The LAMER Effect: Let’s all make enormous rulers!
At heart, I am a Software Engineer. A code monkey.
I kick back at my computer keyboard and bang away at the keys until I get things to work (hopefully) better than they ever did before. It’s what I love to do.
My friends don’t agree with my self-appointed title of ‘Software Engineer’, though. I can understand why they would prefer to call me a ‘problem solver, with a wide range of computer skills’. Still, cracking out IntelliJ or Visual Studio gets me off more then you could ever imagine.
Why? Well, that is simple. The possibility of ‘getting shit done’ makes me jolly like a little school girl.
This is why I have not really enjoyed working in larger teams. Put me in a development team where there are ten or twenty other developers working to solve a really hard problem and I will pull my weight — both literally and figuratively, for better or worse. However, in a small team, working with two or three other developers and my real skills start to shine.
The thing is, in a business, there are lots of really big items that need to get done. We are always trying to get them big-ticket items checked off the list that have a really big impact — and rightfully so — it’s amazingly awesome to tick off three or four of these big items every year.
However, on the bottom of the list there are easy wins waiting for their rightful time to be claimed.
These are the items that would take less than 2.5 hours to complete, but because of our dedication to the cause — or maybe even our short-sightedness, we leave them there waiting until there is time that can be dedicated to getting those lingering items ticked off the list.
Recently I got into a discussion with two fellow employees to explain my new year goal to try and get every employee to spend two hours every month to try and get one of these items completed per employee.
“Everyone just needs to put in a little bit of effort”, I said. Looking something like this:
The discussion — no — argument took approximately 15 minutes before I came up with the perfect analogy. Potentially the best one I have ever come up with.
Proud? Fuck. Yes.
My fellow employees were not getting it — why move away resources from a person’s ‘real’ job, just to get a little task done?
“If everyone put in 2.5cm of effort a month, by the end of a year, they would have a ruler”.
I blurted it out during the middle of my final rant, trying to get my fellow workers to agree with my point while I looked at my fingers. I came up with it on the spot. Did I tell you how proud I was of the statement?
It only dawned on me after I limped back at my desk, my tail between my feet, filled with pain and despair that I lost my argument that, I indeed, was correct.
My math worked out.
2.5 x 12 = 30
(centimeters, sorry Americans).
Ladies and gentlemen: we have a ruler.
I couldn’t get my mind off the fact that I came up with the best catch phrase ever invented.
“Let’s all be LAMERs: Let’s all make enormous rulers!”
The average work week is 38 hours. If we took 2.5 hours away from an employee’s work month to tackle a small task that has been sitting on that long checklist of items that need to be accomplished — that is literally no time at all!
It’s less than 40 minutes of work time a week.
It’s less than 2% of the total months’ time.
Yet at the end of a year, if we take all the time spent, it is almost a full work week.
On this blog, I am going to be reporting the efforts of my monthly 2.5 hours. Lessons learnt, how I can make things better for next time, so you can learn from my mistakes.
