programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
I've been fortunate to have some measure of success in my life, primarily through this very blog over the last eight years, and in creating Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange over the last four years. With the birth of our twin girls, I've had a few months to pause and reflect on those experiences. What did I do right? What did I do wrong? How would I do things differently next time? What advice should I give other people based on my own life experiences?
The short answer is that I wouldn't.
There are too many paths forward in life; I barely feel qualified to make decisions about what to do in my own life, much less recommend strategies for others in theirs. On some level I feel like Jared Fogle, who lost 245 pounds eating nothing but Subway subs. Maybe that worked for him, but how does that make it a valid diet strategy for the rest of the world? In other words, what I did worked for me, but I'm crazy.
That's also never stopped anyone else from handing out terrible life advice hand over fist before. So I figure why not. Who wants to live forever?
Under pressure to make some sense of what I've been doing with my life for the last eight years, I put together a small presentation which I delivered yesterday at this year's Atlassian summit.
How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome Instead
If you're reading this abstract, you're not awesome enough. Attend this session to unlock the secrets of Jeff Atwood, world famous blogger and industry leading co-founder of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Learn how you too can determine clear goals for your future and turn your dreams into reality through positive-minded conceptualization techniques.* Within six to eight weeks, you'll realize the positive effects of Jeff Atwood's wildly popular Coding Horror blog in your own life, transporting you to an exciting new world of wealth, happiness and political power.
* May or may not also include working hard on things that matter for the rest of your life.
I hope you can forgive me for the title, and I guess the rest of the abstract, and probably the entirety of the presentation too, but I find it's easier to be serious when I'm not being entirely serious. At any rate, it's complicated.
Here's what I've seen work:1. Embrace the Suck
2. Do It in Public
3. Pick Stuff That Matters
The slides explain. When put on the spot, under duress, I have selectively doled out this advice to a few people over the years – and miraculously, I've seen them succeed using these rules, too.
(I put a lot of additional explanatory detail in the slide notes that you'll only see if you download the full presentation.)
Mostly, I think it's the fear that gets us, in all its forms. Fear of not achieving. Fear of not keeping up. Fear of looking dumb. Fear of being inadequate. Fear of being exposed. Fear of failure. The only thing preventing us from being awesome is our own fear of sucking.
So that's why I say we embrace it. Who wants to live forever?
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Could you please share the presentation in a way that does not involve mandatory registration to another random site (which does not support OpenID, by the way)?
Federico Poloni on June 1, 2012 12:29 AMYou can use this link to view the slide withoud downloading it.
http://www.slideshare.net/codinghorror/how-to-stop-sucking-and-be-awesome-instead
Maykelange on June 1, 2012 12:46 AMHey Jeff (and others)
It may be the type of account I have at slideshare, but the second link - http://www.slideshare.net/codinghorror/how-to-stop-sucking-and-be-awesome-instead/download - doesn't work.
However, http://www.slideshare.net/codinghorror/how-to-stop-sucking-and-be-awesome-instead takes me to the presentation, which I can page through or download.
thanks :)
Martin_english on June 1, 2012 12:47 AMWow. I've been getting this message A LOT lately, since I've started watching the videos on TED. It's like every successful person out there started with 200 failures, before he got to the one attempt that made him famous. And those 200 failures were also valuable and necessary lessons that allowed the 201st to succeed.
If I can suggest, watch the two videos by Brené Brown: http://www.ted.com/speakers/brene_brown.html There are links to the videos on the right, and I recommend watching them in chronological order, because in the second talk she refers to the first one.
Vilx- on June 1, 2012 12:57 AMYou should try Neuro-Linguistic-Programming NLP, in my own experience it is very efficient to stop sucking with others and with yourself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
Feel the feer, and do it anyway.
pauldwaite on June 1, 2012 1:35 AMIs the talk recorded anywhere? Seems like it could have been a great talk.
Also, please please please host the stuff on another site.
Stephen Ryan on June 1, 2012 3:32 AMToday's Dilbert (1st of June) says something about Feng Shui ways of being awesome...
Alessandro Ogheri on June 1, 2012 4:24 AMYour presentation reminds me of...
Merlin Mann - Scared Shitless:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk0hSeQ5s_k
Douglas Merrill - Do dumb things:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/07/25/2327200/Former-Google-CIO-Suggests-Do-Dumb-Things
...but with less personal or business history. These stories are touching and interesting, but keeping it succinct is what makes your presentation really stick for me. It's more of a practical summary; like a cheat sheet for daily life, with a few good examples and quotes added.
