14 ms·

It’s Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done

375 points by mhb 7y ago

pgt 7y ago
Non-paywalled link, anyone? NYtimes won’t let me read it in Firefox’s Private Mode.
- hadrien01 7y ago
  Disable Javascript to circumvent the paywall
  - CharlesW 7y ago
    That worked, thanks! In Chrome, I was able to use "Site Settings" to disable JavaScript for [*.]nytimes.com for the current incognito session only. [TLDR: Voltaire was right, perfect is the enemy of good.]
    - itwy 7y ago
      "le mieux est l'ennemi du bien." is wrongly translated into "perfect is the enemy of good". The correct translation is "the better is the enemy of good". Totally different meaning IMO. I understand it as the new "better" will eventually replace the existing "good".
      - gowld 7y ago
        Do you have a citation for that? Wikipedia disagrees on the history (it's originally Italian before French: "Il meglio è l'inimico del bene"), and playing with Google Translate shows its ambiguious without context http://go/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good http://go/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good https://www.google.com/search?q=le+mieux+translation https://www.google.com/search?q=le+mieux+translation
        itwy 7y ago
        Unfortunately, I don't speak Italian, but I feel a better translation for "the best" in French is "le meilleur". In fact, if you just click the swapping icon in the Google translation link you posted above, you'll see it uses "meilleur". "c'est mieux" = "it's better", "c'est mieux que..." = "it's better than..."
        notacode 7y ago
        “Il meglio è nemico del bene”
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sebazzz 7y ago
  Use the temporary account containers plug-in. Also very useful for software testing.
- Xunxi 7y ago
  Firefox Focus works flawlessly
  - chucksmash 7y ago
    It's blocked as "Browsing in Private Mode" for me on mobile.
tabtab 7y ago
Steve Wozniak suggests the Apple II became successful because he's a perfectionist. He talks about throwing out almost-finished designs because he thought of a more streamlined approach while implementing the existing one. Then again, Steve Jobs has suggested that "Woz" spent so much time fiddling with Apple II hardware that he never got around to adding floating point math to Apple BASIC. (They probably should have hired somebody else to work on BASIC if Woz seemed more hardware-oriented.)
- cm2012 7y ago
  Perfectionism is great when you know exactly what the customer wants (like a custom made shoe). It wastes too much time when you're experimenting to find out what the market wants.
  - jdsully 7y ago
    The part I’ve always had trouble with is you need a certain amount of polish before the idea is acceptable. The quality of delivery heavily influences people’s perceptions. So this is a very fine balance.
    - cm2012 7y ago
      Quality is local optimization, Market Fit is global optimization. As the saying goes, if you're not embarrassed by v1 you waited too long to launch.
      - piker 7y ago
        But consider results in consumer technology: Palm versus Blackberry versus iPhone.
        AstralStorm 7y ago
        Quality and polish do sell in long term while even brands fade away. So how many mechanical watches do you folks recognize? ;)
AareyBaba 7y ago
The article is just the title stretched out into a few paragraphs. Signal to noise ratio is close to zero.
pier25 7y ago
At least in software "getting it done" is only half the problem. The real problem is knowing how to find a balance between good enough and catastrophic long term consequences. It's a balance between tactics and strategy. The approach is different in other disciplines such as artistic creation where blind confidence in what you are doing is a better long term strategy and we give a lot more importance to tactics. The more you work the better you become.
- robotsquidward 7y ago
  This comment speaks to me. I'm in a weird point at my job where I'm right at the tail end of supporting this legacy app I've worked on for years, and a brand new app my team will be building from scratch. It's pretty surreal, because I've been dealing with many of the negative long term effects of decisions that were made for this app years ago, meanwhile I'm about to have to make a whole host of similar new decisions for the next app. I know there are going to be compromises, I know I won't be able to make it perfect, so finding that balance is going to be critical. I'd love to hear from someone who's had to find that balance and what they've learned.
  - pier25 7y ago
    I'm sure you learned a lot about the problem from maintaining the legacy app. There is some intuition that develops over the years, but honestly the only reliable way I've found of knowing how to properly solve a problem is solving it multiple times.
  - allochthon 7y ago
    From my own experience maintaining legacy systems and then re-implementing them — strive for a system that future maintainers will be able to refactor instead of wanting to replace it, whatever that entails. Even if all of what you write will be refactored away, you've accomplished something if they're able to continue using the code base in some form.
dgreensp 7y ago
