The person on the other side

I have never been able to think of software as the point. That might sound ungrateful, given how much of my life has been spent inside it. But the rooms I have lived in — healthcare, insurance, banking — have a way of correcting your vanity. Nobody calls because the architecture is elegant. They call because a person is waiting.

At HMS that person was often waiting on referral-status — the operator screen that asked whether a referral had moved. The résumé numbers are on the project page. This note is the ordinary day underneath them.

A claim that stalls is not a ticket. It is a week that doesn't start. A transaction that fails is not an incident. It is a feeling someone takes home. I learned this slowly, then all at once, and I have not been able to unlearn it.

People like to talk about scale as if scale were the achievement. I am more interested in the ordinary case. The member who is not a power user. The employee who has already had a long morning. The parent who will not read the error message because they are holding a child and a form and a question they have already asked twice.

If you stay in those rooms long enough, your taste changes. You start preferring the version of the work that is a little quieter. You stop being impressed by the sentence that sounds like a strategy and start listening for the sentence that sounds like a person.

I still care about doing the work well. I just no longer confuse well with impressive. Well is whether the ordinary day got easier. Well is whether the next person to touch the thing can see what you meant. Well is whether you left the system a little more honest than you found it.

Houston has been a good city for this kind of thinking. It does not ask you to be a brand. It asks you to show up, in the heat, and take care of what is in front of you. I have tried to work the same way.