Demanding polished work is a power play designed to take options away from you | Hacker News Reader

Demanding polished work is a power play designed to take options away from you

minimal.app

Without a definition of what the author means by “polished”, this reads like a student who got a C on an assignment and isn’t happy about it.

To be a better submission, the author needs concrete examples that set the context for the reader and helps clue us in on what “good” and “polished” means.

Side note: In my experience, very often one person’s “polished” is another one’s “good”. This is often a key to detecting the quality of the author. For example, if you think of films or books, exceptional creators have made amazing works out of the most mundane topics (eg Office Space). Another way to put it: “Anything worth doing is worth doing well”.

You could say the text needs to be polished a bit.

And that it’s not good yet.

I seems like the author is proposing a continuum of:

Not good enough -> good -> polished

This article has not made it to the good stage because it doesn’t convey a point well.

Depends. I recently got a request to 'polish' some work up.

The definition involved making a document look 'professional' or 'corporate'. No update to the actual quality and clarity of the information.

Complete waste of time and brain cycles.

The request was from a venture cap (natch).

I recall one time at the beginning of my career having some VP look at the project we were working on, and her only feedback was "make the box bluer."

That's one better than my personal best: 'change the green colour to yellow'.

Author here. I wrote this after listening to my girlfriend's neice describing her decision-making process as she completes schoolwork, applies for jobs, cultivates her craft, learns life lessons, has adventures. It occurred to me that she was overvaluing a single assignment for a single needy professor, at the expense of many superior opportunities. She has a lot going on – how can she maximize her opportunity? This micro-essay is my attempt at understanding the position and abstracting it, both for my benefit and others'. I would love for readers to help improve my thinking and shed light on any blindspots.

Thanks for adding this context.

Does your neice have competing opportunities where polishing actually blocks out?

My experience is that I don’t have 5 things I could do if I end with good enough. I rarely have 5 assignments due at the same time. So if I polish something, I’m actually just losing time that I would have spent on some marginal activity like tv, reading, etc.

It also is hard to evaluate opportunity and value, especially ahead of time. So focusing on a single experience rather than trying to increase quantity of experience may result in a lower level of impact than just polishing a single item.

Great point – how do we know when something is worth focusing on? I usually use enthusiasm for signal, but I am sure there is an effective rational approach as well.

In the case of my gf's neice, she is in an exploratory phase with a truly incredible amount of high-quality opportunities right in front of her. Losing attention/time to something low value would be "high cost," by my assessment.

You might be too effective of a fiction writer, because many of us thought you were the actual student with authentic indignation (whether justified was for us to determine).

I’m going to ask an inappropriate personal question:

Did your niece recently choose to spend time on her schoolwork versus spending time with her family?

I like the essay. I find your context here helpful and I actually think it makes your point stronger. It contextualizes it with a real-world example. You might want to consider adding this context in a footnote at the end of your essay.

My interpretation is that school is a not a great place to learn how to act in the real world. In particular, school is way more hierarchical and command-and-control than the real world.

One thing I don't see mentioned is taking pride in your work. I see my work as an extension of myself, and I want it to be as good as possible. I could hustle and shit out a bunch of hack jobs that are "good enough", but I can't take pride in that. Also obviously I have to make compromises to get stuff done, but my fear is that by being okay with hack jobs that I lose the ability to produce polished work. When given the time I will always opt to do polished work.

Excellent point.

Being proud of your work doesn't make it better.

Expertise is applying the right amount of effort at the right time in the right place.

It is developed by the long slog of being good enough many many times, because feedback matters.

Good enough requires focus on the actual problem and avoids being proud of something that doesn't solve it.

Never said it made it better. Expertise is also having a deep understanding of a topic and being able to apply it. And you actually need to apply the feedback, not just passively absorb it. "Good enough" isn't "ideal", or "A", or "You're promoted!"

I noticed you didn’t say pride in your work would make it better. That’s why pride in one’s work is shit as a road to expertise. It triggers defending one’s honor and makes criticisms personal.

