Member-only story
The Grind
Is the grind good, bad, or more complex than we imagine?
My first project in the tech industry was to create a sales system. It did not seem complex at first. It was a bunch of tables that had customers, companies, deals, and activities. The idea was to help the reps keep track of their deals and customer activities more efficiently. Basically it was a CRM or customer relationship management system.
As someone with little real world experience building apps, I thought how hard could it be? I started talking to the sales reps and they wanted everything and have it all be automated. They imagined the software could read their minds and guess what they wanted. It was software as magic.
In fairness, all the requests from sales seemed quite reasonable. What did I know, I did not even know what a database was just one month prior. I could barely program and thought SQL was as foreign a language as Russian. So when asked for an estimate, I said two months.
From the outsider’s perspective, everything looks easy. I can’t tell you the number of times people got mad at Stack Overflow over some slight and threatened to create a competing site. After all, it was just software, a few tables and a user interface. Well after hundreds of different Q&A and forum sites built over the years, no one succeeded at dethroning Stack Overflow.
