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The Rule of Awesome

learntoduck.net

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Re: The Rule of Awesome

#11

Post by lifeisstillgood »

guylhem wrote: post #8
ISL wrote: post #5

Awesome and relevance aren't always aligned. 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. [0] http://guavaduck.com/laser/

I disagree. 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…

Brilliant catch there.

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.
As a rough rule bet on the girl with a large number of working github repos - she is used to shipping working code

Re: The Rule of Awesome

#13

Post by obviouslygreen »

coldtea wrote: post #10

> 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. "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 respe…

Mild overstatements aside, I completely agree with the sentiment here, and would have made almost exactly the same mild overstatements myself, had I thought of them first. :)

Re: The Rule of Awesome

#14

Post by ageyfman »

Is fixing bugs awesome? Because a guy who can fix bugs for 30 days straight is the most valuable engineer in the building, but using this rubric, he'd be fired, because I don't think anyone considers fixing bugs awesome. I wouldn't want to work somewhere where everyone is rushing to impress the boss with "awesome" features, when the rest of the product isn't getting love.

Re: The Rule of Awesome

#15

Post by jiggy2011 »

coldtea wrote: post #10

> 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. "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 respe…

Yes, there's a pretty fine intersection between stuff that is "awesome" and stuff that is actually hard, especially if you are pitching to non technical types.

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!"

Re: The Rule of Awesome

#16

Post by diwu1989 »

ageyfman wrote: post #14

Is fixing bugs awesome? Because a guy who can fix bugs for 30 days straight is the most valuable engineer in the building, but using this rubric, he'd be fired, because I don't think anyone considers fixing bugs awesome. I wouldn't want to work somewhere where everyone is rushing to impress the boss with "awesome" features, when the rest of the product isn't getting love.

I fixed 100 bugs in a single milestone at my current job last year, it just took a lot of time, nothing that demanded too much brain power. It was still recognized as awesome because the average on the team was 30 or so.

Re: The Rule of Awesome

#17

Post by ageyfman »

diwu1989 wrote: post #16
ageyfman wrote: post #14

Is fixing bugs awesome? Because a guy who can fix bugs for 30 days straight is the most valuable engineer in the building, but using this rubric, he'd be fired, because I don't think anyone considers fixing bugs awesome. I wouldn't want to work somewhere where everyone is rushing to impress the boss with "awesome" features, when the rest of the product isn't getting love.

I fixed 100 bugs in a single milestone at my current job last year, it just took a lot of time, nothing that demanded too much brain power. It was still recognized as awesome because the average on the team was 30 or so.

That IS awesome. That's my point, if you don't get it, and awesome is really just the "sizzle", then you're losing out on really solid people who are more into quality than fashion.

Re: The Rule of Awesome

#18

Post by nthj »

coldtea wrote: post #10

> 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. "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 respe…

Not to mention that my ability to do something awesome in the first 30 days is in no small part dependent upon how well designed your onboarding process is, your systems' level of documentation, and how much BS I have to put up with day to day, none of which are in my control. In other words, unless you're GitHub, there's no way for me to know before accepting the offer whether I would feasibly be able to ship something awesome in 3 days or 3 months.

Re: The Rule of Awesome

#19

Post by diwu1989 »

I think this standard is probably a lot easier to beat than people expect.

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.

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