I printed the three points and stuck it to my closet door. Thank you! :D
Mile Tos on June 1, 2012 6:09 AMI'm far from a Steve Jobs fanatic, but he gave an excellent commencement address years back that talks about failures and complements very well what Jeff has just said.
I encourage all of you to read it (even people like me who are normally turned off by the cult of Jobs):
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
I love the slide with nothing but a photo of the horrific Pontiac Aztek.
Joe Attardi on June 1, 2012 6:18 AMThe problem is the difference between:
1) Successful people have failed a lot
2) If you fail a lot, you will be successful
Statement #1 DOES NOT imply statement #2.
The problem is survivorship bias - the people who have failed a lot yet never succeeded, and a completely miserable as a result, don't get held up as examples. Yet there probably many more of them than others.
@Seth Finkelstein - True. Still, (1) implies, that if you avoid failing altogether, then you most certainly won't be successful (well, there are exceptions as always, but they're a minority).
Vilx- on June 1, 2012 7:23 AM"How does one know if they've succeeded, without experiencing failure?"
K Lawrence on June 1, 2012 7:45 AM@Seth Finkelstein I would categorize people who risk nothing and fail never as aggressively pursuing averageness. Nothing lost. Nothing gained. This is where most people exist (hence "average").
However, in a guide on being AWESOME, much must be risked and potentially lost. And by definition of risk, often the investment doesn't pay off. But when it does: bam! Awesomeness.
LoganGreer on June 1, 2012 8:59 AMAh, but just as half of a group is average or below, it's a mathematical fact that most people will never have more than the median level of success.
If you buy a lot of lottery tickets, and one pays off big - AWESOME. But there's not an unlimited budget for buying those lottery tickets (taking risk). Much of the recent financial crisis has been driving by traders taking big risks in pursuit of the AWESOME, and then sticking someone else, especially the taxpayer, with the losses. Risk-management, personal and global, is very important.
You know what would have been awesome ? Giving credit where credit is due. Stealing catchphrases ? Not awesome.
Jörg Stöver on June 1, 2012 10:58 AM@Seth,
If you improve your state you bring up the average for everyone.
Those kids from Fame?
Rpihlgren on June 2, 2012 3:08 AM@Seth: The point isn't to keep taking dumb risks and waiting for luck to pay off. The point is to keep taking informed risks and drawing on the experience of your past failures.
If you lose on the lottery 100 times, you've learnt nothing. In any other area of life, 100 failures means you've learnt 100 things to avoid doing again.
Btdsys on June 2, 2012 3:16 AM@Cryptnotic - Yes, but still, everyone can't be vastly above average, even if the average is rising on a historical scale. People don't consider themselves great successes nowadays because they type in an office cubicle rather than doing back-breaking physical agriculture labor from dawn to dusk.
@Btdsys - The issue is basically whether you can "learn" to be in the right place at the right time, or whether that is purely luck akin to hitting the lottery. Note, I didn't say success is purely luck, don't rush to knock that down. Rather, if a crucial aspect is *low-probability* luck, then that's a hard limit to the results. Consider this - if drawing on past experience, you can raise your chance of getting AWESOME by a factor of 100 times - from one in a million to one in ten thousand - that's still going to be a loss almost all the time.
Seth Finkelstein on June 2, 2012 6:22 AM@Seth - Exactly! And that's the real problem - nobody know what the actual chances are. If you do EVERYTHING right, is it 1/10000 or 1/10? Call it optimism bias if you will, but I tend towards the latter.
Vilx- on June 2, 2012 7:12 AM@Vilx - While it can't be proven in an absolute sense, like one can't prove that bad things only happen to people who sin, I think the evidence of many startup companies with good technology but which failed because the time wasn't right for some reason, argues very strongly that the chances are pretty low (not zero, again, someone wins the lottery). And intrinsically, every Steve Jobs at the top of the heap requires almost by definition that there be tens of thousands of workers underneath - so that puts a very strict limit on how high the chance can be. Note the downside of such an optimism bias is that it tends to produce a fault-finding hunt for the thing that wasn't done right, as the reason why one didn't become AWESOME.
Seth Finkelstein on June 2, 2012 8:09 AM@Seth - well then, I guess the right approach would be to try and become AWESOME, all the time having a Plan B for the (likely) eventuality that it doesn't work out. Like buying a lottery ticket every day, yet retaining a job which pays for the ticket and all the other expenses, until the day that you happen to win. Right? :)
Vilx- on June 2, 2012 9:13 AM@Vilx - That's the theory. But it should be stressed more, and it's difficult to do it well in practice. It's not true that, in the above, "The only thing preventing us from being awesome is our own fear of sucking.". Having to make a non-awesome living is a big thing.
