The Rule of Awesome

http://learntoduck.net/rule-of-awesome/

by RobSim • 13 years ago

26 35 13 years ago

learntoduck.net

alexpopescu• 13 years ago

Yeah, I'm pretty sure timely and imposed awesomeness is exactly what is needed.

kanja• 13 years ago

Last time I did something awesome I had 3 days left in my quota.

angrydev• 13 years ago

30 days to do something awesome, and then...?

krapp3• 13 years ago

29, then 28, then 27...

Until they're left with The Most Interesting Developer In The World.

ISL2• 13 years ago

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/

guylhem• 13 years ago

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 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?)

ISL2• 13 years ago

I agree.

Play is incredibly important. I only wanted to point out that 'awesome' alone may be insufficient as a hiring criterion.

lifeisstillgood2• 13 years ago

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

kaybe• 13 years ago

And this physicist now thinks your lab is a pretty cool place to be. Is this really pointless?

jmorton• 13 years ago

"If we are hiring you because you are awesome, then you have 30 days to do something awesome"

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]

gggggggg• 13 years ago

I might be wrong, but I would like to think everyone getting a new job has something in them to do something awesome. Well anyone with a decent amount of experience anyway.

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.

krapp3• 13 years ago

I agree with the sentiment but I think it's more the "fulfill this arbitrary metric in a month or you're fired" implied here:

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.

coldtea• 13 years ago

>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 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.

obviouslygreen• 13 years ago

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. :)

jiggy2011• 13 years ago

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!"

nthj• 13 years ago

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.

abc_lisper• 13 years ago

Well said. Just because you have a company does not mean you own me ass hole. And I have a life outside work. Shove it deep in there.

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?

krapp3• 13 years ago

It would be awesome if you made us billionaires by the end of the month...

lifeisstillgood2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I am a bit worried by the 30 days thing too, but the idea I like - I would want myself to be doing something awesome every quarter say.

Milestones matter

ageyfman2• 13 years ago

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.

diwu19892• 13 years ago

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.

ageyfman2• 13 years ago

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.

diwu19892• 13 years ago

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.

auggierose• 13 years ago

So, Marissa Mayer is past her 30 days. What has she done that is awesome?

CurtMonash2• 13 years ago

It's a rare client with whom I spend more than 2 days a year. At my rates, if they didn't think I did awesome stuff, they surely wouldn't (re)hire me.

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.)

MrQuincle3• 13 years ago

Perhaps you are not hired for awesome stuff, but just for your name, your connections, your looks...

CurtMonash2• 13 years ago

If I ever was hired for my looks, that was a long time in the past.

My connections, however, are pretty awesome. :)

kbenson• 13 years ago

Isn't that just called doing your job? I imagine awesome to be more than expected.

nmcfarl2• 13 years ago

So much is this depends on your "awesome" level. Personally I'd be hard-pressed to think of anything anyone on the planet has done this year that is awesome. Or at least that I've heard. A couple of my friends done "pretty excellent" things involving either cooking or overcoming fears in the last year but not a single thing in this past year has filled me with awe.

Call me jaded...

eCa• 13 years ago

You don't need to be filled with awe, you only need some awe..

nmcfarl2• 13 years ago

Nice. But I've got none at all :)

MrQuincle3• 13 years ago

Sure... one of my colleagues was doing something awesome according to my CEO, another not so much. The former was demonstrating open-source software build by others. The latter implemented lots of stuff adding intrinsic value to the community.

Manager, if you require "awesome", you will get "awesome", but it will be tailored to you and won't surpass your intellect or vision.

brand0n_• 13 years ago

Ugh... Why does every portfolio website use this identical layout? (the left nav, the random image header above it, etc). All people do is switch up the colors and put their own obscure image at the top. Lame.

zachlatta• 13 years ago

You might want to take a look at https://svbtle.com/

The Rule of Awesome

Related Stories