While working on a problem at work today I had a thought...about my younger days working as a web developer in a university. The weather was hot and approaching unbearable just like today. Unlike this office, the state university office had air-conditioning. So one day we were having a go at each other after lunch. I was a real bookworm so I always had an answer for just about everything computer related. And my liberal arts degree handled just about everything else. One of my colleagues decided they were going to test my SAT test taking skills and asked me some random question from one of the hundreds of biology books stored in the office. By this point my last biology class was freshmen highschool years (about 8 years). While I can't remember the question, nor the answer, now I do remember the look on everyone's face when I answered correctly.
In some ways I astonish myself because I've acquired a lot of things in the head over the years. Most of this is outside of my core competances. But you never know when someone will call on you to see if you know something completely outside your field. I'm a software developer and I rarely delve into the Active Directory stuff these days. I've had that brief spark of clarity where a network problem stumps someone else and I'm able to answer the question.
Software development is still an industry that is still in it's infancy. I know there are a lot of computer scientists out there. I know a few of them. These guys and girls are just as inquisitive as I am about working with computers and how they work. And sometimes, like me, they encounter a phenomenon that fails to reproduce itself. Or if it reproduces itself it mysteriously vanishes back into the ether.
At our company we ship regularly. But our clients are quite slow at the uptake when it comes to deployment. I recently had a client with 2 previous versions of software in the testing pipeline. That means when they encounter a bug we fixed in a later version they can only complain about it. It sort of makes us look bad because the end user thinks we are unresponsive and slow.
Recently, after an update we encountered a bug that defied every method we tried to fix it with. What made it worse is the section of code where it was occuring hadn't been touched in this release so the bug couldn't have come from there. And it was only coming from a few servers. So we had no idea why it would occur on one server and not another. After much trial and error we discovered there might be a bug not in our software but in the operating system. After getting all the clients to run a serious of patches that may not work. We were in luck. The debriefing afterward was more like "blame it on Microsoft... they probably introduced a bug and then corrected it in a system update". Yeah, we blamed it on someone else.