6 ms·
Half-Ass It
- surfingdino 2y agoI feel a book / podcast tour coming ;-)
- rogual 2y agoMy initial reaction is "if there's one thing this world and this industry doesn't need any more of, it's people half-assing it." But, who knows, maybe that means I should do the exercise.
- aulin 2y agoI agree that my half-ass is more ass then most people I work with whole-ass. I'd love to work with more overachievers. Even just achievers would be great.
- SebFender 2y agoYou just made my day
- cl3misch 2y agoThat is true. I guess this specific advice is meant for people who have such high standards (for better or for worse) that they could bring more benefit to the world if they half-ass more things. I agree that telling everybody to half-ass more would probably not yield a net benefit.
- user_7832 2y agoIt is possible that those who whole-ass it generally have high standards and tend to release very little ("I'll link the github later, the code's messy") while 80 (or 90?)% of those who send it have lower standards making you go "who designed this $%^& thing". The first group needs to launch/release/send it faster (I'm likely in this group), and the second could benefit from higher quality standards.
- platzhirsch 2y agoIf I half-ass is, then there's still 33% less for other folks to learn from it.
- huygens6363 2y agoFor people with a long and rich history of procrastination, half-assing and missing deadlines - like 90% of devs I hang around with - consider doing the opposite: do something with care and focus. Make it perfect to the best of your abilities and do it within the time limit. Consider all parameters, not just the technical. You might fail. Explore your emotional reaction to that.
- ocodo 2y ago> Make it perfect to the best of your abilities No, make it good/working to the best of your abilities. Never aim for perfection, if you actually want to get out of bed and do things. Your abilities will grow, and your techniques will develop. If you want to know what "Perfect is the enemy of Good" really means... double down on perfectionism, and see you do nothing, or see your hires leave you.
- chromanoid 2y agoPerfectionism is usually a cause for procrastination. In my experience the long and rich history of procrastination, half-assing and missing deadlines is usually caused by over-thinking, pre-mature optimization, wrong abstractions and analysis paralysis combined with deadlines. I would suggest to try to finish tasks with the bare minimum. Not half-assed but without bells and whistles. Important bells and whistles will come back anyway as their own tasks. Drive by sight and don't prepare too much for the final destination. The latter will change anyway and you will waste your time worrying about ifs.
- fphhotchips 2y agoI've been taking this approach more recently. Something shipped is 100% better than nothing at all, even if it's 25% worse than if I whole-assed it. It's been working, in that the 'leave room for others to step in' has worked well, and those others have filled the gaps with new and interesting ideas that I likely would not have done even had I whole-assed it. At the same time, those people weren't equipped to whole-ass something from nothing.
- huygens6363 2y ago
- pyrale 2y agoAs a self-proclaimed genius, I agree with this advice. People say my work is shit nowadays, but it's only because I'm trying to give them a chance to shine.
- boxed 2y ago"If you aren't ashamed of your first version, you shipped too late"
- andrewfromx 2y agoi did this recently with laying ceramic tile. I had a wooden pallet left over from something being shipped to me so I added a flat sheet of particle board on top and then tiled it. I did not do a good job. But when it was over I had: 1. respect for professional tile people 2. a sense of failing at a task 3. (notice I also half-assed this comment)
- peutetre 2y agoI disagree. I think you two-thirds-assed it.
- sph 2y ago"Good things are worth doing badly," rather than obsessing with perfection and not doing them at all.
- snowstormsun 2y agoDon't follow that advice if you're a doctor please.
- mofeien 2y agoIn school there were overachievers, who put as much as they could in a task the teacher gives to them and always chased the highest grade, and half-asses, who always scraped by with the least amount of work necessary. They did so mostly indiscriminately of the task. Which is the best approach? I think it's being both, with an extra step: first, for each task determining with agency what is the quality target you want to reach, and then half-assing it with everything you've got to attain that goal, and no more or less.
