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Arguing with something/someone by labeling it (too) perfect is a bit of a signal for me. Criticizing perfectionism is often just a lazy way to argue for one's s
by cm11 2y ago
Arguing with something/someone by labeling it (too) perfect is a bit of a signal for me. Criticizing perfectionism is often just a lazy way to argue for one's side—usually to argue for doing less, but notably the less that doesn't matter to the arguer. Requesting more QA time, improving load times, getting one more feature in could be perfectionist, but have to argue against the particular thing not perfectionism.
The thing I most worry about using anti-perfectionism arguments is that it begs a vision in the first place—perfectionism requires an idea of what's perfect. Projects suffer from a lack of real hypotheses. Fine, just build. But if you're cutting something important to others by calling it too perfect, can you define the goal (not just the ingredients)? We tend to justify these things by saying, we'll iterate. Much like perfectionism can always be criticized, iteration can theoretically always make a thing better. Iteration is not vision and strategy, it's nearly the reverse, it hedges vision and strategy.
This is a slightly different point, but when we say we don't need this extra security or that UX performance, you're setting a ceiling on the people who are passionate about them. Those things really do have limits (no illusions!), but you're not just cutting corners, you're cutting specific corners. That's a company's culture. Being accused of perfectionism justifiably leads to upset that the company doesn't care about security or users. Yeah, maybe it's limited to this one project, but often not.
I agree with others that on a personal level, perfectionism is a lot of individual procrastination. I'm commenting a bit more about groups, but it might work quite well to look at the leader as procrastinating on strategy by calling downstream work perfectionist.
- ChicagoMan 2y agoSimilarly, it’s helpful to remember that “high level” rhymes with lie level.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoMakes me think of one of the Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design: 6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker. It's all fine in context, but things go wrong if you only look at that high-level view and then step back down to low-level: you may think you've done something useful, but you mostly just threw away the high-frequency components, i.e. the important bits of the signal. Your view gets blurred and unrefined (literally, in case of dropping the high frequencies of an image).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- satyrnein 2y agoIn practice, trying to satisfy everyone's target for perfection took forever and immediately after launch the vision of perfection was revealed to be incorrect anyway; this is the classic "waterfall" failure mode. It also (incorrectly) perceived the cost of delay to be zero. If you are optimizing for something like "actual business value delivered over time" in most typical business contexts (maybe not SpaceX), you are better off putting a ceiling on everyone's idea of perfection, whether that's stakeholders, designers, devs, etc and focusing on launching quickly. From there, you can choose whether to continue to iterate, or move to something else, based on real world feedback. It's not really being against perfectionism; there are just many projects and diminishing returns.
- cm11 2y agoRight. Perfection can be the enemy of the good. It's that it's not a particularly a helpful critique. To use the article’s concept, it’s the wrong scale. It might be helpful to an individual in a performance review, but it doesn’t say why X is unnecessary in this project or at this company. Little is added to the discussion until I describe X relative to the goal. Perfectionism is indeed good to avoid—it's basically defined as a bad thing by being "too". But the better conversation says how X falls short on certain measuring sticks. At the very least it actually engages X in the X discussion. Perfectionism is more of a critique of the person. This takes work, which is why it tends to signal lazy dismissive arguments. It takes effort to understand the person's idea enough to engage it, but more importantly it takes work that was supposed to (but might not) have gone into developing good projects or goals in the first place. Projects well-formed enough to create constraints for themselves.