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I've been giving a lot of thought to how engineers are different in this way. Assuming everyone has similar motivation and work ethic, I think it boils down to

I've been giving a lot of thought to how engineers are different in this way. Assuming everyone has similar motivation and work ethic, I think it boils down to what satisfies you — or more precisely, what irks you the least. For some engineers, the thought of leaving some things undone gives them the icky feeeling, while the thought of not completing a challenge in an expected timeline doesn't bother them. For others, it's the opposite. I think this holds true even for personal projects, where there's no manager or sprint to impose a time constraint.

subarctic 3y ago
That's an interesting idea to think about: if the thought of not completing a challenge in an expected timeline bothered me so much that I took every step to meet the timeline, and leaving something undone didn't give me a very strong icky feeling, what would I do differently when things inevitably turn out to be more complicated than I originally thought? Turn in my code in a non-working state and say it's done?
- hanspeter 3y ago
  In the extreme case, I guess so. The other extreme is the person that will never complete a task as there's always some detail to refine. But it's a spectrum where most people are somewhere between the extremes.