Mediocrity is underrated (or better is the enemy of good enough)

Let's assume the author is serious for a second; the company he/she is describing is just asking to get fed to the lions by a company that does not embrace mediocrity-as-policy mantra, and shows they actually give a damn about their product and their customers. Those customers they are pissing off, but aren't seeing leave, are staying because there isn't another option; as soon as there is, the exodus will begin. As it does, this company is screwed, because the mediocrity they worked into their codebase assures they will be able to react about as swiftly as rock can to someone threatening to kick it.

This is not the first appeal to mediocrity I've heard, but the authors or orators I've heard make this same appeal in the past are really offering an apology for their own apathy. They want this to be true, regardless of veracity, because then it will justify their own desire to not give a shit. They hope that their self-fulfilling prophecy becomes the same to everyone else, so no one is forcing them out of mediocrity. No one is making them actually work for their monthly lifestyle installment, and instead join them resting on past achievements, hoping this grants all of us a perpetual annuity.

On the other hand, if this is satire, it's really bad satire.

Oh, and to reflect on his clever quip about spelling: yes, I did catch the spelling mistakes, and they did piss me off. And I did finish the essay, in hopes that I would find a paragraph loosely reading "jk lolz" at the end. Since I didn't, this blogger now has the bozo-bit set. So much for mediocrity being good enough.

Trying to do everything perfectly will lead to burn out, but leaving some things badly done will leave you exposed.

What I took from the article was to be mediocre in almost everything you do is a sustainable approach - want to take payments, use paypal, sales and marketing? Adwords, some PR puffs and a voip number. Mediocre still means a job is done and to an acceptable standard. If it is quick and dirty, it is a lot better than not done at all.

As long as you do one thing better than mediocre, and everything else is covered, you stand a chance.

But yes, there is a lot of judgement between 'this quick and dirty is an acceptable mediocre' and 'this quick and dirty is worse than nothing'.

The superstar coders are much harder to work with.

I think a lot of readers took this article the wrong way or were somehow offended by it. Why..?

This almost sounds a little like Eric Sink on software and is somewhat opposed to Paul Graham's philo, which is basically: the more super stars you have on your team the better. The OP sounds more in favor of building a cohesive team.

This author needs to get out more. Many corporate IT shops have this attitude. You can argue whether it is good or bad all you want, but it definitely exists.

Note: Technology companies should not have this attitude. But how many companies out there truly are about technology.

Is a grocery store a technology company? Your lawn service? Your local pizza shop? Being startups geeks, we all tend to get tunnel vision. Most companies are not about technology.

Even mine, a large energy company -- Our customers don't give a crap about our technology. They care about what we pull out of the ground and how we pipe it across the country. Our IT work has nothing to do with our actual business. IT work measures it, does accounting, handles "office work", etc. It affects our internal costs and efficiencies. But that isn't our actual business, and our customers don't know and don't care about our IT shop.

Skip.

Indeed, the author is correct, I finished the article (which, to be fair, had some interesting points) -- but will I return in the future or subscribe. To that, the answer is 'no'.

Also, I read this graph, mouth agape, and quit. No, I didn't finish your article.

"Process. It is important not to use Agile methods, as it actually improves quality. While a reader has pointed out that ‘It is perfectly possible to use Agile methods and be a very mediocre organization’, why take the chance? Using a CMM or waterfall approach will ensure that there is sufficient rigidity in process to disallow attempts to achieve a high quality."

If he's serious, that just makes no sense, and would be a miserable, miserable place to work. If it's satire, well, I still wouldn't want to work wherever this guy does.

pg talks about the priorities for HN in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830035

The core observation of Worse is Better is that the 50%-80% solution, designed to be easy to replicate, is more popular than a 90% solution that is more difficult to replicate, because the worse solution will spread faster, gain a larger community, and can then evolve to an 85% solution and will not need to evolve further because users will have been conditioned to expect less.

These arguments appeal because they are basically correct descriptions of a common phenomena, but if you simplify the message to "mediocrity is good" then you miss the point. Mediocrity of product is good, but only if it allows for a 50-80% solution to an existing problem and only if that is the problem that you want to solve. Mediocrity of skill is also good, but only if your goal is to look good to managers of mediocre software products and if you have no desire to move beyond your current domain of expertise at anything beyond a snail's pace. Note how Gabriel says that C is not good enough for AI: it is a great example of this, and also of what causes people to start believing in mediocrity; namely becoming overly discouraged after working on a problem that is far too difficult to solve with current tools and levels of understanding.

I think there is a correct observation in this article as well, and that is that putting a lot of effort into designing the right thing without getting any feedback from users up front or during the process is a terrible form of premature optimization. I agree with this observation and wish it were obvious to everyone, but clearly it is not. But the real question is who are your users and what do they demand? Here the writer goes off the rails by attempting to argue that users want mediocre software, when he really means that users want software that does something very similar to the software that they already have.

The distinction is blurred by the fact that the software that users already have was probably created by someone who sacrificed quality for time to market. The problem with not making this distinction is that you fail to recognize just how much quality remained after those sacrifices had been made.

Microsoft is a good example of this. Many people like to point out their lucky breaks, their rapacious acquisition strategy, and their monopoly preservation techniques, but it is also important to remember that Microsoft, for all its bloated bureaucracy, began with a strong technical culture and has managed to retain much of that culture as it has grown. It has an excellent research division, one of the few remaining in industry (not that Microsoft is much better at leveraging it than, say, Xerox was). If Microsoft is mediocre, and it is, its level of mediocrity is higher than most people's best effort. If you think you can beat Microsoft at anything remotely large scale with a strategy of mediocrity, well, you deserve what you get.

Linux is another good example here. It is a prime case of worse is better culture; initially based on a clone of a conservative OS design, never having ambitions beyond POSIX compliance as a way to spread everywhere, and repeatedly trying and failing to get a foothold on the desktop by slavishly copying Microsoft. Apple may not beat Microsoft, but it is thrashing Linux on the desktop with a strategy of tight control and emphasis on quality. Linux is mediocre all right - too mediocre to succeed outside of the server market, and even there it is probably not as good as whatever BSD best fits your needs. The real success of Linux is when it leverages its large porting culture to spread to platforms with no alternatives. And you probably aren't even as good as the core Linux developers. Hope you're not as ambitious.

Take a look at Google, perhaps the biggest challenge Microsoft has faced yet. Did they get where they are today by being more mediocre than their competition? Quite the opposite, I think.

The secret of mediocrity is that it is more helpful as a way of capturing a mass market than you might think. The secret of quality is that it allows you to create a market that doesn't even exist yet. Do you think every mass market lasts forever? How do you think they die? How do you think their successors began?

So yeah, be mediocre, but you will be at the bottom of a long chain of increasing mediocrity, and your ambitions of being big and successful some day will never be more than delusional fever dreams. Have fun with that.

The message here is not that really that mediocrity is bad or that quality is good. The real message is that you should think carefully about what exactly mediocrity and quality mean in your situation. These are meaningless terms in the abstract. Ignore the details at your peril. Don't let "premature optimization is the root of all evil" turn into "mediocrity is better than quality" turn into "I can be lazy and get away with it" turn into "I have no job, there is no market for my skills, and I have lost the ability to learn new ones." Don't live your life by platitudes at all. Think a little bit.

..:: Concentate on stability first ,and then excel in thoughtful and considered directions ::..

This mediocre rubbish is just that