Anecdote: I Frustrate Easily

When I first started my "real job" where I'm at I was put on an internal site. It was a beast, it had a lot of history, and more importantly, it was damn ugly and sometimes hard to use. The site was used by developers and no one on the team had much UI experience. I was frustrated. I couldn't work on this thing and have it be ugly, why should we have a tool that gets used every day that's a bear to use? "Because it's always been that way" wasn't good enough for me. For about a month I worked outside of work, off the sprint, and I re-tooled the CSS, markup, and UX while still maintaining the overall functionality and behavior. No one asked, I just did it because I was frustrated. Sure, at some points, people were sort of wondering what the heck I was doing but in the end, everyone loved the changes and everyone keeps mentioning how great the changes have been since. I believe it was also the start of a bigger push to make things easy to use internally but I suppose correlation does not equal causation :)

I think that's what Zach Holman means when he says to hire people who frustrate easily and that's what triggered this anecdote.