Whether or not something is worth polishing is context dependent, so the context you’re giving here is pretty crucial, and the essay suffers without it.

When I write docs for my small team, I’m pretty lazy about it. If I write docs for a new joiner, I put in more work. If I write docs for external users, I’m both careful and I seek external review!

What comes to mind are the exceptions.

Writing for example, is often as much about the polish applied after initial drafting is done. Perhaps for an academic assignment in a class, that's not a big deal, but it would be a huge deal for... marketing copy, fiction writing, scientific papers, journalistic reporting, screen-writing... etc.

The other possibility, where asking for polish is an attempt to be helpful, not a power-play, is where the professor is attempting to train the student to produce better work in the field of speciality of the professor. This is actually part of the professor's job. In that case, it would be unreasonable to attribute malice, and instead it should be considered a simple case of two people optimizing for different things.

Seems like author got frustrated by some specific demand of his professor and wrote this rant to let steam out.

There is a suggestion in the end to always follow Pareto principle and do 80-20 work. I think it is not that simple. I tend to work in this mode and yes it is efficient but after some time working in this mode I get frustrated by not satisfying my “craftsmanship” needs. Sometimes I just crave to work on something that is not 80-20 optimised, that has polished edges and qualities that might not be worth it economically but they are there because someone just cares about the thing being the best it can be.

Sure the difference in this scenario is that the motivation to polish is internal and there is a sense of ownership for the thing.

This sounds suspiciously like the argument a former coworker gave when I asked him why he wasn't testing his code before pushing it to production.

I’ve had similar interactions with immature or bad coworkers.

“I don’t have time to run spell check before sending this email. I’m working on other important things. You understood what I meant, right?”

For internal communication it doesn't seem very important. Like I do try to be pretty careful about sending useful emails (so I do have spell check turned on), but spelling errors in internal messages aren't something I can imagine bringing up in a conversation with a coworker.

Let's try to see this in another perspective.

Say you are now the leader/boss/manager/client and you are working with a programmer.

So you receive a work and from past experiences you see it's lacking documentation of architectural design choices, you see many data processing procedures done synchronously with the APIs serving layer, the coding style is different than the agreed in the organizations. So you as for polishing.

And every time you ask for polishing this particular Dev cites a whole bunch of nonsense about powerplay and that the way it's done is different than his working style. You try to educate, and show why you are asking what you are asking to no avail.

What follows next is a slow but sure separation of this Dev. The employee starts receiving less and less work that requires those kinds of things, only maintenance jobs.

What the Dev did was effectively argue himself into isolation.

so when first powerplay lost, looser starts second one to isolate dev (so therewould be reason to fire?)

No. The argument is the argument over polishing work is not a power play. Work is expected to meet certain standards. A request to polish the work is an opportunity to ensure the work meets those standards, prior to cutting them loose for falling short of expectations.

I have worked with many students who have felt that submitting the minimum possible should reflect the standards. The argument goes it has demonstrated they know their stuff. Sometimes they have learned the material. (Usually they haven't, but that is a separate issue.) What they are neglecting is the expectation to communicate they have learned the material in a clear manner to other people.

Something similar can be said of software development. It is relatively easy to write code that solves a problem. It is more difficult to write code that solves a problem well. It is also more difficult to document the code in a manner that other people will understand, which is important since other people will will have to work on it in the future. (Even if, as the saying goes, that other person is future-you.)

Interestingly, I am often in the position of leader/boss/manager/client. One of my favorite questions to ask specialists is: "of everything that's in our scope, is there anything you think is not worth doing?" Another working paradigm I find critical to effective management is limiting myself to a tiny "nitpick budget" so that we focus on what matters without eroding morale/trust/time/attention (if the job is not being done to core standards, I'd find a new specialist altogether).

Once again, the distinction between good work and polished work is critical. (It deserves its own essay!) And I agree with you – the ability to make this distinction – and to never push against against core standards – is a basic requirement.

