The Rule of Awesome
learntoduck.net
learntoduck.net
"You have 30 days to do something awesome"? Really?
Well, how about you stuffing your job offer you know where?
Professionals, including trained Computer Science and IT professionals, demand professional respect. They are there to solve specific needs. In our case code quality code, iterate, engineer and polish programs to completion, ensure a solid architecture for your offering, and all that.
Programming is not a parlor trick, and employees are not trained dogs to do back flips at will for your amusement.
The sense of self-entitlement of those BS managers always amuses me. As if your shitty startup is the be all end all, and people should be grateful and "amaze you" for having given them work. Like some decadent Roman emperor towards his circus act: "amuse me or die".
Not to mention that amazing some exec with something "awesome", as everybody has witnessed at some point, can be miles away from shipping solid code and solving the company's real problems keeping it from sinking.
Carefully design a distributed system so that it handles all of the one-in-a-million concurrency edge cases correctly , logs exceptions properly and has proper tests and documentation; hard but not "awesome".
Creating an HTML page and filling it up with jquery plugins , "totally rad dude!"
By the way, what was it that makes you or your company so entitled to think you can judge me? Did you guys ship a awesome product or made a pretty penny or invent something fundamental in Computer Science?
If a sales guy can't set up a meeting with an awesome prospect his first week on the job (set it up, not necessarily get around to having it), chances are he's not a great sales guy.
If a process-oriented manager can't find some stupid process and short-circuit it her first month on the job, what is she good for?
This standard isn't as crazy as it first sounds. What worries me more is the pompous tone of the whole thing.
------------------------------------
Also, I'd hope that any organization that abides by this rule goes all-in on the Rule of Awesome, which in its original form is the a tabletop RPG principle to the effect of "Anything sufficiently awesome is automatically allowed." :)
(Compare Rule of Funny, Rule of Cool.)
My connections, however, are pretty awesome. :)
Some days, we do something awesome in the office (laser cut a table from aluminum sheet, or print hundreds of digits of \pi directly onto a storebought pie [0] for example), and everyone around says "Whoa! That's awesome!".
At the end of the day, though, we're physicists, and we need to ship some physics out the door.
Take a military analogy - if you're not doing something "shippable" (ex: fighting), you are training to maintain or raise your potential for when you will have to get in action - or at least to maintain discipline.
I'm not into physics, but if I had to place my bets between a team of physicists who loves to redo the world with the help of beers during long lunch hours, and a team of physicist who is into laser cutting a table from an aluminum sheet, I'd place my bet on the latter.
You may not be "shipping" physics at the moment, but you are maintaining your knowledge, training doing something that might seem pointless but will help you keep your skills or even develop new ones (ain't there a place for physics to decide how to best laser cut aluminum? Can you write an equation for the precise minimal laser power required to cut, depending on the metal and its depth?)
Play is incredibly important. I only wanted to point out that 'awesome' alone may be insufficient as a hiring criterion.
And adding in a quote I heard recently supposedly from a Navy SEAL
Under pressure you don't rise to the occassion, you sink
to the level of your training.
I'm curious about how much autonomy and latitude people need to do something that breaks the awesome threshold. It seems to me that the more guided or directed someone is, the less likely the work they do will be considered awesome.
I tend to prefer more quantifiable terms. For example, having a clear million dollar improvement to the top or bottom line in one year. However, I very much agree that everyone should add something to the team.
[edit, format quote]
Call me jaded...
From personal experience, my hypothesis is that in any organization, there are a handful of high impact but low cost improvements to make. These low-hanging fruits will not be blatantly obvious, and will not be discernible to someone who isn't "awesome" for whatever reason, e.g. lack of curiosity, incompetence, bad business sense, etc... In a startup with sufficient autonomy, it's probably even doable to make a lasting difference in the first week.
This is probably also tied to the idea of a 10x engineer, because they can figure out the right problems to solve and use 100% of their time to provide 1000% value.
Manager, if you require "awesome", you will get "awesome", but it will be tailored to you and won't surpass your intellect or vision.
A fresh set of eyes and no history is all it takes a lot of the time. I am not sure this makes someone really awesome though.
If we are hiring you because you are awesome, then you have 30 days to do something awesome. And awesome is simply defined as me (or your supervisor) thinking to him/herself, “man, that's awesome!” just once.
that's putting people off.
Until they're left with The Most Interesting Developer In The World.
Milestones matter