The Salt Mine

I work for a large company. Not large in the sense of Exxon/Mobil large or US Government large, but large nonetheless. It is a technology company. You are probably using a dozen or so of our products right this very instant, and you don't even know it. You may even use the product I helped design and build as you go about your average work-day -- a few million people do, so the likelihood is rather high. Our products are, in fact, quite ubiquitous and yet invisible to the modern user, even the one I work on, which might sit on your desk right next to you.

Despite the satisfaction that I could derive from knowing these facts -- a job well done, a successful product in the marketplace, etc. -- in truth I glean only a small amount of pleasure from them. Work is generally referred to me and my closest associates as the Salt Mine, a moniker which stems from the fact we work for a large company. My job satisfaction comes from the micro-activities I perform at work -- coming up with an elegant algorithm, or constructing a practical technical solution, or divining the correct answer to a question on the barest sliver of evidence -- rather than the knowledge that my micro-activities (theoretically) advance the macro-activity of the company as it meanders ponderously toward the next product release.

From my position within the Salt Mine, I can see the company lurch and wobble towards these destinations. It never moves fast. It cannot, the institutional inertia is far too great. Sometimes it breaks free of the coefficient of organizational friction and careens out of control briefly. But most of the time it plods along, like a blind giant lead by a thousand lilliputians with quite contrary opinions about exactly where this unseeing monster is supposed to go and who, from time to time, get trod on when they forget to hold the ropes restraining the giant and begin arguing among themselves about whether the beach or the mountains is a better place to put a blind, stumbling, rather unintelligent colossus.

Still, these facts, in and of themselves, do not bother me. I fully realize that I work for a large, ponderous company. While the reader might glean that I think this is a bad thing, I will state for the record it is not. Rather, it's just a dull and pedantic thing. A small company, while rife with the flush of excitement a nimble-footing and the day-to-day goals of a hand-to-mouth existence provide, is also, in my experience, a very stressful place.

The Salt Mine is not a very stressful place. The same institutional inertia which forces it to plod its course with snail-like sluggishness, also makes it relatively immune to the storms of the marketplace. So while it might cross the technology ocean at the same speed as a loaded brick, the riders upon it are rather immune to sea-sickness. Instead, they tend to play cut-throat games of Capture the Manager or Pin the Blame on Marketing to alleviate the almost impenetrable dullness of the ride, lest they throw themselves overboard and drown.

Still, my diatribe does not come unbidden to these pages. It was not that I awoke this morning and said to myself, "Time to complain about the Salt Mine." On the contrary, another event occured, one that birthed a kind of epiphany in me, a small bite from the fruit of knowledge that maybe, just maybe, my job was rather dull.

At the Salt Mine, we produce patch notes. Our patch notes read like most patch notes -- Fixed a divide-by-zero error in the message passing structure -- stuff like that. The epiphany came when reading another company's patch notes. In most patch notes, you can see the same kind of errors and patches and statements of how the errors were patched. From most of these, you can assume that life for the engineer over there is just about as dull for him as it is for you.

However, once in a while, and this morning was one of those onces, you read a patch note which makes you cringe with self-realization, a dribble of text which makes you wonder if you can even drag yourself into work today.

This morning, it was...

Fixed a bug when in certain situations a summoned pet could turn evil. [sic]

So, while I am dealing today with handling unhandled exceptions and finding memory leaks, I now have the unwelcome knowledge that at least one engineer sat down at work last week and dealt with the monumental issues of good and evil.