Saving Time is Time Consuming

A true story inspired by real events. Seriously.

• Hello?
• Startup Times Hotline where trying is the first step to failure. How may I help you?
• I am an enterprise application developer, working for an enterprise business aiming to urgently improve the state of our enterprise…and maybe yours. Not sure. I’ll have to check with the enterprise.
• What is this inquiry about?
• I have excellent news. After many many months of trial and error and an unbelievable demonstration of human perseverance, we have managed to urgently reduce the start-up time of our enterprise application significantly. Isn’t this the sort of thing your institution writes articles about?
• Absolutely! How significant of a significance are we talking about here?
• The startup-time of the old version was around 35 seconds, and now through hulkish feats of solid engineering, we are looking at a startup-time of about 30 seconds.
• So, 5 seconds?
• I am not sure I appreciate your tone here. 5 seconds is a looooong time. If you were on your deathbed, wouldn’t you want to have 5 seconds more with your loved ones? Of course you would! Note that we used to restart the application almost on a daily basis. This is a life savings of almost one minute a week.
• Uh…OK…which means?
• Exactly. It means after a couple of hundred years, this effort would start to save lives and reunite families. Do you now understand the significance of this improvement?
• Sure, very impressive. Would you like to come in for a …?
• Sorry. Hold on one second…I am getting a text from my enterprise architect…Oh…wait…I am being told we would be retiring the application in the very near future and we are being acquired by an enterprise solution.
• Sorry to hear that. I hope the adoption and transition process goes smoothly?
• Yeah, but usually these things take a long time.
• Like…5 seconds long or…? Hello? Hello?!

#HappyFriday

Misagh Moayyed