[HN Gopher] Not Perfect, Just Better
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Not Perfect, Just Better
Author : fredrivett
Score : 21 points
Date : 2022-09-18 19:49 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (satfax.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (satfax.substack.com)
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| Would be just better with capital letters.
| boomskats wrote:
| i don't know if I'm alone in this, but i find this style easier
| to read - find it less intense in a way. maybe it's an adaptive
| thing. maybe i'm just weird.
|
| when i read caps i can almost feel the author's resentment at
| having had to reach for one of those shift keys and break up
| their typing rhythm, when without them text can flow so easily.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| You're probably alone in this.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Or a haiku, there's not much being said there.
| smitec wrote:
| Something I will add which relates to the examples in the post
| (gym, business, relationships) is that big things happen with
| lots of small steps over time. You can't do a years worth of
| workouts on Jan 1 and be fit for the year. These things take
| daily effort and cycles of work and recovery to happen.
|
| That desire for perfection can also be a desire to be done. To
| have it finished and get closure. It's hard to accept that some
| things are going to take a long time or a lifetime.
| fredrivett wrote:
| 100% with you on this smitec.
|
| It's what I tried to capture in the post, but probably could
| have put better.
|
| The sense of just taking the steps I can today, rather than
| burdening myself with the expectation of needing to have worked
| it all out and achieved all of my comparison-driven life goals.
|
| The key is to find healthy rhythms that help us continue to
| better ourselves over time.
| satisfice wrote:
| I am not aiming for perfect, or better. I am no longer aiming. I
| am reacting to the kinetics of the life I long ago put into
| motion.
| verisimilitudes wrote:
| I'm not entirely disagreeing, but this is a disgusting mindset
| when applied to mathematics, and programming is applied
| mathematics. I've seen it so often. The incompetent spend so much
| of their time dredging up excuses for mediocrity, rather than
| improving.
| karmakaze wrote:
| The trick is defining a subset of a larger problem that you can
| solve perfectly--and know what isn't solved for next time.
| taeric wrote:
| Mathematics can be applied to programming, for sure. However,
| much of programming is encoding of business processes. Such
| that, unless you expand your scope for all business process
| also being applied mathematics, I'm not sure this is that
| instructive.
| verisimilitudes wrote:
| Let's use the linux kernel as an example, since it does very
| few, well-defined things, and still doesn't work. This comes
| from an inability to imagine better, an unwillingness to use
| proper tools, and an attitude that _kernel panics_ be
| acceptable.
|
| It's fine to solve a vague problem by simply having the
| machine ask for human direction in a few cases. It's not fine
| to have the machine do something inappropriate or _crash_
| because a valid case wasn 't handled in any way.
|
| Everything below these vague areas can, and should, be
| perfect. People who claim this be an unobtainable goal are
| liars.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd be comfortable, calling it "disgusting."
|
| It's different from the one I tend to apply, in my own work.
|
| I used to work for a famous Japanese imaging corporation. Their
| brand was pretty much synonymous with "Quality."
|
| They got that way, by practicing Perfection as a religion. It
| could be very, very tough, to deal with, but it gave me a great
| appreciation for a Quality mindset, in my own work.
|
| The result is that even my lash-up, throwaway code, tends to be
| better than many folks' final release code.
|
| This has great advantages for me. In fact, I just experienced
| one, a few minutes ago. If the baseline code is of as high
| Quality as I can possibly make it, then I can avoid lash-ups,
| or at least, reduce their severity, later. I refactored a
| fairly complex server interaction timeline, and it was made
| much easier, because I was pretty damn anal, when I first wrote
| it, maybe six months ago.
| fredrivett wrote:
| I think this is a good point I didn't convey in my hastily-
| written-in-10-minutes-blog-post-that-I-didn't-expect-to-
| reach-the-HN-front-page.
|
| I can fall into perfectionism, but I find this a suboptimal
| mindset for healthy outcomes.
|
| Excellence seems the far better path.
|
| Keeping a high bar still, but not expecting something that's
| unreasonable.
|
| Continuing to challenge yourself to get _better_ , but not
| expecting yourself to have achieved something already that's
| out of your grasp.
|
| For me it's about trajectory and momentum over perfection.
| badtension wrote:
| I have a completely opposite view. Striving for perfectness can
| be very toxic and create an environment where growth is
| impossible if you don't match someones definition of "perfect".
| It's not about excuses, it's about compromises, making
| progress, growing in our own pace and being human.
| spoiler wrote:
| You both make good points.
|
| Striving for perfection is a toxic habit (not just to your
| team, but to yourself too). However, there's also a category
| of people that write sloppy/unthoughtful code at the expense
| of their colleagues. Often times this is just due to
| inexperience, and we should reach out with advice and
| mentorship, but also have patience with their pace of
| improvement.
|
| However, there's also a subset of people who abuse this
| compassion to get away with being sloppy intentionally (ie
| lazy). We should be mindful that these people exist, as they
| also create resentment/contempt, which also creates a toxic
| work environment.
| badtension wrote:
| Can you provide some rough statistics of each group size
| from your personal experience? Not asking to trap you but I
| am genuinely interested whether in practice it is useful to
| focus on the underlying cause.
|
| Intentionally sloppy vs.
| inexperienced/tired/overworked/ADHD sloppy
| spoiler wrote:
| Intentionally sloppy is someone I would categorise as
| being persistent sloppy, and showing no interest in
| improving themselves, but also a resistance to advice,
| and/or feedback. It sounds silly, because "who wouldn't
| wanna improve?", but sometimes they can't tell the
| difference between saying/wishing it and doing it.
|
| I'd say I probably had a handful of such colleagues out
| of roughly ~70 devs I've worked with. They were all good
| people though, and had different reasons for their
| "sloppyness," but I think it kinda boiled down to being
| slightly more insecure and egotistical, or self-serving
| than I'm personally comfortable with (not that I hold it
| against them; all these traits are gradients). One was
| very open that he doesn't care about maintenance burden,
| and couldn't understand why I'm frustrated by the idea of
| amalgamated hacks. It was just the cost doing business to
| him. I sometimes think about this attitude and the wonder
| of I'd be happier by caring less about quality and
| maintainability than I do right now.
|
| There's other components to all the other kinds you
| listed, IMO. People who are inexperienced tend to learn
| from their mistakes and don't repeat them (or at least
| try not to) once they know better. People who are
| tired/burnt out also show this indirectly outside of code
| in different ways. And people with ADHD don't tend to be
| sloppy in my experience, but they tend to just have a
| more erratic cadence (depending on how well they can
| maintain focus), or just be a bit sporadic (ie not get
| anything done for almost two weeks then have a barrage of
| PRs on Thursday/Friday).
|
| All of these can be addressed if the person is willing to
| improve, though.
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