Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–135 of 135 posts

Re: It’s Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done

#131

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

bluGill wrote: post #60
CM30 wrote: post #54

Well, they've got a point. There are definitely quite a few projects whose creators needed to step back, stop spending years focusing on the wrong things and actually get something done. I mean, look at Duke Nukem Forever. Might have done pretty well had they not spent 14 years on it. Same with many other games and pieces of art that spent decades in development, and sometimes bankrupted/broke their creators in the p…

For software you should make something - any part - work and release it. Then do regular feature releases after that. If you are not working alone you can ask your marketing people for help, sometimes it is worth waiting for a big bang release, sometimes not (For some things if you miss Christmas you should delay until next Christmas). I recommend you err on the side of release too soon - customers are the ultimate a…

Considering the garbage fire state of modern technology, I am not convinced this idea is a good one.

Re: It’s Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done

#132

Post by [deleted] »

ta1234567890 wrote: post #105
nostrademons wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the eyes of its users DropBox is a fundamentally different product from the filesharing sites like YouSendIt that already existed, or the techie utilities like rsync that HN commenters compared it to. There's an easy way to see this: people talk about dropping a file in their DropBox, they don't talk about this new filesharing program they're using called DropBox. Similarly, people talk about buying a GoPro and pu…

Your explanation is very clear and really makes a lot of sense. > The customer's mental model is the only thing that matters here. Totally right > If you're building a car or a skateboard, you're seeking to fit into an existing category in their head. Even if you win (which is unlikely, because incumbents optimize very heavily with lots of resources), you lose, because you're a commodity in a market with lots of subs…

[deleted]

Re: It’s Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done

#134

Post by Millennium »

rtpg wrote: post #116
Millennium wrote: post #114

I really wish I could stop seeing this everywhere I went. I get that there are people who need this kind of advice, but for someone like me, this advice is poison. For everyone who needs to be carefully and constantly reminded that you can't let the perfect become the enemy of the good, there's someone else, maybe several someones, who need to be carefully and constantly reminded that "good enough" is almost never go…

This is definitely in the category of advice (much like GTD) of "if you don't think you need this advice, you probably don't need it." I feel like there's an alternate wording for this advice that is less "cut corners" and more "determine how many corners you don't want cut". Maybe involving a target condition? You want to make the best thing possible. Keep on aiming for the best, but establish a baseline that you wo…

This makes sense to a certain degree, but "just ignoring it" only goes so far: even seeing it is corrosive to a certain extent, and by the time you've even registered it enough to ignore it, a lot of the damage is done.

Perfectionists undergo a similar phenomenon, I'm told. After all, the modern "Do it badly" movement was itself a response to the corrosive effect of the "'Good enough' isn't" message permeating all of society. I'm not unsympathetic. In solving one problem, it didn't exactly create another -we've always had perfectionists to some extent- but it made that problem much, much worse than it had once been. But the fact is, it was done to solve a real problem in its own right, and that problem has not gone away.

What it comes down to is conflicting needs. The all-pervasive "'Good enough' isn't" came about because some people genuinely need it, and they genuinely need it at that level. The same is true of the now-pervasive "Do it badly": it is genuinely needed, and at this level. And you can't balance them, because they inherently undermine each other. So what do you do?

Re: It’s Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done

#135

Post by allochthon »

robotsquidward wrote: post #37
pier25 wrote: post #9

At least in software "getting it done" is only half the problem. The real problem is knowing how to find a balance between good enough and catastrophic long term consequences. It's a balance between tactics and strategy. The approach is different in other disciplines such as artistic creation where blind confidence in what you are doing is a better long term strategy and we give a lot more importance to tactics. The…

This comment speaks to me. I'm in a weird point at my job where I'm right at the tail end of supporting this legacy app I've worked on for years, and a brand new app my team will be building from scratch. It's pretty surreal, because I've been dealing with many of the negative long term effects of decisions that were made for this app years ago, meanwhile I'm about to have to make a whole host of similar new decision…

From my own experience maintaining legacy systems and then re-implementing them — strive for a system that future maintainers will be able to refactor instead of wanting to replace it, whatever that entails. Even if all of what you write will be refactored away, you've accomplished something if they're able to continue using the code base in some form.
Post reply on HN