It would be nice to have an ontological essay laying out what exactly these concepts relate to in practice.

It is a subject full of nuance that I would love to read deeper into.

lacking documentation of architectural design choices, you see many data processing procedures done synchronously with the APIs serving layer, the coding style is different than the agreed in the organizations.

If these matter, these are failures to meet requirements.

Meeting requirements is not polish, it is the bar for good enough.

To the degree they don't matter, asking for them is a power play.

Yes, the thing is that the concepts of polish and requirements are not stable across different perspectives. What I am calling requirements were viewed as unnecessary flourishes by someone else. The comment is actually motivated from experiences in my work. There was always this constant resistance from a colleague to do what I thought was a basic requirement, where he thought was unnecessary.

So it is much more a matter of culture, the constructed meaning of those concepts and how they translate in practice that shape the discussion. It is a matter of quality and how different people have different perspectives on the matter, none of them being objectively wrong, because how on earth can you even be objective about it? There is nothing in essence that says that a project with well documented design principles is better than another, otherwise you would just say "it is better because it is", when in reality "it's better just because I say so and the team agrees".

To the degree they are requirements, the work can be reassigned within the team and it will make no difference.

Not fulfilling requirements is a straight up HR performance matter.

An unwillingness to execute in conformance with culture is also an HR matter for cultural fit.

In both cases it is not a matter of good-enough. It is a matter of not-good-enough.

Situations where it is not these are what the article covers, e.g. when the important thing is someone performing as requested not as expertise indicates or when there are non-trivial opportunity costs to fulfilling the request.

Too broad of a generalization here. The article is describing trade offs. Yes, we all could be elsewhere and doing other things, but this isn’t always valid reasoning.

Anecdote incoming:

I work on a product where just about every feature suffers from trade offs. Over time, this becomes a million little cuts. The overall product now lacks a proper coating and fine finish. Some of the things are done so half assed that going back to polish it just becomes lipstick on a pig.

In a situation like that, I’d insist everything be built better because we’ve crossed the trade-offs budget where the trade off of getting more stuff done is no longer a worthwhile trade off.

I disagree, work that is actually useful to the world is almost always polished. As an academic scientist, “good“ isn’t useful, that last 20% is essential to make sure my work is correct and understandable to the world. If a professor demands polished work, they are teaching the students that they are capable of more than they believe they are. I think it’s more rewarding, and more useful to the world to complete one polished work vs a number of good works. When I look back at my education, I was angry about professors that demanded polished work, but in hindsight I feel that those are the only classes that prepared me for real success, and they were insisting on greatness because they believed I was capable of it. They believed in me, when the people accepting “good enough” did not.

I generally agree.

One can probably come up with scenarios where doing more things "well enough" to get by is maybe the right answer. And there's another extreme where you never finish anything because it's never good enough.

But in general, my goal is to produce work that's polished--or at least polished enough for the purpose at hand. You're mostly not rewarded for producing lots of sub-par work--you just get known for sub-par work.

Not sure about this. I'm going to paint with broad stripes here, but take Spanish work culture versus USA for example. Spain is okay with 'good enough', while US is striving for excellence through overtime etc. Or Christmas in the US, everything "has to be perfect", if there's a slight hiccup, the whole thing is ruined. In Spain people just shrug their shoulders and carry on. In my opinion, as a consequence, the average Spanish person is a lot happier than the average American.

Interesting that you would point out the Spanish vs American work culture. I feel there is some more nuance and complexity here that can't be captured in a single dimension, e.g. 80% vs 100%.

As a scientist, I have found that I most often prefer to work with Spanish scientists on projects, and indeed mostly collaborate with Spanish people, despite having never been to Spain, not speaking Spanish, etc. I just really connect with their culture and attitude, and love working with them.

But I wouldn't characterize it as "good enough" vs "excellence." I find there is a deeper excellence in Spanish work that you don't usually see in American work that is hard for me to put words to, but I will list a few things that come to mind as well as I can:

* An appreciation for minimalism and simplicity- simplifying the work itself, so that it can be 'excellent' while being paired down to the core of what is important, with nothing superfluous or distracting added. Simplicity allows more excellent work, not less, and allows you to actually get to 100%.