I think that what the author meant by that was that most people are so afraid of failing, that they don't even try to become awesome. They avoid the necessary risks and learning in order to gain stability (illusory as that might be). And as long as it stays so (which is probably forever), the few who do gather the courage and bite the bullet, eventually do come out on top (mostly), because there's still enough room for a few more awesome people.
If everyone started doing this, then yes - nobody would become awesome, because awesome is defined as "above the average", as you already noted.
Vilx- on June 2, 2012 5:08 PMHonestly Jeff, between you and Scott Hanselman, every time I doubt my coding abilities one of you comes out with a blog article like this one that re-inspires me. Well done sir, and thank you.
Also, your list at the end of the presentation and shown above remind me of Cave Johnson's speech on what to do if life gives you lemons from Portal 2.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8ufRnf2Exc
Alexander Kahoun on June 2, 2012 7:16 PMAfter my disappointing performance during a 5-hour job interview which failed to yield an offer last week, I was feeling like I'm destined for mediocrity- that I'm just not good enough. I felt the most demoralized and inadequate than I've ever felt before. The pain from failing to achieve is probably the worst thing I've experienced in the last 5 years.
But thanks to this post, I've gotten some perspective- it's not the end of the world, I shall embrace the suck.
Mikeru on June 3, 2012 7:12 PMI thought that the quote is from Barney Stinson :P
Prshntvc on June 3, 2012 10:32 PM@Pixelbart - I've always wondered how this advice applies to people like pedophiles and mass murderers. No, I'm not saying that this advice is bad - it's actually pretty much on the right track - just that... it feels like there should be a few exception cases listed and alternative suggestions for those exception cases.
Vilx- on June 4, 2012 6:07 AMThe easy way to suck is doing something you don't like, eventually for the money or because it was the safest choice. I did, and I learned not to suck after that experience.
I'm working in a small company, and I love the software I write. It wasn't the safe choice, and I could get more money if I did something different. But I'm *happy* with my job. With few exceptions, nobody is happy writing COBOL, even if they make lots of money.
Gabriele Boccone on June 5, 2012 1:26 PMSo, how is your self esteem? Do you want to be excellent simply for its own sake or do you have something to prove? If you have something to prove, you probably chase material wealth and success through much of your waking hours. You want to outsmart, outperform, out-dress, or outshine everyone else in at least 1 aspect of your life. You need something that you can look at and say, "I'm worth something now!" or academia's, "Truly this justifies my existence!" or the most common, "SEE DAD?!".
Although such material lies are just convincing enough to adolescents and other individuals whose development was arrested at an early age, they are not adequate measures of personal excellence or self worth.
Justin Time on June 6, 2012 5:04 PMlol fantastic!
Marciohiroyuki on June 6, 2012 5:19 PMI agree, a recording of the talk is even better than just the slides.
John Buchner on June 7, 2012 5:56 AMIn hopes of reading the notes, I downloaded the presentation. But I live in the Linux ghetto, which sucks. And I have to try to use OpenOffice, which sucks. I did see some notes, but they are apparently set in a column that is one letter wide, so they run down the left side
l
i
k
e
t
h
i
s
and off the slide.
Does anyone know how to view the presentation, with notes, on Linux?
Norman on June 7, 2012 2:16 PMhttp://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/funny-pictures-challenge-accepted2.jpg
T Rex on June 8, 2012 11:09 AMI honestly find it hard to reconcile the advice in this blog post with the other advice to avoid premature optimization. Whenever I have made a conscious choice to allow my code to suck in the name of avoiding premature optimization, I have usually regretted it the _very next_ time I touched that code (and often just when I used that code).
I nearly always find that code that isn't fully awesome is a time sink that winds up sucking out any time that the so-called premature optimization might have cost. And, honestly, if the code fails because of something you saw coming and failed to prevent, you're every bit as responsible for that problem as for the time you spend initially building the code.
I think more developers should be less afraid to make their code fully awesome because of the time involved--primarily because you _do_ learn from the mistakes involved in engaging in this process, and ultimately you _will_ learn how to turn out fully awesome code with little to no time overhead (but huge benefits on the maintenance side). However, this doesn't happen if you huddle in the corner worried about premature optimization.
Just sayin'.
Amy Blankenship on June 11, 2012 7:09 PMGreat presentation! So much so, I think everybody forgot this line early in the post:
"What advice should I give other people based on my own life experiences? The short answer is that I wouldn't. "
WTF!!! I am so glad many of my relatives, peers, etc. were not so polite! Of course, you go on to give software/business advice, so thank you!
