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to and fro
Thursday, October 21 1999
For the past few weeks, the website architecture for my company has been running into an ominous ceiling. Every day the traffic volume ramps up to form the dome-shaped waveform familiar to anyone who's ever looked at daily traffic statistics. But at around 10:00am every morning the curve's vertical progress is interruped and the traffic flattens out. For much of the rest of the day the traffic stays at about this level, which is all that our present architecture can support. Any further users coming to the site experience such inconvenient delays that they leave. Today the engineers were trying to find some ballast to throw overboard so the normal healthy curve could return, but they could find no solution. An architecture based on Microsoft IIS and SQL Server 7.0 can only be pushed so far.
A two or three weeks ago my job was driving me crazy because there was nothing to do. That was back during the code freeze and it's immediate aftermath. I felt unnecessary and underutilized, and my spirit was diminished. I thought about quitting more than I've ever thought about suicide.
A week ago, I suddenly found all sorts of purposes where I could apply myself successfully. My workplace satisfaction reached some sort of all-time high. The amount of work I accomplished in a reasonable workday was phenomenal.
But this week, we've swung too far. Suddenly I'm deluged with a backlog of things in need of doing "yesterday." It's demoralizing. I work hard and get a lot done, but it's like the breathing of a drowning man. It's not healthy and it cannot persist. Indeed, I found myself thinking about quitting again.
But suddenly, out of nowhere, I'm the master of contests. I can put together a complex web-based voting system, front end to back end, in a single day. I can make a "hidden Jack-O'lantern" hunt in similar time. But there's something bleak and empty about the work. It's so clear to me that I'm simply building traps to separate unwary people from their money. I never wanted to grow up to do that back when I was a kid.
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