I’m reminded of a similar online NY Times piece I read, years ago, I think by a woman named Gladys, which was entirely about the harrowing process of procrastinating on, and eventually writing, the piece. All I could think was, poor Gladys. Not, here’s an authority on procrastination. Heck, I’m more of an authority on procrastination, based on my high school and college years alone, not even counting that I’ve overcome it in my 30s. There is so much better advice than “just get it done” (isn’t that like telling a commitment-phobe, nobody’s perfect, so just pick someone and commit? I’m sure someone, somewhere, has given themselves that advice and taken it, with positive results, but it’s kind of questionable advice in general). For example, “meditate” is good advice. Let the anxiety come up; allow it to flow, and leave; see it without judging it or trying to figure it out. Even realizing your problem with starting is an anxiety problem, and feeling the feeling in your body, is a huge step. Maybe noting some beliefs that contribute to it. “Journal” is good advice. Practice writing in your voice, and the act of writing. Journal about your anxiety. Learn to enjoy your writing. Practice will improve the quality. Discounting quality will not help. Stories about how I procrastinated on something for a month and then late one night managed to forget my usual thought patterns for an hour and do it? I have hundreds of those from my past. There is some information in the thoughts I had when finally doing it (“I get it! You just do it!”), but not relative to the information you will get from going inwards and asking how to change your own patterns of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.
- ohazi 7y ago
  I often tell myself to "just start" rather than to "just get it done," especially when I suspect my anxiety is driving. If I tell myself I'm just going to sit down and pretend-work on the thing that's making me anxious for five minutes, just to get a feel for it, and if it ends up being crappy, I'll just toss it and start over later, I'm usually able to short-circuit the anxious "everything must be well-understood and perfectly optimized before you even start, or you're going to fail, because this problem is crazy hard" part of my brain. Usually five minutes turns into 45 minutes, and I either finish, or conclude that it wasn't so bad after all.
  - Buttons840 7y ago
ravenstine 7y ago
This is exactly what I was saying in the other HN thread today about code reviews, and I got downvoted a bunch of times. A lot of people have a perfectionist mindset and lose sight of the fact that "perfection" can be subjective and that the product they are creating for the user is more important than the engineer's personal vision. This isn't to say that we should just throw out best practices, wing it, and never take criticism. Being willing to break work into further tickets and actually giving them priority can mitigate long-term problems created by imperfection in the first place.
- opportune 7y ago
  This sounds like some non-engineer talk that ends up fucking the team up 1 year later as there code starts breaking everywhere, the code becomes very difficult to refactor, new hires start to struggle ramping up, etc. I agree that sometimes people can be too focused on perfection in code reviews but consistency, modularity, and other seemingly unimportant things are crucial in maintaining hygiene for your project
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    > This sounds like some non-engineer talk Does it merely sound like non-engineer talk, or is it actually non-engineer talk? I just want to make sure you aren't making the wrong assumption or implying the wrong thing. I've been saying what I've been saying as a result of my 5+ years experience doing full-time software engineering. > I agree that sometimes people can be too focused on perfection in code reviews but consistency, modularity, and other seemingly unimportant things are crucial in maintaining hygiene for your project It's interesting to me how easily people here are assuming that I'm implying the absence of standards merely because I'm suggesting people opt not to chase perfection in favor of providing a non-blocking pathway for engineers to make changes or improvements. Maybe my phrasing is poor. I don't think you and I disagree that consistency, modularity, etc., are important and should have some amount of enforcement. The point I'm trying to make is that, in my experience, people sometimes go too far with this, so there should be some set expectations as to the limits of an individual code review. Limiting the amount of review iterations in a unit of work and splitting feedback-related work into other tickets can help address the issue of perfection zealotry.
beamatronic 7y ago
I’ve seen some code done by perfectionists, it was beautiful to behold. It did it’s job well. Unfortunately it was considered the “legacy system” and was eventually retired.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Some things belong in museums.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
quaquaqua1 7y ago
Reacting solely to the headline, no. "We're never going to find an energy better than coal, so just go down in those mines and go earn your living like a real man!" Critical thinking is an extremely important skill, always, forever. Not impulsivity.
ljm 7y ago
The problem with the headline is that if you think ‘it’ isn’t good enough, then ‘just getting ‘it’ done’ will send you into a vicious loop that will spin out of control as the pressure to over-achieve builds up. You really have to reframe your view of ‘enoughness’ in a more positive light, so instead of something being perfect (not enough until then), it’s finding a way to see what is good enough for the time being, that allows you to move on. Then you can go and do what you need (or do nothing if what you have is adequate) and take the weight off your shoulders. The startup lingo for this is MVP. There’s no getting it done with that until you’ve reduced the scope of ‘it’.
darkmighty 7y ago
