procession of PowerPoint slides with enough laser pointers to take down an incoming ICBM.
“Just give me a damn status!” growled Murray, the aging IT project manager who everyone thought would have been retired by now. In fairness, the fifty-nine year old’s job performance hadn’t waned one bit through his decades-long tenure at Bell Labs. In fact, some would even say that in his later years, he traded some of his trademarked ferocity for geniality. “Dammit,” Murry barked two seconds later at Tom Limoncelli, one of the developers sitting around the conference table, “I don’t have all day! Give me a status!”
Despite being considered a small player in the insurance field, Mike I.'s company writes $1.1 billion in premiums annually and has carved itself a nice niche in the area of non-standard automobile insurance. Non-standard is for drivers who are rejected due to things like too many speeding tickets, fender benders or DUIs. Like all other insurance companies, Mike's relies on complex custom software to quote and write its policies.
Tore S. had it made. He landed an enviable position that many of his fellow students had been gunning for – an evening/night shift as a Unix admin and general support for a large company that let him work from home. And you know what that means: equal time given to work and dancing around in your PJ's Risky Business-style. He could sleep and get paid for it, so long as he kept his cell phone on and would wake up and answer if/when it rang. Then he'd have to VPN into the network, do his thing, and then carefully weigh the decision to have another one-man dance party or go back to sleep. (Sleep usually won.)