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One of the most important lessons that I think it's difficult to really internalise, is that your job is far more about managing imperfections than it is about
by thom 6y ago
One of the most important lessons that I think it's difficult to really internalise, is that your job is far more about managing imperfections than it is about achieving perfection.
It's very hard to kill your darlings as a developer, you have the whole edifice of software engineering best practice right there on people's blogs, there are infinite frameworks, libraries and languages at your fingertips. An appreciation for what's theoretically possible is always useful, but I will hire, promote, and throw money at people who can deliver a 75% solution to a problem with 90% confidence. I will struggle with people who aim for 100% solutions that never materialise.
I don't think that I (as a younger programmer or if I'm honest even quite recently) would want to hear this, from my future self or anyone else, but I would have been happier accepting it early in my career.
- brundolf 6y agoI've been running up against this lately. It's a really hard lesson to learn for some of us. Code as a medium just caters way to much to perfectionist tendencies, to the point where you may not even come to see them as a problem.
- thom 6y agoI think it really does help to have an outlet where you can apply every last ounce of craftmanship to at least one project. That is very rarely something in a business context, but there is nothing stopping you having the most exclusive possible yak salon in our own time!
- brundolf 6y agoYes I have found this to help!
- the_arun 6y agoWell said!
- sid6376 6y agoHey, author here and I completely agree. One of the things that I meant to express in the article but couldn't was when as someone approaches a problem with an understanding of the context (business, people etc) they will be more likely to understand what's important, what's not and when good is good enough. As a side note, I shared this article with Jessica as a draft and she shared it with her followers before I could add a few more things. Still my most successful post yet and comments such as these make me understand there is a lot of material for new blog posts.
- thom 6y agoBought at least one book clicking through from this post, so thanks! It's a tough area, and something I'm stressing about a lot as I try and build as many career paths as possible for engineers at my current company.