There are several kinds of procrastination, so it's impossible to generalize. Some projects require very large time commitment to get right, reworking several times, etc. Some others reach a diminishing return stage very quickly and continued effort is wasted. You definitely shouldn't just take whatever you have in front of you and just rush it until it's barely workable. The critical skill is to be able to judge without anxiety and with some precision how much additional time is going to improve the outcome, and what is the rough global value (to you) of this improvement. Some projects have long ramps of effort and refinement, some are just not worth the time and can arrive at a good enough stage very quickly. I think the best advice I could come up with is that if you're having this sort of problem, recognize it, try to deal with the anxiety and get a perspective on the risks vs benefits, and improve. If possible find an environment/hobby /side occupation where you have to make a ton of such decisions to get a lot of practice. College/personal projects tend to be pretty sparse and give a lot of room for failure and delaying I guess. For me it's been a very slow, progressive realization that I'll never get things I wanted done by just leaving them to an arbitrary later date, or obsessing too much over details. In nothing vs something, something wins.
jhedwards 7y ago
I had the same negative reaction to the title that other commenters had, and of course I was thinking about software. But then I opened the article and saw a picture of a canvas and my mind shifted to music. I know lots of people who love to write music or want to write music but can never get anything done because of a feeling that it has to be perfect. I have always embraced an aesthetic of rough imperfection in my music and (I suppose) as a result I have record over 30 albums and EPs. Sure, lots of that music is, well, cringe-worthy, but there are some gems in there that wouldn't exist if I let perfectionism get in the way of _production_.
- pier25 7y ago
  For artistic creation I always come back to this anecdote from the book "Art and Fear": "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
  - bluGill 7y ago
    That anecdote seems to be a story that was just made up. It is believable if the students have never done ceramics before, however if the students have done a lot before I would expect thinking about what to make would become more useful than doing something again for the millionth time.
    - zaphod4prez 7y ago
CM30 7y ago
Well, they've got a point. There are definitely quite a few projects whose creators needed to step back, stop spending years focusing on the wrong things and actually get something done. I mean, look at Duke Nukem Forever. Might have done pretty well had they not spent 14 years on it. Same with many other games and pieces of art that spent decades in development, and sometimes bankrupted/broke their creators in the process. Does that mean you should rush? Obviously not. Does that mean having an eye for detail is bad? No, not at all. But it does mean you should try to finish your projects at some point. Something that never gets released at all is pretty much useless, and it's probably better to get your products while you're alive rather than have them released posthumously by your estate. It's also probably worth pointing out that a creator will likely never be as happy with their work as a customer will. After all, you created it, you've got nothing to be surprised by. So right off the bat, some of the 'magic' found in experiencing a piece of fiction/work of art for the first time is immediately gone. You're also quite likely to see all the flaws, all the things you could have done better, all the possibilities that didn't pan out yet, etc and feel disappointed compared to some ideal you had in your mind.
- bluGill 7y ago
  For software you should make something - any part - work and release it. Then do regular feature releases after that. If you are not working alone you can ask your marketing people for help, sometimes it is worth waiting for a big bang release, sometimes not (For some things if you miss Christmas you should delay until next Christmas). I recommend you err on the side of release too soon - customers are the ultimate answer, if their feedback on what is important is useful to have (but their feedback is not always correct!)
  - paddlepop 7y ago
    This doesn't work so well for video games. Reviews come out saying its thin on content with a score to match and can kill a game before its had a chance to expand. Developers have started trying to do this more often lately with mixed results, DICE and Blizzard are high profile examples of this. Blizzards latest World of Warcraft expansion was heavily criticized for the lack of content on release day and has yet to shake the bad blood even after two big content patches. DICE tried this with Star Wars Battlefront but couldn't keep fans long enough with the limited maps it released with.
SubiculumCode 7y ago
This is a difficult decision in science. If you are too perfectionist you will fail. If you are not, then your contributions can be bullshit. However, there is no such thing as a perfect experiment (at least in cognitive sciences), so we depend on converging evidence, so pretending it can be perfect is procrastination.
thereare5lights 7y ago
Just don't take it as far as Boeing did.
- neverminder 7y ago
  Is it time for "That's what Boeing said" already?
JetezLeLogin 7y ago
So-called satisficers are happier with their decisions probably because they are decisions, that give them a sense of control. "I chose this 'good-enough' option, I will now proceed." In other words, if there exists some better path out there, I don't care, because this is good enough, and I want to proceed. It's all coming from, and directed from, within. You are the agent in charge. Whereas so-called maximizers are always at the mercy of an external world that might contain a previously-unknown "better" or "best" option that they feel obliged to find. It comes from without; the world is in charge, the vagaries of a perfect ideal are in charge; the person is only hapless and reactive. Thinking you're in control of your destiny (even if it's not true) is more satisfying for people.
