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Comment by maldusiecle | Hacker News Reader

I'm really skeptical of this attitude. In a lot of fields I've seen people who commit themselves to "just getting it done." The result is that they do get a lot of work done: and it's bad, it's mediocre, it doesn't have value. On the other hand, one can easily think of creators who spent a long time on one work (maybe "too much" time), and the result was work of lasting value.

Of course, this relates more to artistic work than technical matters. But I think it is damaging to act as if all work is equivalent to deadlined development work. Great things come from people being impractical.

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I think you’re missing a few things:

1. Many great artists were extremely prolific and created lots of mediocre work, we just forget about those. There seem to be very few perfectionists who just created a few great works, not “releasing” them until they were perfect. There are some, but they’re the exception.

2. You’re also not seeing all the many perfectionists who waited until things were perfect and then never finished at all, which is by far the biggest risk. I’d argue there are orders of magnitude more of these than perfectionists who ship perfect things.

I suspect that many of the “just get it done” people who do lots of bad or mediocre work will end up creating great things, you’re just catching them earlier in their learning / experimentation cycle. But those people will learn and adapt so much faster than the perfectionists will.

Sure. You need a balance, and creating flawed works is a part of the process--I wouldn't deny that. But creating work after work, for the sake of creating, doesn't necessarily lead to better work; going through the slow process of refinement, revision, and self-criticism, is necessary. There's a saying that music teachers often repeat, which is that practice doesn't maker perfect, practice makes permanent. You have to step back and think about what you're doing, and that does mean sacrificing "productivity," at least for a while.

>But creating work after work, for the sake of creating, doesn't necessarily lead to better work

I don't see anyone suggesting this.

> Great things come from people being impractical

Yes, but in my experience this is more an exception, compared to the vast majority of people who never ship anything, because "it's not quite right yet". That's where the danger lies.

And I think there are plenty of similarities between art and tech, regarding this.

For a web app, it will have to be shared before growing in quality and becoming great. Github, Basecamp, Twitter all did that. It's always about having a first released being a kick ass half or a half ass product (Getting Real was phrasing it like that if I recall correctly).

Same for a film. It might be released on a specific date to a wide audience, but it has gone through many iterations, discussed between dozens of people.

And just getting it done does not mean that you have to stop everything once your deadline has passed. If there is more work that you want to add to improve it, do it. But at least you've shared it as an intermediary stage, and you and your work have probably both grown from that. And you can now give yourself another deadline.

As someone who spent the first ten years of their career desperately trying to salvage one steaming heap of technical debt and security disasters after another, I think we have wildly diverging opinions of the consequences of software development driven primarily by just trying to get something committed and out there.

In my opinion, every single one of these companies was effectively a zombie: dead, but unaware of it.

Do I understand you right that Github, Basecamp, Twitter are or were zombies?

If that's what you are saying, I'd love you to elaborate, because I can't see how one could see this.

The companies I was referring to are the companies I had worked for in the past, that were saddled with irrecoverable technical debt as a result of “just ship it” with no regard to craftsmanship.

If history has anything to teach us, it's that being prolific in creating work is more successful than being a perfectionist. Alexandre Dumas didn't know he was creating a what's now considered a literary masterpiece when he wrote The Three Musketeers. It was just another of the many, many stories he wrote.

I'm an artist myself and I still think it applies. If I take a client they are going to want it done in a reasonable time frame. At some point I will have to make the call of "Good enough to ship."

But even when it comes to personal projects it's useless to work on the same project forever. Often that stunts growth (new pieces teach you new things) and it also makes you a lot less prolific. I've met so many artists who let the fear of not being perfect stop them from drawing much at all. They fidget over the same drawing for months and even when they finally finish it's because they give up, hate what they made and are sick of looking at it. Something they might have been passionate about is now a source of sadness and frustration to the point they don't want to do it anymore. There is no such thing as perfect. Even the best masterpieces in history had to be declared "finished" at some point.

Yes, I haven't mentioned that in the post, but that's definitely a good point. Our happiness or satisfaction will be very much linked to progress we make.

And since progress tend to be logarithmic (the last 20% taking 80% of the time), the last bit will be the least pleasant. So that's where we become less efficient.

Of course that doesn't mean either that we should stop when it gets hard. But being aware of this should help you decide if you should keep pushing or if it's time to take a break (which can be a few minutes or maybe weeks).

Maybe paintings can't be "fixed" once they are done, but software can always be improved, refactored or even completely rewritten if it takes off. So it would make sense to do as many projects as possible and test which ones have the potential to go big, isn't it?

Obviously this doesn't apply to software that goes into medical equipment, planes etc that can harm people.

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