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Comment by sublinear | Hacker News Reader

I have such a hard time relating to this in the same way I get deeply annoyed by sloppy code from coworkers. Any advice?

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Try to keep in mind that your attention to detail is almost certainly perceived by them to be fastidious, and that quietly your seniormost colleagues and leaders may well muse: "Man, if only sublinear would loosen their standards, just imagine how much faster we'd proceed". Put another way: the fact that you can't relate to OPs problem is because you're hardwired to solve it (putting things in their place) continuously, likely without exception, which means you're paying a different cost. Try to think of _that_ cost when you bristle at their solutions.

I enjoy thinking about this perspective, but at the end of the day it's not slower in the long run to be meticulous. Quite the opposite.

I think it's less that being meticulous is time consuming than that, in the same way that things have different values to different people, things can have different costs. I feel like if I didn't put things in convenient places that may be difficult to find later, I'd end up doing a lot of backtracking in the present.

Eg, I misplace my wireless headphones a lot. Something comes up that demands my full attention, so I take off my headphones. My headphones live at my desk.

If I walk to my desk, I'm likely to forget what I needed to do - there's lots of stuff demanding my attention on my desk, after all. Someone could also engage me in conversation on my way. Much of the time I'll return to my original task without issue, sometimes I'll get distracted for 15 minutes, sometimes I'll get distracted for an hour.

It's a lot cheaper to just put down my headphones. Or maybe it's more accurate to think of it as less risky.

"Meticulous" is basically defined as "the upper end of the right level of care about detail." What you call meticulous others might call unnecessarily pedantic, or obsessive. What they call meticulous, you might find sloppy.

Exactly that, it's the No True Scotsman fallacy.

I'm in the process of coming to terms with how neurologically diverse people are.

Some people are completely comfortable with being late, or having smudged glasses, or driving erratically - it does not bother them in the slightest.

Their world is completely different to mine, and it's not that they don't care about the sloppy code or that they are too lazy to polish it - they don't even see it.

Humans are surprisingly diverse in how their brains work.

Some sympathetic reading about ADHD might help. And think about who in your life might have it in some degree. That person who leaves the cabinet doors open, or who has 500 tabs on their browser. Don’t pathologize it.

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