myrandomcomment 7y ago
Has anyone else just stopped reading stories on sites like NYT that block reading if your browser is in private browsing mode?
- dbg31415 7y ago
  And all the sites that won’t let me use an ad blocker or Firefox Foxus. I don’t trust any of them not to load 300 ads.
habitue 7y ago
Paywalled but, I guess the headline contains all the actionable insight already
andrewstuart 7y ago
I still build out everything required to realise the vision, and that usually takes at least months to build. There's an analogy in startups that you should build a great skateboard first if your vision is to build a better car, but I just don't agree. If you have a vision for a better car then you need to deliver a better car, not a skateboard, because, well a skateboard just isn't a car. https://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp https://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-... If my idea is to create a business for sharing cars, but it's cheaper and quicker to build a business where local kids drive you around on their pushbikes, I just don't see that as being the same. Those who argue for skateboards versus cars would say "well you are solving the problem of rental transport and starting in a practical way". Meh. The other thing I think is important is not to waste the initial attention for your product on something that is not in fact the true vision of what you had in mind. But so far I haven't succeeded so my philosophy can't be given much credence.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  >> They had tried to build similar systems in the past and failed miserably, mainly because of Big Bang thinking. They told me that one of their previous attempts took 7 years from inception to first release. SEVEN YEARS! By then of course everything had changed and the project was a total failure. So this time they wanted to do it differently. Or well... Maybe it's just that they have failed to build a system because the IT industry had been changing incredibly fast at the time. So they built their skateboard, but the government closed the skateboard parks, and everyone jumped ship to rollerblades. And that's how they've spent the full 7 years.
  - celticninja 7y ago
    At least agile, whatever it may be to people, has worked well in government/public sector IT projects. If ever a project was going to require many changes in its development lifecycle it's government. No more 7 year projects with no working product at the end. It was common practice to underbid the price to win the contract and rinse it on the change requests.
thom 7y ago
I think many people and teams (myself included) have pretty poor self-knowledge. You should aim to create the best product you’re capable of. Most people either over or under estimate that, and they’re left either never delivering, or spending the rest of their lives complaining about technical debt.
Millennium 7y ago
I really wish I could stop seeing this everywhere I went. I get that there are people who need this kind of advice, but for someone like me, this advice is poison. For everyone who needs to be carefully and constantly reminded that you can't let the perfect become the enemy of the good, there's someone else, maybe several someones, who need to be carefully and constantly reminded that "good enough" is almost never good enough. And this latter group, when left unchecked, tends to do a lot more harm than the former.
- rtpg 7y ago
  This is definitely in the category of advice (much like GTD) of "if you don't think you need this advice, you probably don't need it." I feel like there's an alternate wording for this advice that is less "cut corners" and more "determine how many corners you don't want cut". Maybe involving a target condition? You want to make the best thing possible. Keep on aiming for the best, but establish a baseline that you would find acceptable. Maybe you won't make something perfect, but you'll now have a target that you _can_ get to. This thought process reframes the discussion of "good enough" away from "did I spend enough time on this? Surely I can spend another week and make it 10% better" to "Does this meet the requirements". There is no longer a debate to be had, just a yes or no question to answer. So when people ship things that just aren't good enough you don't have a discussion around spending more time on things or being more careful, you have a discussion around what your baseline requirements are (which is _actually_ what you care about).
  - Millennium 7y ago
    This makes sense to a certain degree, but "just ignoring it" only goes so far: even seeing it is corrosive to a certain extent, and by the time you've even registered it enough to ignore it, a lot of the damage is done. Perfectionists undergo a similar phenomenon, I'm told. After all, the modern "Do it badly" movement was itself a response to the corrosive effect of the "'Good enough' isn't" message permeating all of society. I'm not unsympathetic. In solving one problem, it didn't exactly create another -we've always had perfectionists to some extent- but it made that problem much, much worse than it had once been. But the fact is, it was done to solve a real problem in its own right, and that problem has not gone away. What it comes down to is conflicting needs. The all-pervasive "'Good enough' isn't" came about because some people genuinely need it, and they genuinely need it at that level. The same is true of the now-pervasive "Do it badly": it is genuinely needed, and at this level. And you can't balance them, because they inherently undermine each other. So what do you do?

