Day Job

This is kind of a follow-up to my last post. I’ve been thinking more about why I find so much joy in randomly coding things.

Ever since I started climbing, I look at buildings and walls completely differently. Architectural features are no longer decorations, but instead hand holds. The door frame is a crimp. Concrete is used for its texture (increasing friction), not for structural soundness. I mentally plan out routes and think to myself, “someday..”

It got me wondering about other skills. Does Tiger Woods think he could sink an acorn into a gopher hole from 500 yards away? Does a dog trainer see a stray dog and think, “I can tame that”?

It can’t be just me. Joel Spolsky wrote a post about Starbucks in the eyes of an engineer. After learning about computer architecture, you see that they care about throughput, not latency—a cup of coffee will always take so much time, so in order to make more money, they want to serve as many people as possible. Of course this is within limits. They want to make sure customers don’t wait forever (starvation). Materials are prepped for immediate use (pre-fetching) and each employee does overlapping approximately equal amounts of work (pipelining).

Some parts don’t make as much sense, as Joel points out. Like, the person that walks in front of the line taking people’s orders while they wait in line. This does nothing to make the process or more efficient. Joel discovered after digging around that the smart people at Starbucks realized that people are less likely to leave the line and go next door if they’ve already “ordered” (but not paid). To my knowledge, there is no computer architecture equivalent to this.

I think it’s natural for people to start seeing the world through the eyes of their profession, interests, talents, and hobbies. What better place for inspiration? Personally, I wouldn’t want to enter a field where I couldn’t see like problems surface around me. It’s like having friendly reminders that $160k for college didn’t go straight down the drain. That if/when your career takes a turn for the worse, your skills aren’t for nothing.