Tuesday, January 12, 2010

About my watch and your workloads or projects....


It seems like I have a follow-up to my "About my pants and your systems". This weekend I was kind of dosing off in a train of thoughts when I noticed my wrist watch. It is very lightweight and I usually don't notice it while wearing this watch. The design is very simple, just 3 hands (hour, minute, second) and a date indicator. I also have a more chunky sports watch with an atomic clock, solar power and a dominating digital display and some other watches.


When wearing that sports watch I was focusing so much on the precise time ('cause it's receiving the signal from the atomic clock) that I always tried to be exactly on time. However, those who I met or the trains I tried to catch did not. With my lightweight watch on I am more relaxed and for meetings and other occasions I try to follow the "spirit" of invitations.

Anyway, what I noticed in the IT world is that in many cases IT professionals try to be overly exact. It started when studying computer science that every word of a description was taken into full account and it still is something I have to deal with during software development (and deployment). In our profession in too many cases we try to aim for the best/optimal/fastest solution, but in how many situations would have something less served equally well? We could have used that energy and motivation for another problem (or gone home earlier).

How many of your workloads are overly optimized or overly precise? Do you compute exact values or do you sample to get current trends? Are workloads still important that they have to run with highest priority or can they be moved to other categories? Do you focus too much on details (and loose the big picture)? Are you relaxed...?

(Image taken from here)