375 points by mhb 7y ago

pgt 7y ago

Non-paywalled link, anyone? NYtimes won’t let me read it in Firefox’s Private Mode.

hadrien01 7y ago
Disable Javascript to circumvent the paywall
- CharlesW 7y ago
  That worked, thanks! In Chrome, I was able to use "Site Settings" to disable JavaScript for [*.]nytimes.com for the current incognito session only. [TLDR: Voltaire was right, perfect is the enemy of good.]
  - itwy 7y ago
    "le mieux est l'ennemi du bien." is wrongly translated into "perfect is the enemy of good". The correct translation is "the better is the enemy of good". Totally different meaning IMO. I understand it as the new "better" will eventually replace the existing "good".
    - gowld 7y ago
      Do you have a citation for that? Wikipedia disagrees on the history (it's originally Italian before French: "Il meglio è l'inimico del bene"), and playing with Google Translate shows its ambiguious without context http://go/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good http://go/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good https://www.google.com/search?q=le+mieux+translation https://www.google.com/search?q=le+mieux+translation
      - itwy 7y ago
        Unfortunately, I don't speak Italian, but I feel a better translation for "the best" in French is "le meilleur". In fact, if you just click the swapping icon in the Google translation link you posted above, you'll see it uses "meilleur". "c'est mieux" = "it's better", "c'est mieux que..." = "it's better than..."
      - notacode 7y ago
        “Il meglio è nemico del bene”
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sebazzz 7y ago
Use the temporary account containers plug-in. Also very useful for software testing.
Xunxi 7y ago
Firefox Focus works flawlessly
- chucksmash 7y ago
  It's blocked as "Browsing in Private Mode" for me on mobile.

tabtab 7y ago

Steve Wozniak suggests the Apple II became successful because he's a perfectionist. He talks about throwing out almost-finished designs because he thought of a more streamlined approach while implementing the existing one. Then again, Steve Jobs has suggested that "Woz" spent so much time fiddling with Apple II hardware that he never got around to adding floating point math to Apple BASIC. (They probably should have hired somebody else to work on BASIC if Woz seemed more hardware-oriented.)

cm2012 7y ago
Perfectionism is great when you know exactly what the customer wants (like a custom made shoe). It wastes too much time when you're experimenting to find out what the market wants.
- jdsully 7y ago
  The part I’ve always had trouble with is you need a certain amount of polish before the idea is acceptable. The quality of delivery heavily influences people’s perceptions. So this is a very fine balance.
  - cm2012 7y ago
    Quality is local optimization, Market Fit is global optimization. As the saying goes, if you're not embarrassed by v1 you waited too long to launch.
    - piker 7y ago
      But consider results in consumer technology: Palm versus Blackberry versus iPhone.
      - AstralStorm 7y ago
        Quality and polish do sell in long term while even brands fade away. So how many mechanical watches do you folks recognize? ;)

AareyBaba 7y ago

The article is just the title stretched out into a few paragraphs. Signal to noise ratio is close to zero.

pier25 7y ago

At least in software "getting it done" is only half the problem. The real problem is knowing how to find a balance between good enough and catastrophic long term consequences. It's a balance between tactics and strategy. The approach is different in other disciplines such as artistic creation where blind confidence in what you are doing is a better long term strategy and we give a lot more importance to tactics. The more you work the better you become.

robotsquidward 7y ago
This comment speaks to me. I'm in a weird point at my job where I'm right at the tail end of supporting this legacy app I've worked on for years, and a brand new app my team will be building from scratch. It's pretty surreal, because I've been dealing with many of the negative long term effects of decisions that were made for this app years ago, meanwhile I'm about to have to make a whole host of similar new decisions for the next app. I know there are going to be compromises, I know I won't be able to make it perfect, so finding that balance is going to be critical. I'd love to hear from someone who's had to find that balance and what they've learned.
- pier25 7y ago
  I'm sure you learned a lot about the problem from maintaining the legacy app. There is some intuition that develops over the years, but honestly the only reliable way I've found of knowing how to properly solve a problem is solving it multiple times.
- allochthon 7y ago
  From my own experience maintaining legacy systems and then re-implementing them — strive for a system that future maintainers will be able to refactor instead of wanting to replace it, whatever that entails. Even if all of what you write will be refactored away, you've accomplished something if they're able to continue using the code base in some form.

