IT pilot fish returns from a week at a hardware vendor’s user conference — remember those? — and the junior consultant on the project team has a status update for him.

“He was beaming, and so excited to tell me about the in-memory sort he had implemented while I was away,” says fish.

“He explained how he dug up some of his computer science class notes, coded up a bubble sort and completed testing. It was not a large number of records so the sort algorithm really didn’t matter.

“We talked about both the elapsed time and billable hours that went into this effort. Then I reached up above my desk, pulled down the runtime library reference manual for our system, flipped to the page detailing the qsort function and showed him the information.

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