Perfection is a modern heresy
This is straight from the cowboy coder&#x27;s mouth. This is Philistinism, plain and simple.<p>&gt; &quot;...deliver something, anything...&quot;, no need to make it good, &quot;teams make things better,&quot; anyway.<p>No, no, and no. If you want to scale a team you have to deliver quality code.<p>The cowboy coder spews out code, screams &quot;see it works!&quot;, and then moves on to produce more diarrhea for &quot;the team&quot; behind him to clean up, &quot;make better&quot;...<p>When one realizes they do not yet have a skill (such as producing quality code), it is tempting to scream &quot;quality&#x2F;perfection is a heresy&quot; because this is much, much easier to say than the labor it takes to develop the skill.<p>&gt; It’s hard to see more than a week out because anything that takes more than a week to build involves R&amp;D.<p>Wrong, wrong, and wrong. MOST of what we do as practitioners (for those that have been doing it for at least some time) is NOT novel. Estimation is a skill. Estimates can be extremely accurate for those of us that have developed that skill.<p>It is much easier to say &quot;estimation is worthless&quot; when it is a skill that you have not yet developed. Because it is only developed through (often frustrating) practice.<p>Record the time it takes to do your work. Notice the patterns of problems that you face and how often they repeat themselves.<p>---<p>Perfection per se has its hazards but in no way should that truth get us off the hook from developing ourselves and doing our work well.<p>This post is nothing but dangerous to the nascent programmer-practitioner as it attempts to lull them away from what is possible and the work it takes to get there.<p>Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.
   -- Vince Lombardi