Job Architecture

2Why Work Gets Organized into Jobs

A recent trend in computer software is the development of microservices. Microservices are segmented programming tasks that can all run together, automatically, through an orchestration program. Microservices are all around us, operating behind much of the software we use each day. Instead of a computer program running one discrete service, now many programs are written to orchestrate multiple programs together at once. If you run a retail site, for example, you can set up an orchestration program to run microservices like order processing, payment, and inventory management together. Payment takes in the number that is being paid, stores it, and then sends that number to another database that validates it, then validates the credit card information, and then communicates with the bank.

I'll share an example of how microservices work from my own company. Our major product is a dashboard of data that companies can use to analyze their workforce and compare it to competitors. This dashboard executes on thousands of tasks for each company, automatically. When people open up the dashboard, they visit their “Company Overview” page, which offers data analysis on headcount, growth of employees, active posting for jobs, benefits, business outlook, and more.

For each of these analyses, our programmers have coded several different “microservices” that pull the Company Overview data from a massive table. These microservices execute on the command to find ...