* A playful or joyful child-like attitude towards the work that sees it as fun, rather than a huge stressful burden. This lightness allows for visionary high risk work that would be too 'scary' for people that take the work too seriously and can't endure a chance of failure.

* An understanding that we are humans, and need relaxation, naps, solitude, contemplation, and joyful social experiences to be fully human, and to continue being creative, happy, and healthy people that can do excellent work.

In short, I feel that the Spanish approach to work actually makes it practical to bring work from merely "good" to truly "excellent" without burning out.

Nietzsche, a German, writes a lot about this, and how he much more admires and likes to work with Mediterranean philosophers vs other Germans, and how he also feels that the cultural differences make German work mostly mediocre, and Mediterranean work excellent. This is the idea behind his book "The Gay Science," e.g. The Joyful Wisdom or The Joyous Science.

Interesting, but not sure I’m following…

If you’re working under a “time and materials” model of compensation then “the professor” is paying for the polishing. Would it still be a bad deal to do the polishing?

If your working under a “fixed price” compensation model then it’s obviously a bad deal to keep working on something that’s already done (by all reasonable standards), and no elaborate explanations are required.

I guess their issue is that due to the professor's clout, its hard for them to say no to do work at t&m they are no longer comfortable at [maybe even for free]. That's why the 'powerplay' ref ? I know that can be frustrating because I worked with a professor once who wanted me to work a lot before giving me clarity about money/cred.

I still have an argument for "time and materials" - original article is about opportunity cost.

You can continue working and being paid for working on X - all is fine.

But what if in that time you could get customer that is paying more - will you still be willing to put up with demands to continue to meet "higher standards"? Will person demanding "higher standards" pay more - so would you renegotiate?

From the title I didn't expect it will take the angle it did. Your superior demanding you polish the artefact they signed you up for is a perfectly reasonable "play".

I think where it can become unreasonable or controlling is when the superior is intentionally vague about the polishing criteria to allow them optionality in dismissing your changes after each submission or to get you to plead for clarity. This can create significant anxiety in the individual involved as they try to second-guess how their superior will respond to each change or to guess if they meet their standard.

Or if they ask for "simple" polishing changes which they know full-well will take an insane amount of effort ("maybe you can expand section X show how the package performs on another set of data to demonstrate its versatility")

The person who makes 100 pieces of pottery will make higher quality ones than the person who tried super hard to make one perfect piece.

“Polish” is a natural consequence of experience.

It really depends. If they are willing to learn from those 100 pieces of pottery, then definitely. If they are performing the same mechanics over and over again, then their work is unlikely to improve. Alas, too many people fall into the latter category.

I am not buying this. Maybe that is a case of misunderstood definitions, as the author at the end alludes to the difference between polished work and good work.

But as the definitions of those are missing it is hard to know if the problem I have with this approach is in the labels or the core of the claim.

The lack of widely accepted precise definitions makes the whole thing pretty arbitrary.

Like the concept that it's possible to spend a lot of time doing work that doesn't really add much value is reasonable enough, but what that means is going to vary a huge amount based on the situation and task.

I try to use automation to nitpick my work, which when it works ends up adding polish without taking much time (of course the initial investment in the automation is easier to justify when the work is at least somewhat repetitive). Spell check is a good general example, the automation eliminates a whole category of errors without taking much time.

It does not even need widely accepted definitions, a local definition of those terms would be enough.

It would improve the piece. I'm not sure they would create a way of labeling "power plays" that wasn't more or less arbitrary.

It's probably easier to write a piece that argues for the concept that it is good to be mindful of the potential for diminishing returns to further work and to push back on those requests. It's also likely to be useful to more people.

I don't understand what "polished work" (as opposed to good work) is. Without that, this just doesn't mean anything to me.

