I was talking with one of my neighbors the other day. We both have kids and the subject of work and kids came up. When your kids ask what you do at work how do you answer them? When I was at a hardware company, the answer was simple….. I play with computers so that I can help other people who want to use them and make it easier for them to use the stuff we sell. My youngest thought that I played Nintendo all day and wanted to be just like his dad. The only thing that he heard was that I play with computers all day. I must be an expert at every computer game on earth.
Now that they are older and hopefully wiser, my story has changed a bit. The last time they asked me what I do at work all day I answered ….. I talk on the phone for a few hours, I read a lot of books and documents, I experiment with different configurations and combinations of software, and I go to meetings and talk about software. I can just imagine what they think that I do all day. Putting on their filter, this is probably what they hear…. I talk smack about fantasy football all morning with my friends and associates. When my manager catches me and tells me to get to work I have to read boring and dusty old manuals. I still play with computers but now it is trying to combine different games for multiplayer arena smackdowns.
I have also been talking to some former coleagues that still work at universities and they see me as a demo jockey. All they perceive that I do is go from one customer to another and demo stuff. Yesterday I did my first demo in years. It actually went well. It is truly hard to understand the grid management software until you see it in action. I think that I have a good handle on this software and understand how it works. When I was at Rice we used Nagios for a monitoring and management system. It was interesting but it has some severe limitations on time delays and sampling skews. After playing with database monitoring tools and operating system extensions, I think I could replace a Nagios system with the Grid Enterprise Management system. One of the significant advantages is that it would show a relationship between correlated systems and heiarchy of hardware to deliver a service. I like the concept of going to an applicaiton server and looking at a breakdown of the response time too see if it was the DNS server, Apache web server, or LDAP server that took the most time to reply.
I think I know how to talk to former coleagues and potential customers on the capabilities of our products and what I do on a day to day basis. I can almost even explain it to someone who is trying to get a job in our group. If I could just figure out how to explain it to my kids my life would be perfect.