dgreensp 7y ago

I’m reminded of a similar online NY Times piece I read, years ago, I think by a woman named Gladys, which was entirely about the harrowing process of procrastinating on, and eventually writing, the piece. All I could think was, poor Gladys. Not, here’s an authority on procrastination. Heck, I’m more of an authority on procrastination, based on my high school and college years alone, not even counting that I’ve overcome it in my 30s. There is so much better advice than “just get it done” (isn’t that like telling a commitment-phobe, nobody’s perfect, so just pick someone and commit? I’m sure someone, somewhere, has given themselves that advice and taken it, with positive results, but it’s kind of questionable advice in general). For example, “meditate” is good advice. Let the anxiety come up; allow it to flow, and leave; see it without judging it or trying to figure it out. Even realizing your problem with starting is an anxiety problem, and feeling the feeling in your body, is a huge step. Maybe noting some beliefs that contribute to it. “Journal” is good advice. Practice writing in your voice, and the act of writing. Journal about your anxiety. Learn to enjoy your writing. Practice will improve the quality. Discounting quality will not help. Stories about how I procrastinated on something for a month and then late one night managed to forget my usual thought patterns for an hour and do it? I have hundreds of those from my past. There is some information in the thoughts I had when finally doing it (“I get it! You just do it!”), but not relative to the information you will get from going inwards and asking how to change your own patterns of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

ohazi 7y ago
I often tell myself to "just start" rather than to "just get it done," especially when I suspect my anxiety is driving. If I tell myself I'm just going to sit down and pretend-work on the thing that's making me anxious for five minutes, just to get a feel for it, and if it ends up being crappy, I'll just toss it and start over later, I'm usually able to short-circuit the anxious "everything must be well-understood and perfectly optimized before you even start, or you're going to fail, because this problem is crazy hard" part of my brain. Usually five minutes turns into 45 minutes, and I either finish, or conclude that it wasn't so bad after all.
- Buttons840 7y ago

ravenstine 7y ago

This is exactly what I was saying in the other HN thread today about code reviews, and I got downvoted a bunch of times. A lot of people have a perfectionist mindset and lose sight of the fact that "perfection" can be subjective and that the product they are creating for the user is more important than the engineer's personal vision. This isn't to say that we should just throw out best practices, wing it, and never take criticism. Being willing to break work into further tickets and actually giving them priority can mitigate long-term problems created by imperfection in the first place.

opportune 7y ago
This sounds like some non-engineer talk that ends up fucking the team up 1 year later as there code starts breaking everywhere, the code becomes very difficult to refactor, new hires start to struggle ramping up, etc. I agree that sometimes people can be too focused on perfection in code reviews but consistency, modularity, and other seemingly unimportant things are crucial in maintaining hygiene for your project
- ravenstine 7y ago
  > This sounds like some non-engineer talk Does it merely sound like non-engineer talk, or is it actually non-engineer talk? I just want to make sure you aren't making the wrong assumption or implying the wrong thing. I've been saying what I've been saying as a result of my 5+ years experience doing full-time software engineering. > I agree that sometimes people can be too focused on perfection in code reviews but consistency, modularity, and other seemingly unimportant things are crucial in maintaining hygiene for your project It's interesting to me how easily people here are assuming that I'm implying the absence of standards merely because I'm suggesting people opt not to chase perfection in favor of providing a non-blocking pathway for engineers to make changes or improvements. Maybe my phrasing is poor. I don't think you and I disagree that consistency, modularity, etc., are important and should have some amount of enforcement. The point I'm trying to make is that, in my experience, people sometimes go too far with this, so there should be some set expectations as to the limits of an individual code review. Limiting the amount of review iterations in a unit of work and splitting feedback-related work into other tickets can help address the issue of perfection zealotry.

beamatronic 7y ago

I’ve seen some code done by perfectionists, it was beautiful to behold. It did it’s job well. Unfortunately it was considered the “legacy system” and was eventually retired.

AstralStorm 7y ago
Some things belong in museums.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

quaquaqua1 7y ago

Reacting solely to the headline, no. "We're never going to find an energy better than coal, so just go down in those mines and go earn your living like a real man!" Critical thinking is an extremely important skill, always, forever. Not impulsivity.

ljm 7y ago

The problem with the headline is that if you think ‘it’ isn’t good enough, then ‘just getting ‘it’ done’ will send you into a vicious loop that will spin out of control as the pressure to over-achieve builds up. You really have to reframe your view of ‘enoughness’ in a more positive light, so instead of something being perfect (not enough until then), it’s finding a way to see what is good enough for the time being, that allows you to move on. Then you can go and do what you need (or do nothing if what you have is adequate) and take the weight off your shoulders. The startup lingo for this is MVP. There’s no getting it done with that until you’ve reduced the scope of ‘it’.

