Product Performances | Hacker News Reader

Product Performances

dcurt.is

58 pointsgmcabrita15 comments

Bugs and "known issues" become personal flaws. How well the user accomplishes his or her goals become a personal reflection of the creators.

It's a dangerous idea for performers to hang their ego on a performance. Just because you played a crap guitar solo one night does not mean you're a bad person. It's all part of a process - you can learn from what didn't work and try something different tomorrow night. The more time you're in the process, the better your performance gets.

A great performance is about making the audience feel something. Sometimes you can feel like it was your worst solo every, but the audience loved it because you really took a chance and went for something and they were with you for the adventure. It's not as entertaining to watch you play it safe even if it's technically more refined.

To stick with the guitar example, compare Kurt Cobain's guitar solos to those of Django Reinhardt - both made for a great performance, but they are on different planets in terms of complexity and sophistication. My significant other and I have been playing Draw Something and I find it ugly and ad-ridden, yet I love playing the game because we have fun and enjoy the challenge.

He will never accept anything less than perfection because it would be a personal reflection of himself; he loves what he does and it shows through his work.

The best artists I've learned from didn't reach high levels because of ego or a desire to appear perfect. They were able to put unfathomable amounts of energy into honing their craft because they were that passionate about it. The love of the process is what enables the quality of the finished product. Jony Ive strikes me as this kind of artist. His obsession with the process is clear - his love of materials, creativity in inventing new methods of machining...everything right up until when you're holding the device in your hand as the user feeling something.

Designing a product is much different than executing a musical performance because playing guitar on stage contains elements out of your total control like a broken guitar string, amp malfunction etc. Sometimes they miss a note, that's not a mental lapse, it can be a physical disconnect between what their mind is trying to accomplish and what their finger actually does.

A designer has total control over a product before it is released. This article is about the mental pursuit of perfection.

A designer does not have total control except in the most ideal of circumstances. In the real world there are deadlines, a budget, the whims of clients to cater to, and investors to impress. It's nice to think that perfection is possible but realistically compromisesl must be made in the real world.

And you think programming/product design is unaffected by these disconnects?

What if a server crashes? What if Illustrator doesn't draw the exact like the hand performed?

There are physical and technological disconnects in much the same respect as a musical performance.

What's most impressive to me in Penn & Teller's work is not just that they put in extraordinary amounts of time perfecting a trick (giving themselves a barrier to entry), but that they "ship". They don't let perfection get in the way of bringing a new trick out.

I agree with Dustin that caring is critical to creating well-designed products, but fear the desire for perfection getting in the way of releasing.

"More trouble than it's any reasonable person would have expected it to be worth" turns out to be a pretty good description of modern exploit development. For instance, from Derek Soeder:

The author's proof-of-concept exploit uses this technique to implement a six-stage approach, comprising: (1) the replacement INT 10h handler, a tiny, low-byte arithmetic / PUSH / Jcc sequence that computes the offset of the next stage, pushes it, and branches to a nearby RET, RETF, or IRET; (2) a larger, low-byte sequence stored over the 8x8 graphics font table (hopefully in video BIOS ROM pointed to by the INT 1Fh vector) that computes the bytes of the next stage, pushes them onto the stack, and branches to a nearby RETF or IRET; (3) a small, base-64-like decoder that decodes and executes the next stage, which was also stored in the font table; (4) a loader that reads the subsequent stages into RAM from the "guestinfo" database via the VMware backdoor interface, decodes them, and executes the next stage; (5) the main V86-mode payload, which prepares the next stage to execute in ring 0 using the appropriate, aforementioned HAL or NTOSKRNL infiltration technique; and (6) the main kernel payload, which creates an interrupt gate for convenient kernel access and cleans up the environment so that execution can resume without crashing. The Win32 portion of the exploit can then use the interrupt gate as needed.

(This is, of course, art, and it's hanging on the wall in our Chicago office.)

Wow, Dustin sure has been prolific on HN lately. Four front page articles in the last few days. Prior to this week, he popped up in my news reader maybe once a month.

I'm not complaining, mind you. Just acknowledging and applauding his renewed motivation to write.

I think it's self-fulfilling - people see his posts score high for a submission, so they scramble to be the first to submit his next one, or automate submission through a bot/rss.

That agrees with the observation that this post hit 15 points before anyone commented, with the first 2 comments not even related to the blog entry content.

I agree with the rest, but it's not that unusual to get several points without comments.

(e.g. as an extreme case: I recently submitted one that made it to 50 before the first comment, and dropped off the front page at ~60 with just that comment.)

Great startups work like this too. The best and most successful teams invariably exhibit these characteristics and failing companies almost never do. It’s an emotional and personal attachment that a team has to the end result of their work.

If you're in a competitive space, obsessing over details is a great way to differentiate. The "product market fit" theory better predicts startup success:

http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-star...

So it seems like the main argument here is this: perfectionism in product development is a good thing because (in the author's experience) products succeed if and only if the team is perfectionist. This requires obsession and investing yourself personally into what you are creating, as if the products you produce are a performance of your soul.

First of all, I think this ignores various different effects that also influence success, such as mainstream tastes, the first mover advantage, PR/marketing/sales/branding/whatever, monopolies/antitrust, being an established player, and the overall utility of an idea independent of its execution. If you have enough of these things, perfectionism doesn't matter, as long as you're defining success in capitalist terms.

But let's say perfectionism IS required to succeed; in that case I'm still not sure it's helpful in the long run. Growing up as a superachiever, I used to embrace perfectionism more than anyone else I knew personally. (Then I met someone who was more obsessive than I am and he got cancer and I slowed down a bit.) It does work if you want to make a certain kind of beautiful thing - a transcript, a CV, a piece of software, a meal - but it's psychologically hard on the perfectionist and by extension the people the perfectionist works with. It's not a sustainable model. It is notoriously ungood for healthy relationships; God help you if you try to perfect your relationship partner.

In the end, our work and personal lives are complex, and you simply cannot optimize all the variables. Enjoy things for what they are, rather than what they should be. In my personal experience, perfectionism is a defense mechanism that seeks to fill up a desperate emptiness inside.

Running a design studio, this comes up frequently. We work with startups that rarely have the time/budget to do that over-the-top perfect work. In most cases, too, it is a bit soul crushing to ship work that isn't the absolute best we could have done.

I'm sure both of us don't feel great about it, but at some point there has to be a compromise. We tend to work along the lines of "strive for perfection, accept reality."

Exactly. Too often I see posts by idealistic people who haven't actually shipped product who are espousing the idea that your product should be perfect. (Not saying Dustin Curtis is one of these, mind you.)

I think we're starting to see the opposite. A lot of pragmatic people who are arguing that shipping crappy products is a good thing.

I like this article. It provides some balance to the wave of "worse is better" posts that have been coming out.

Also worth reading Bruce Tognazzini on Magic and Software Design:

http://www.asktog.com/papers/magic.html

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