There is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature

I spent three hours in a meeting this morning with a bunch of people from our billing and IT department.

The meeting in and of itself wasn't bad, but not spectacular, either. For me it was the beginning, other than the collection of basic requirements, of a project that I consider The Holy Grail right now. In a very non-Monty Pythonesque way. If we pull it off, it's going to solve a lot of problems and open up a lot of new opportunities.

What was fascinating was watching the people there, a selection of requirement analysts, solution architects and project managers, go about their business. “Their business” being the theoretical deconstruction of every single step in the processes we're looking at. It was...frightening.

Now, I'm a fairly theoretical guy, in the sense that I like disassembling a problem in it's component parts. The best meetings are when I get to draw on a whiteboard, trying to figure out how to solve something, especially if I get to do it with input from other people, discussing, toying with ideas. But this...this was on a whole different level.

That level was theoretical beyond belief. My job requires me to keep a very firm grip on reality, since I work a lot with the operative side of our products. Today I felt that reality slipping from my fingers, down into a morass of process flow charts, definitions of terms, and discussions about where one logical part of the solution we're looking at ends and another one begins. We're very far from practical applications and integration at this stage.

I don't ever want to be a requirement analyst. But I'm happy someone does.

I wonder if someone dreamed about that as a child? Your friends wanted to be fire fighters and astronauts, but all you wanted to be was a requirement analyst. Probably not.