Let me share with you a document that was Double Secret Probation Confidential back in 2004, a full twenty years ago: it is the schematic of the technology of my company, Prophet.
Looking at this chart, which brings back many sentimental memories, I realize how little has changed. What I’ve created with Slope is almost bit-for-bit the same as I did with Prophet. The only real difference is, well, almost every single thing about life here on Earth.
For one thing, we had so much revenue at Prophet that we could easily fly around the country and set up our cool little booth at trade shows, like this.
In addition, even though what was available on Prophet was MUCH less than what is on Slope today, there was enough revenue to actually support an organization like the one shown below. You’ll notice your old pal Tim there at the top, who had been given the lofty title Senior Vice President of Technology after I sold the place to Ameritrade. Just look at all the folks who could do work for me!
Isn’t that amazing? I stumbled upon the above org chart on my plane ride home, and I had forgotten just how many folks worked for me.
These days, things are a little different. Allow me to present to you the Slope organization. (The tree is a silent partner.)
There is, of course, a trade-off in this sea change. As a searing, painful example, allow me to offer up what happened on Tuesday morning.
With the days as short as they are, my usual wake-up time of 5 a.m. offer me a pitch-black exterior. These days, it’s well until 7 or so that there’s any sunlight at all, and I find this early morning darkness to be my favorite time of the day.
At about 6:50 Tuesday morning, I was cheerfully going through charts, tweaking trades, and enjoying the peace and quiet. While working, I thought to myself – – and I’m not making this up – – “this is the coolest job in the world.”
Well, the universe heard my optimistic and grateful thoughts and figured, yeah, let’s kick this guy RIGHT in the balls, and my beloved Slope of Hope was instantly turned into……….….this:
In truth, that was actually one of the NICER looking pages. For five hours, there was all manner of awfulness, including 404 page, “Access Denied” pages, and PHP error codes.
I will pause here for a moment and state there’s really no way for me to express how torturous an experience like that is. I take my beloved Slope (and the twenty years that went into building it) with extreme gravity. I regard my customers with the utmost care and affection.
Having my site go down is a form of psychological torture that I would not wish on anyone. Simply stated, those five hours really, really, really sucked.
To make things even crueler, after spending hours on the phone with various engineers, it seemed we finally had victory at hand, and yet THIS was the appearance of the site.
As one Sloper humorously put it, the site had that “1995 vibe” now. Indeed, once I (falsely) believed that things were A-OK, when in fact there was more work to do, this meme sprang immediately to mind.
Want to know something, though? As much as I hate those situations, there’s a tiny bit of me which actually likes dealing with these kinds of challenges.
I guess it’s sort of like a guy who’s really proud of being able to take a punch. It’s a skill, I suppose, but let’s face it, eventually you’re not going to want to be punched anymore. That’s why whatever aspect of these little nightmares might seem enjoyable, it’s a really, really tiny piece of myself. I’d be happy to never deal with problems like this again.
The thing is, though, in one way or another, I’ve been “good at taking a punch” my entire life when it comes to technical challenges.
There are plenty of people better at me at specific tasks, but I think the number of folks that know JUST enough about a ton of stuff to be useful is much, much smaller. I’ve been at this for 45 years, after all, so I know a little bit about a tremendous amount. My skills and knowledge are many miles wide and about 3 centimeters deep.
But it’s enough.
My job at Slope is principally as a writer of posts and director of products. But my “organization” isn’t the 25-person chart you saw earlier.
I need to be a little bit of a database guy, a little bit of an HTML guy, a little bit of a web platform guy, a little bit of a hardware guy, and a little bit of everything else – – – including, importantly, being a diplomat who is psychologically adept enough to simultaneously terrify the technical people I pay to help me without having them scream into the phone “Hey, Tim, fuck YOU!” and turning their phones off.
Because, ya know, they COULD do that if a cross enough lines. And then I’m toast.
Over the decades, I have been on my hands and knees with modems, cables, Alteon boxes, Cisco routers, disassembled tower computers, and malfunctioning monitors. I have crawled onto rooftops with satellite dishes, a compass dangling from a cord around my neck so I could try to position it properly to suck down the data I need. I’ve seen it all and I’ve done it all. It’s been rough.
And you want to know something? Nobody would want this job. Nobody sane, at least. Because I’ve had the same job since 1991, in one form or another, and at times it can be absolutely unbearable, almost beyond belief. Trust me on that.
But you know me well enough that I will never leave your side, and even when troubles arise, there’s no way I’m ever going to ever let them beat me. Count on it.