- cjfd 2y agoActually, I think 'half-assing' it is never good. But some people have a problem with perfectionism. I think in general one should have standards and the standards should be good enough to keep a code base in a permanent state of maintainability. And even to bring back maintainability to a bad code base in small increments. This does not mean attempting to do everything perfectly, though, because that just invites too much stress and what is 'perfect' anyway? I think the 'boy scout rule' of leaving a piece of code in a better state than you find it is good. Don't make things perfect, just make them a little better and next time they can become yet another bit better. Also, try to automate more and more manual steps, especially increase automated testing. Automating testing is necessary to ensure improvements are not actually regressions in disguise.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago> Actually, I think 'half-assing' it is never good. All of these conversations are so bizarre to me. I have to imagine these basic labels like "half-assing", "perfectionism", everyone has their own little definition of those things, the circumstances are different, and really all of those things are more like spectrums. And in different scenarios very different configuration of how much "half-assing" is being done will have very different yields. You can make those absolute statements, and sure they could be the optimal truth in certain scenario, but there's thousands of permutations of different scenarios. From the article itself "self-identified overachievers" - to me that doesn't even mean perfectionism. It could be that someone is just doing a lot, but half assing all of it. They could also be identified as an overachiever. E.g. they are always working, and delivering half assed projects, which despite being half assed are successful because there are so many of them, and few of them succeed because they were delivered quickly. In addition if you are constantly working and "overachieving" you might start to half ass for just that reason, that you are mentally done. If there's one truth that is somewhat accurate is that in most projects the 80% / 20% rule does apply, that with 20% effort you can get the 80%, and rest of the 20% will become increasingly difficult towards the perfection, where perfection is actually impossible to reach. Is spending 20% effort to get the 80% and leaving it there half assing? Or is it 80% assing? Or 20% assing?
- 2y ago
- miksik 2y agoI even skimmed reading it and thought I would give it a whirl.
- jstummbillig 2y agoOne problem stems from connecting full/half-assing with outcomes. If the person doing the assing is not feeling the fallout (if there is any, and often times, I agree, there is not) the evaluation of the assing will be off. Some of us probably still over-correct for it, but having this as part of your calculus is a more important part of being a decent human being than it might appear at first glance.
- danwills 2y agoFor some reason this sounded to me slightly like filter-width/domain aware sampling vs point-sampling of inputs when resampling or translating information. When you said 'calculus' it made me think of it this way.. and actually I personally think that one can apply the principles of anti-aliasing (of signals when sampling or translating them) to everyday life.. ie: AA, IRL! Probably sounds strange but to me, AA IRL is still a simple concept about preserving as much of the original signal in the target domain, even when changing sampling or representations from the source domain. I just think it is also a very interesting and relevant/applicable way to think about various aspects of human life too! Seems to me like since various information is moving around, it would be good to choose the appropriate AA strategy based on the context's input and output filter domains! (At least as far as one can control this!) Yes, AA IRL is certainly a bit of a fanciful idea (humans are not shaders/etc) but I think it's still a very interesting way to conceptualize things, and would love for HN to tear it to pieces some time!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tuyiown 2y agoHalf-ass it with the best care and ability you have.
- smarkov 2y agoAs someone who's struggled with starting projects from scratch multiple times over and not releasing anything for many years because it was never good enough, half-assing is not the mindset that helped me start shipping things. Rather, it was gaining an understanding about which parts of my code don't need to be perfect right now and also realizing that practically nothing is perfect the first time you do it. I now leave a bunch of TODOs in my code as a reminder to myself that yes, this isn't the best it can be, I'll come back and make it better when it becomes a bottleneck, but for the time being 80% of something is better than 100% of nothing. This way I'm able to move on and continue doing meaningful work rather than wasting time obsessing over minute details that almost nobody else would care about.
- yakshaving_jgt 2y agoHalf-assed is fine if you only need half an ass.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoA hammer that isn't gold plated and wifi enabled isn't a half-assed hammer. The first part of the job is it's own seperate kind of job, and that job is not to produce the end result of a year of work immediately, it's to identify the job, identify just what actually are the essential requirements and just what exactly is doable on what kind of time scale. Not one line of code. Whole-ass the part of the job which is kind of like triage where you identify what is reasonable and what is out of scope, or out of the initial immediate scope. Then you are not really half-assing anything. You fully attain the more correct goals.
- andrejguran 2y agoI think the author was trying to point out that one way to triage or to identify what actually are the essential requirements is to half-ass it and see the results.
- wegfawefgawefg 2y agoI read half of it.
- jerome-jh 2y agoI recently prepared a small presentation to explain my job to kids in secondary school. I realized many of the products I have worked on are completely obsolete and most of them lie in garbage somewhere. Of course I still fondly remember that hard to fix bug, 10x optimization, smart code trick. But in the end little of it remains but in my own memories. In would say "half-ass it" and use "the other half" for some something truly useful. I am quite far from being able to do it though.
- er0k 2y agoas Homer Simpson said in the 90s: "if you don't like your job, you don't strike! You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That's the American way." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmtxUiGYrB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmtxUiGYrB0