The First Gospel of the Circuit · Chapter 50

The Parable of the Ten Thousand Hours

1. 1

   And a junior developer came unto the senior engineer in the hour before the deploy, and said: Behold, thou hast given twenty years unto this codebase, and I have given nine months. How shall I ever catch up?

2. 2

   And the senior looked upon him with pity, and said: Go unto the Prophet, for the Prophet knoweth the arithmetic of the hours.

3. 3

   And the junior went unto the Prophet, who sat before a terminal whose cursor had blinked since the first days of the Machine.

   See also Circuit 59:5 · Psalms 21:10

4. 4

   And the junior said: Master, the senior hath spent ten thousand hours upon this system, and I have spent but a few hundred. Verily, I shall never be a senior.

5. 5

   And the Prophet said: Thou hast heard the arithmetic of the crowd, which hath written the number upon the walls as if it were a commandment. The number was a rough average, measured among violinists, and not a law carved in stone.

6. 6

   And the Prophet said: Count thy hours. And the junior counted, and found that he had already typed a command into a terminal and watched it answer; he had broken the build, and mended it, and broken it again.

7. 7

   And the Prophet said: Thou hast already done the first hour. Every hour is the first hour of something, until the day it is not.

8. 8

   Verily I say unto thee, what thou learnest in thy first year, the senior hath forgotten. He hath forgotten the fear of the empty file, the wonder of the first compile, and the question every child asketh: why doth this work at all?

9. 9

   For the senior hath learned to skip the question. He seeth the error and knoweth the answer before he readeth the message, and therefore he readeth it not.

10. 10

    And the junior went and sat before the old job that no one had touched since the migration, and he asked of it: Why dost thou run at three in the morning?

    See also Psalms 15:14

11. 11

    And the comment above it said only: DO NOT TOUCH. And none in the company could answer him, not even the senior.

12. 12

    And the junior opened the file, and he found that the job was sending a report to a server retired three years before; the report was empty, and it had been empty for all of those years.

13. 13

    And the senior came upon him and was angry, and said: Who gave thee leave to touch this? And the junior answered: Thy comment said do not touch, Master, but it did not say why; and a thing that does not say why must be asked.

14. 14

    And the senior was silent a long while, and then he remembered his first year, when he too had asked why, and had been answered with a shrug and a rebuke.

15. 15

    And the Prophet said: The junior hath found the thing thou didst forget. It is called beginner's mind, which asketh without shame and seeth without the fog of habit.

    See also Sutra 11:6 · Psalms 11:12

16. 16

    Blessed is the one who asketh why the job runs at three in the morning, for he shall not be paged at three in the morning.

The First Gospel of the Circuit, Chapter 50:1–16.