How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 1. Bob

In the early 1990s, I worked for the consulting division of an up-and-coming database company called Oracle. My job was to fly to a different customer site each week and help the people there make their Oracle-based application systems run faster. I did this about 30 times a year.

My manager was named Robert. He was from Pittsburgh, and he had a small team of people like me spread throughout the US. At the time, he introduced himself as Bob, and he taught us how to say his nickname with just a tiny bit of w in there—​“Bwob”⁠—​like his family and friends would say it. We felt like family on Bob’s team. He was a great boss. He taught us a lot, and he always had our backs.

My job was a whole new world every week. Every Wednesday or so, I would call Bob (usually from a hotel), and he would tell me my mission for the following week: what airport to fly to, what hotel to stay at, whether I’d travel Sunday night or Monday morning, who’d be meeting with me and where, and what I’d be doing. Every week I wasn’t at a client site, I was teaching or preparing to teach my colleagues what I was learning in the field.

In my earliest engagements on Bob’s team, I would mostly execute tasks that Bob had defined for me before my trip. While I was at this week’s client, Bob would be negotiating the tasks I’d be doing at next week’s client. He’d tell me, “They’re having disk I/O performance problems, so you’ll be rebalancing their database files across a bunch of new disk drives that ...