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.
Not Perfect, Just Better
11–20 of 40 posts
Re: Not Perfect, Just Better
#12Would be just better with capital letters.
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.
Re: Not Perfect, Just Better
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 peop…
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
Re: Not Perfect, Just Better
#14Something 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…
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.
Re: Not Perfect, Just Better
#15I'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.
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…
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.
Re: Not Perfect, Just Better
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 peop…
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
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.
Re: Not Perfect, Just Better
#17I'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.
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.
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.
Re: Not Perfect, Just Better
#18Would be just better with capital letters.
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.
You’re probably alone in this.
Re: Not Perfect, Just Better
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 t…
Aim high, but have compassion for yourself as you push forward.
This is not embracing mediocrity, it is not disengagement, slacking, or merely rejecting perfectionism. It is understanding that the process of growth and improvement exacts a toll, and that growth is not always a pure function of time invested.
Re: Not Perfect, Just Better
#20Something 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…
Reminds me of a quote from Bojack Horseman I think about quite often (in the show it's in reference to running): "It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That's the hard part".