My grandfather went to work for Mobil Oil in 1946, right out of the war, and stayed until he retired around 1988. Forty-some years, southwest Oklahoma, running routes as a pumper. He was a slender man. Five-eight, five-nine, not big. And he had some of the strongest hands of anyone I've ever known — grip … Continue reading His Hard Hat
"Can you summarize that for me?" I've been hearing some version of that my whole career. You write up a problem — the background, the angles you've considered, what you think ought to be done about it — and back it comes. Too long. Don't have time for all that. Give me the high points. … Continue reading The Warehouse
Around 2013 I was very good at Excel, and Excel was slowly ruining me. The job needed SQL. I had built SQL up in my head into a wall — I'm a business person, I'd say, not a technical person, and they've got me doing technical things. It'll take too long. It's too hard. I'm … Continue reading Thirty Copies
This week I spent fifteen minutes finding a bug. Records were dropping out of a data pipeline somewhere between where they started and where they were supposed to land, and nobody could say where. Finding it meant tracing the path through somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand lines of code. I could do that by … Continue reading Left Click Or Right Click
In my twenties I worked with a man who got fired over something he said. I'll leave it there — it was his to carry and it isn't mine to publish. Today it would be called an HR violation. We both worked for the owner of the company. A client told the owner the man … Continue reading I Knew The Guy
