Good Enough: The New Standard of Excellence
August 20, 2024
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This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I read an interesting essay about software development. “[The] Biggest Productivity Killers in the Engineering Industry” presents three issues which add to the time and cost of a project. Let’s look at each of these factors and then one trivial downstream consequence of implementing these productivity touchpoints.
The three killers are:
- Working on a project until it meets one’s standards of “perfectionism.” Like “love” and “ethics”, perfectionism is often hard to define without a specific context. A designer might look at an interface and its colors and say, “It’s perfect.” The developer or, heaven forbid, the client looks and says, “That sucks.” Oh, oh.
- Stalling; that is, not jumping right into a project and making progress. I worked at an outfit which valued what it called “an immediate and direct response.” The idea is that action is better than reaction. Plus is demonstrates that one is not fooling around.
- Context switching; that is, dealing with other priorities or interruptions.
I want to highlight one of these “killers” — The need for “good enough.” The essay contains some useful illustrations. Here’s the one for the perfectionism-good enough trade off. The idea is pretty clear. As one chases getting the software or some other task “perfect” means that more time is required. The idea is that if something takes too long, then the value of chasing perfectionism hits a cost wall. Therefore, one should trade off time and value by turning in the work when it is good enough.
The logic is understandable. I do have one concern not addressed in the essay. I believe my concern applies to the other two productivity killers, stalling and interruptions (my term for context switching).
What is this concern?
How about doors falling off aircraft, stranded astronauts, cybersecurity which fails to protect Social Security Numbers, and city governments who cannot determine if compromised data were “good” or “corrupted.” We just know the data were compromised. There are other examples; for instance, the CrowdStrike misstep which affected only a few million people. How did CrowdStrike happen? My hunch is that “good enough” thinking was involved along with someone putting off making sure the internal controls were actually controlling and interruptions so the person responsible for software controls was pulled into a meeting instead of finishing and checking his or her work.
The difficulty is composed of several capabilities; specifically:
- Does the person doing the job know how to make it work in a good enough manner? In my experience, the boss may not and simply wants the fix implemented now or the product shipped immediately.
- Does the company have a culture of excellence or is it similar to big outfits which cannot deliver live streaming content, allow reviewers to write about a product without threatening them, or provide tactics which kill people because no one on the team understands the concept of ethical behavior? Frankly, today I am not sure any commercial enterprise cares about much other than revenue.
- Does anyone in a commercial organization have responsibility to determine the practical costs of shipping a product or delivering a service that does not deliver reliable outputs? Reaction to failed good enough products and services is, in my opinion, the management method applied to downstream problems.
Net net: Good enough, like it or not, is the new gold standard. Or, is that standard like the Olympic medals, an amalgam. The “real” gold is a veneer; the “good” is a coating on enough.
Stephen E Arnold, August 20, 2024
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