One aphorism frequently cited in English is "Perfect is the enemy of the good". It's basic message is clear: perfectionism may initially result in improvements but it eventually becomes counterproductive. Unfortunately it is often misused in the workplace as an excuse for mediocrity: it becomes another way of saying "'good enough' is good enough".
Apart from the above-mentioned misuse, the truth of the saying seems fairly uncontroversial. After all, in a world of mortals perfection is never truly attainable. However a few months ago I decided to look for the origins of this saying and discovered a hidden controversy behind it, and with it a more subtle and deeper truth.
A Google search revealed that the quote originated from the French philosopher Voltaire. As you might expect, the English quote is a translation. The original words were "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien." I do not know French, but apparently the words "le mieux" (translated as "perfect" in the popular aphorism) is more literally translated as "the better" or "the best". As is common in such situations, debates abound over Voltaire's intended meaning of his words and which translation most accurately conveys that meaning.
I prefer the translation "The best is the enemy of the good". It may sound very similar to the common translation, but there is a subtle difference. While perfection is clearly unattainable, "the best" appears to be more within reach. However it is this attainability that makes it more dangerous than perfectionism.
When we strive for quality (good), we frequently encounter choices on how to proceed. At the beginning it is usually easy to identify the "better" choice, however as progress is made this becomes more difficult. The difficulty arises because at higher quality levels the choices tend to trade off one aspect of quality for another, so value judgments must be made as so which trade-off is the "better" one to make. Such value judgments are by their nature subjective and if there is disagreement a lot of energy can be expended in resolving the differences of opinion. In my experience, such disagreements almost always occur before "the best" is reached.
So if mediocrity is unacceptable, perfection is unattainable, and "the best" is too costly, what should we aim for? My answer is excellence. Once we learn to recognize excellence in our own work and the work of our peers, it becomes more productive to stop at "excellent" than to continue towards "best".
All this hit me recently while working on Model-Glue. I have been contributing to the Model-Glue project for a few months now and was recently accepted as a member of the development team. The two members I have been working the most with are Dan Wilson and Ezra Parker. Both are skilled coders and I am grateful for them giving me the chance to be the worst in their band.
We are working on finalizing a maintenance release and Ezra was assigned to fix an outstanding bug. He implemented a proposed fix and posted it with a request for feedback. I was a bit busy at the time so it was a few days later before I replied with an alternative approach that I had in mind that addressed a concern he had. I also offered to implement my idea if he were interested. In his response to my reply Ezra said:
If you'd like to create another patch for this ticket, feel free. I'm all for going with whatever fix works best, so if your idea turns out to be the better one, then we should probably implement it. That said, I performed some load testing tonight, and I'm not currently convinced that the attached patch causes any decrease in real-world performance.
Ezra wrote a good implementation, created unit tests for it which his fix passed, and performed load testing that confirmed that his fix offered good performance. In short, his work was excellent.
Sorry Ezra, but I must disagree with you on going with whatever fix works best. I've decided to not implement my idea. Why should I mess with your excellence?
PS. Excellence is not always the best or most important goal. Less is often a more important goal than excellence. Sometimes worse is better. And as strange as it may sound, sometimes sucks is a better release point than excellent (an idea Google seems to have embraced).
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