Doesn't the article clarify that in the last paragraph? I'd understand it if you said "the last paragraph is flawed because..." but you seem to be saying there was no attempt to define the terms.

Not really, it says "good work is worth it, polishied work is not worth it", which means... what?

That's not how I would use the word "polished", or I've ever heard anyone else use the word polished. And if we just define the word polished to mean "work that isn't worth it", that changes the title to the much clearer, but much less exciting "Demanding work which isn't worth doing is a power move".

There's a danger in producing 'good enough' work, it is exactly what China and other low-cost producers turn out by nature, and almost by definition it is commodified.

IMHO what defines 'German engineering' and other admired systems of production is attention to detail. 'Polish' as the author would have it.

Of course some situations call for 'good enough' and there's always a tradeoff, but with some things, just like in sports, the final 1% or even 0.1%, is the difference between winning and also-ran, between really standing out or just being another minion.

I think you need to polish your article for more internet points. Please rewrite it with examples where refusing to polish work for a boss / employer and a client led to more opportunities in each case.

People sometimes have different standards of acceptable quality. It seems so much more likely that that’s what would be going on than some weird Machiavellian power play. If I asked a colleague to refactor some code in a code review and they jumped to this conclusion, I’d file that coworker under “toxic” and do my best to avoid them[1].

[1] I’d, of course be happy to have a discussion about whether the refactor would make the code better or be worth the effort.

After reading the comments I was expecting a longer writeup. It seems to be restating "perfect is the enemy of good enough" reframed in the light of opportunity cost to the author in addition to consumers/customers which is the usual framing. In short your goals don't always align with the reauestor's.

As I was reading this I realized that I'm usually the one raising the quality bar at times when the author doesn't see the benefits. Don't always assume that just because you can't appreciate the stated benefits that they're not there. If you can trust the reauestor's motivations don't be too hesitant to put in some extra, but as always try to understand what and why and find a good balance. Personally I've internalized so much of my knowledge that I have to make an extra effort to make them conscious again and communicate reasoning as clearly and simply as possible. OTOH if the requests are made shallowly without much context of thought, dismissing them tactfully is the best course of action. Interesting to think about and apply.

Yeah, I'm confused. Is OP suggesting that no work needs to be polished ever or that polishing is just a job for someone else?

More like they are looking for validation from a recent experience. I doubt they will get it.

If a non-polished (or is that just not-good-enough?) work result comes with negative consequences at a future point in time, of course polishing reduces the opportunity for some urgent fire-fighting activities, and reduces the possibility to become the hero to solve the problem.

If it's just some work output for the purpose of practicing / studying, it wont come with such consequences. No-one is going to read it next year, and even if, it won't matter.

Fail/pass quickly for practice, to get the experience to work carefully for when it matters.

This is nonsense. Work isn’t done if it isn’t polished. Polish and attention to detail is what separates the Nintendos and Apples of the world from the also-rans.

The options are not always equivalent. 19 offers to work on blockchain scams are not equivalent with 1 offer from a top company that wants their products market ready and offers you a once in a lifetime opportunity. So get polishing.

I’ll be a C student and graduate in 3 years vs. being an A student who graduates in 4.

There’s a lot of factors that makes that a good idea vs a bad idea.

If your goal is just to achieve a degree and it doesn’t matter the quality, then it makes sense. Maybe you have an existing job where there’s a guaranteed promotion of you have a degree.

But school is about learning and making connections, not just sheepskin. If you want to get a good internship, or grad school then grades and special projects with professors are important.

So the person who graduates in 4 years will likely have a much higher lifetime income than the person who graduates on 3 years.

>>I’ll be a C student and graduate in 3 years vs. being an A student who graduates in 4

Why be a student at all then? you can finish in zero years.

Weasel words at the end about how good work isn’t polished work, but no discussion of the distinction. Reads like it was written by a lazy prima donna.

No author name? No post index?

What's the point of an anonymous block of text published on the internet?

So, who would do the actual work then? Probably I know: others.

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