A Geeky Interlude

We're doing some workload balancing at work this week. My normal job is interfacing with the customers of our customer semi-conductors (which generally means I make Powerpoint presentations and go to a lot of meetings). This week, I'm also doing some programming for our test group. It's a job that I used to do full time about 15 years ago, and have continued to dabble in occasionally since then.

I have spent about half my time this week working on two different functions. I'm working in a language that I don't have much experience in, so I spent a lot of time researching and studying to figure out how to make the code do what I wanted it to do. I wrote, tested, re-wrote, and deleted a lot of code. I finally figured it all out and re-wrote it more efficiently. And at the end of the day, I probably averaged less than 10 lines of final code per day.

But on the other hand, I probably got more of a sense of accomplishment with those few lines of code in a few days than I do on the bigger scale of delivering our chips to customers, where we work for a year or two before we complete a product, and then it's another year or two before the customer ships their product (which uses ours).

Engineering can be a very strange world. Good thing I don't get paid per line of code.