"There are too many paths forward in life..."
... And depending on the which part of life, most lead to sadness, a few are OK, but usually one way - doing as many things right as possible - is the best. So dear reader you should do that, even if it sounds crazy, because, even if you deny it to yourself, you do want to be happy and successful, and not sucking will get your there!
Sure I received lots of bad advice; but I received many ideas I wouldn't have thought of. By being a universal skeptic and doing my research and talking to others, I could verify the most reasonable sounding advice. And suprisingly, it's usually universal - what's right works for everybody, crazy or not.
Now I notice you spare us a lot of other life advice, outside of programming. Of course you are an IT blogger. But not I ... So here goes! If any readers are under 30, you still have hope of adopting some of these changes which have made my life 700% better than the average Joe's life; if you are over, you will probably, unfortuantely, dismiss anything here with which you don't already agree.
Follow Christ as a convinced Catholic. Including what the RCC teaches about S*X. Yes, I know, you're not supposed to do that. You are supposed to be skeptical of anything religious-read, ignore it. I was, and this is all that held up. Atheism didn't. How about being skeptical as well, of the idiots who tell us to be skeptical of the church? Plus you won't be afraid of Death once you grok Catholicism. Wow.
Be nicer to your wife than you are to your friends, job, and golf game.
"Stop at two kids and get snipped" HUGE JOKE. Don't do that. You're supposed to but don't. Have as many as you d*mn well please. Yes they're hard but so is going to work, but like a job, the payback is better if you do it right. Even more so than the pie chart here:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/on-parenthood.html
But that gives you a start.
Skeptically accept the best parenting shortcuts. Dr. Sears is great for ideas to get your baby asleep in the first place, but when they don't work, it's perfectly OK to let a changed, warm, healthy, fed baby cry itself to sleep. And 100s more like it (google dr ray guarendi). Caring about your own effort/stress AND caring about the kids is a huge part of reducing the 'this sucks' factor of kids, and leveraging the joy. You're not going to make them psychos. Unless you try to be a friend, instead of a parent.
Stay in shape. I've been on a diet the last 15 years. TOTALLY worth it. You should lift weights 3x+ a week, go on and off cardio 0-2x/week, you can never get TOO strong. You'll learn to enjoy it more than TV. And you will be as healthy as a 30 year old when you're 70 and much more likely to die suddenly at 90 instead of wilting in a nursing home from age 75-85.
Movies only,, or video games and surfing. Broadcast TV spends millions to enslave and addict you to itself and the advertiser's products. Yes, the ads, and the entire tenor of every show is designed to do this, and it works for you 100% as well is the dumbhead down the street. You're fooling yourself with pride if you disagree. Cut back, cancel cable/dish, and in a year, it will be as if you got new glasses when you're at a freinds house watching - the spin and manipulation will jump off the screen, and piss you off. Plus you will be richer, happier, and healthier for the couch time and money saved.
Go to college for a technical career. Sure, the art/music/psych/lit degree is fun & cool for 4 years. Searching for a decent paying job for 40 years sucks. Law, IT, Medical, if you're reading this blog you can handle it. If you're not married yet, go back!
There are many more. You want to know them. And I want to know yours! Some of these I mentioned took 1000s of hours of talking/surfing/experiencing to discover amoungst the noise. Your journey will be no exception; just keep listing to advice and gleaning it for new ideas. You can't think of everything!
Fastal on June 12, 2012 2:29 PMThe seventh slide absolutely killed it. Laughed really hard at that.
Spinchange on June 15, 2012 4:54 AMJeff, love this post!
I can't tell you how much your 3 guidelines -
1. Embrace the Suck
2. Do It in Public
3. Pick Stuff That Matters
- have changed my life, and the lives of many other Chicagoans, via Fear Experiment (http://macncheeseproductions.com/fear-experiment), where folk sign up by themselves to learn an art form they "suck" at (improv, dance, stepping, a capella...) and then after 3 months of rehearsal, perform in front of 700+ at one of Chicago's top theaters.
It started off as a silly way for me to cross "dance hip-hop on stage" off my Life To Do List (I'm a horrible dancer), and three years later has turned into a way for people to create amazing relationships, challenge themselves, and be rockstars. All rooted in your 3 tips!
So inspired when I hear of others doing or encouraging Living Fully, so thanks for sharing.
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The biggest problem with failing 100 times is that you tend to go broke in the process.
Mrmx.blogspot.com on August 17, 2012 5:19 AMThe comments to this entry are closed.
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