darkmighty 7y ago

There are several kinds of procrastination, so it's impossible to generalize. Some projects require very large time commitment to get right, reworking several times, etc. Some others reach a diminishing return stage very quickly and continued effort is wasted. You definitely shouldn't just take whatever you have in front of you and just rush it until it's barely workable. The critical skill is to be able to judge without anxiety and with some precision how much additional time is going to improve the outcome, and what is the rough global value (to you) of this improvement. Some projects have long ramps of effort and refinement, some are just not worth the time and can arrive at a good enough stage very quickly. I think the best advice I could come up with is that if you're having this sort of problem, recognize it, try to deal with the anxiety and get a perspective on the risks vs benefits, and improve. If possible find an environment/hobby /side occupation where you have to make a ton of such decisions to get a lot of practice. College/personal projects tend to be pretty sparse and give a lot of room for failure and delaying I guess. For me it's been a very slow, progressive realization that I'll never get things I wanted done by just leaving them to an arbitrary later date, or obsessing too much over details. In nothing vs something, something wins.

jhedwards 7y ago

I had the same negative reaction to the title that other commenters had, and of course I was thinking about software. But then I opened the article and saw a picture of a canvas and my mind shifted to music. I know lots of people who love to write music or want to write music but can never get anything done because of a feeling that it has to be perfect. I have always embraced an aesthetic of rough imperfection in my music and (I suppose) as a result I have record over 30 albums and EPs. Sure, lots of that music is, well, cringe-worthy, but there are some gems in there that wouldn't exist if I let perfectionism get in the way of _production_.

pier25 7y ago
For artistic creation I always come back to this anecdote from the book "Art and Fear": "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
- bluGill 7y ago
  That anecdote seems to be a story that was just made up. It is believable if the students have never done ceramics before, however if the students have done a lot before I would expect thinking about what to make would become more useful than doing something again for the millionth time.
  - zaphod4prez 7y ago

CM30 7y ago

Well, they've got a point. There are definitely quite a few projects whose creators needed to step back, stop spending years focusing on the wrong things and actually get something done. I mean, look at Duke Nukem Forever. Might have done pretty well had they not spent 14 years on it. Same with many other games and pieces of art that spent decades in development, and sometimes bankrupted/broke their creators in the process. Does that mean you should rush? Obviously not. Does that mean having an eye for detail is bad? No, not at all. But it does mean you should try to finish your projects at some point. Something that never gets released at all is pretty much useless, and it's probably better to get your products while you're alive rather than have them released posthumously by your estate. It's also probably worth pointing out that a creator will likely never be as happy with their work as a customer will. After all, you created it, you've got nothing to be surprised by. So right off the bat, some of the 'magic' found in experiencing a piece of fiction/work of art for the first time is immediately gone. You're also quite likely to see all the flaws, all the things you could have done better, all the possibilities that didn't pan out yet, etc and feel disappointed compared to some ideal you had in your mind.

bluGill 7y ago
For software you should make something - any part - work and release it. Then do regular feature releases after that. If you are not working alone you can ask your marketing people for help, sometimes it is worth waiting for a big bang release, sometimes not (For some things if you miss Christmas you should delay until next Christmas). I recommend you err on the side of release too soon - customers are the ultimate answer, if their feedback on what is important is useful to have (but their feedback is not always correct!)
- paddlepop 7y ago
  This doesn't work so well for video games. Reviews come out saying its thin on content with a score to match and can kill a game before its had a chance to expand. Developers have started trying to do this more often lately with mixed results, DICE and Blizzard are high profile examples of this. Blizzards latest World of Warcraft expansion was heavily criticized for the lack of content on release day and has yet to shake the bad blood even after two big content patches. DICE tried this with Star Wars Battlefront but couldn't keep fans long enough with the limited maps it released with.

SubiculumCode 7y ago

This is a difficult decision in science. If you are too perfectionist you will fail. If you are not, then your contributions can be bullshit. However, there is no such thing as a perfect experiment (at least in cognitive sciences), so we depend on converging evidence, so pretending it can be perfect is procrastination.

thereare5lights 7y ago

Just don't take it as far as Boeing did.

neverminder 7y ago
Is it time for "That's what Boeing said" already?

