I work on one part of a huge suite of interconneted services that have extremely strict SLAs for up-time. It really is an interesting problem, and the quantity

I work on one part of a huge suite of interconneted services that have extremely strict SLAs for up-time. It really is an interesting problem, and the quantity of engineering resources devoted to ensuring availability and avoiding downtime -- basically fighting to make inherently unstable, complex systems stable and reliable -- is dumbfounding. When I'm trying to explain to people what it's like to work on this kind of software, I like to use an analogy: it's as though I have my own personal brick, or group of bricks, in the great pyramids of Egypt, just a a tiny piece of a stupefyingly, inconceivably larger whole -- and when I twist my chisel and strike my block just so, at exactly the right (or rather the wrong) angle, I can shake the very foundations of Egypt.