[HN Gopher] Not Perfect, Just Better ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-18 23:00 UTC)