Coding Monkeys

A few years ago a good engineering manager friend of mine (Adam H) brought me into a conference room to talk about an issue that was troubling him.

He was concerned that one of his better engineers was spending a lot of time running queries to populate data in a metrics dashboard. The work was very easy... and supposedly beneath the engineer doing the work.

He said "this is monkey work... monkeys could do this... Lucy is wasting her time running these queries for you".

My response: "Interesting. If this is in fact true, that monkeys could write and run these SQL queries... then we have a major opportunity before us. We must find these monkeys, and put them to work. Imagine: Monkeys that can write SQL queries. We'll open up a whole new channel for sourcing engineering talent!

Comments

[SAthya]

Hi Chris,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

You should read the above theory :P

if a million monkeys can type out shakespeare ... they indeed can run the right sql queries :P

Cheers,

Sathya