JetezLeLogin 7y ago

So-called satisficers are happier with their decisions probably because they are decisions, that give them a sense of control. "I chose this 'good-enough' option, I will now proceed." In other words, if there exists some better path out there, I don't care, because this is good enough, and I want to proceed. It's all coming from, and directed from, within. You are the agent in charge. Whereas so-called maximizers are always at the mercy of an external world that might contain a previously-unknown "better" or "best" option that they feel obliged to find. It comes from without; the world is in charge, the vagaries of a perfect ideal are in charge; the person is only hapless and reactive. Thinking you're in control of your destiny (even if it's not true) is more satisfying for people.

myrandomcomment 7y ago

Has anyone else just stopped reading stories on sites like NYT that block reading if your browser is in private browsing mode?

dbg31415 7y ago
And all the sites that won’t let me use an ad blocker or Firefox Foxus. I don’t trust any of them not to load 300 ads.

habitue 7y ago

Paywalled but, I guess the headline contains all the actionable insight already

andrewstuart 7y ago

I still build out everything required to realise the vision, and that usually takes at least months to build. There's an analogy in startups that you should build a great skateboard first if your vision is to build a better car, but I just don't agree. If you have a vision for a better car then you need to deliver a better car, not a skateboard, because, well a skateboard just isn't a car. https://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp https://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-... If my idea is to create a business for sharing cars, but it's cheaper and quicker to build a business where local kids drive you around on their pushbikes, I just don't see that as being the same. Those who argue for skateboards versus cars would say "well you are solving the problem of rental transport and starting in a practical way". Meh. The other thing I think is important is not to waste the initial attention for your product on something that is not in fact the true vision of what you had in mind. But so far I haven't succeeded so my philosophy can't be given much credence.

heavenlyblue 7y ago
>> They had tried to build similar systems in the past and failed miserably, mainly because of Big Bang thinking. They told me that one of their previous attempts took 7 years from inception to first release. SEVEN YEARS! By then of course everything had changed and the project was a total failure. So this time they wanted to do it differently. Or well... Maybe it's just that they have failed to build a system because the IT industry had been changing incredibly fast at the time. So they built their skateboard, but the government closed the skateboard parks, and everyone jumped ship to rollerblades. And that's how they've spent the full 7 years.
- celticninja 7y ago
  At least agile, whatever it may be to people, has worked well in government/public sector IT projects. If ever a project was going to require many changes in its development lifecycle it's government. No more 7 year projects with no working product at the end. It was common practice to underbid the price to win the contract and rinse it on the change requests.

thom 7y ago

I think many people and teams (myself included) have pretty poor self-knowledge. You should aim to create the best product you’re capable of. Most people either over or under estimate that, and they’re left either never delivering, or spending the rest of their lives complaining about technical debt.

Millennium 7y ago

I really wish I could stop seeing this everywhere I went. I get that there are people who need this kind of advice, but for someone like me, this advice is poison. For everyone who needs to be carefully and constantly reminded that you can't let the perfect become the enemy of the good, there's someone else, maybe several someones, who need to be carefully and constantly reminded that "good enough" is almost never good enough. And this latter group, when left unchecked, tends to do a lot more harm than the former.

rtpg 7y ago
This is definitely in the category of advice (much like GTD) of "if you don't think you need this advice, you probably don't need it." I feel like there's an alternate wording for this advice that is less "cut corners" and more "determine how many corners you don't want cut". Maybe involving a target condition? You want to make the best thing possible. Keep on aiming for the best, but establish a baseline that you would find acceptable. Maybe you won't make something perfect, but you'll now have a target that you _can_ get to. This thought process reframes the discussion of "good enough" away from "did I spend enough time on this? Surely I can spend another week and make it 10% better" to "Does this meet the requirements". There is no longer a debate to be had, just a yes or no question to answer. So when people ship things that just aren't good enough you don't have a discussion around spending more time on things or being more careful, you have a discussion around what your baseline requirements are (which is _actually_ what you care about).
- Millennium 7y ago
  This makes sense to a certain degree, but "just ignoring it" only goes so far: even seeing it is corrosive to a certain extent, and by the time you've even registered it enough to ignore it, a lot of the damage is done. Perfectionists undergo a similar phenomenon, I'm told. After all, the modern "Do it badly" movement was itself a response to the corrosive effect of the "'Good enough' isn't" message permeating all of society. I'm not unsympathetic. In solving one problem, it didn't exactly create another -we've always had perfectionists to some extent- but it made that problem much, much worse than it had once been. But the fact is, it was done to solve a real problem in its own right, and that problem has not gone away. What it comes down to is conflicting needs. The all-pervasive "'Good enough' isn't" came about because some people genuinely need it, and they genuinely need it at that level. The same is true of the now-pervasive "Do it badly": it is genuinely needed, and at this level. And you can't balance them, because they inherently undermine each other. So what do you do?