[Leica] The last word on Starbucks - a Project

[chmphoto at sbcglobal.net (Clive Moss)]

animal said the following on 4/22/2004 5:58 PM:
> 
> Excuse my ignorance but what is most time consuming?
...
Despite Brian's plea for restraint on posting, I must jump in on this one.

I have lived on both sides of the programming and operations world in 
systems. When I started (1963) the distinction did not really exist.

Programming is really hard, intellectually. You need to analyze the 
problem , come up with an elegant solution, test it completely and prove 
that it works under all circumstances. All that operations has to do is 
run it and follow the instructions (if you wrote them).

Operations is really hard, intellectually. You need to be able to keep 
the cruddy code that the programmers wrote (without proper 
documentation) running, that never considered all the things that could 
go wrong. When power (or the hardware) fails at just the time that the 
system is updating some critical file, you need to have some way of 
recovering while the users are hurling abuse at you. You have to deal 
with all the unsubscribers who do not know how to unsubscribe.
You have to deal with the folk who say "What do you mean, you don't know 
my password?"
You have to deal with the folk who say "Wait a minute, if you do know my 
password, maybe you are invading my privacy!"

Been there, done that, been abused, never again.

-- 
Clive
http://clive.moss.net