Arguing with something/someone by labeling it (too) perfect is a bit of a signal for me. Criticizing perfectionism is often just a lazy way to argue for one's side—usually to argue for doing less, but notably the less that doesn't matter to the arguer. Requesting more QA time, improving load times, getting one more feature in could be perfectionist, but have to argue against the particular thing not perfectionism.

The thing I most worry about using anti-perfectionism arguments is that it begs a vision in the first place—perfectionism requires an idea of what's perfect. Projects suffer from a lack of real hypotheses. Fine, just build. But if you're cutting something important to others by calling it too perfect, can you define the goal (not just the ingredients)? We tend to justify these things by saying, we'll iterate. Much like perfectionism can always be criticized, iteration can theoretically always make a thing better. Iteration is not vision and strategy, it's nearly the reverse, it hedges vision and strategy.

This is a slightly different point, but when we say we don't need this extra security or that UX performance, you're setting a ceiling on the people who are passionate about them. Those things really do have limits (no illusions!), but you're not just cutting corners, you're cutting specific corners. That's a company's culture. Being accused of perfectionism justifiably leads to upset that the company doesn't care about security or users. Yeah, maybe it's limited to this one project, but often not.

I agree with others that on a personal level, perfectionism is a lot of individual procrastination. I'm commenting a bit more about groups, but it might work quite well to look at the leader as procrastinating on strategy by calling downstream work perfectionist.

I agree with the thesis of this article but I actually think the point would be better made if we switch from talking about optimizing to talking about satisficing[1].

Simply put, satisficing is searching for a solution that meets a particular threshold for acceptability, and then stopping. My personal high-level strategy for success is one of continual iterative satisficing. The iterative part means that once I have met an acceptability criterion, I am free to either move on to something else, or raise my bar for acceptability and search again. I never worry about whether a solution is optimal, though, only if it is good enough.

I think that this is what many people are really doing when they say they are "optimizing", but using the term "optimzing" leads to confusion, because satisficing solutions are by definition non-optimal (except by luck), and some people (especially the young, in my experience) seem to feel compelled to actually optimize, leading to unnecessary perfectionism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

ps — Re-reading that wikipedia article reminds me of how often the topics that make the front page as "new" thoughts have been studied and written about in detail by thinkers of the past. Herbert Simon's Bounded Rationality has a lot to say about the toping of the original link.

Perfectionism is sort of polarizing, and a lot of product manager / CEO types see it as the enemy. In certain contexts it might be, but in others “perfectionism” translates to “building the foundation flawlessly with the downstream dependencies in mind to minimize future tech debt.” Of course, a lot of managers prefer to pretend that tech debt doesn’t exist but that’s just because they don’t think they can pay it off in time before their team gets cut for not producing any value because they were so busy paying off tech debt. That’s why it’s critical to try to minimize it in the first place, which almost never happens because engineers are held to tight launch deadlines and sacrifices are made in the process. And this is not just a problem at startups, if anything it’s a bigger problem in BigTech™ where I have the privilege of cleaning up after messes that were made over a decade ago.

This article argues against an utterly strawman form of perfectionism that almost no perfectionist exhibits.

The details that perfectionists are concerned with almost always matter, just maybe not much or not in a contextually appropriate way.

Obsession with details that matter can still be counterproductive and unhealthy.

The difference between a $1000 watch, $10,000 watch and $100,000 watch matters. It's counterproductive if you're in charge of producing $1000 watches to try to put in the same effort and fuss as if you were making $100,000 watches, while the revenue per unit stays pegged at $1000. It's not counterproductive if you're asking $100,000. That's just a contextual difference; all watches are objects on the same scale.

The equivalent thought process is: you can’t optimize for both the whole system and each subsystem at the same time. If you optimize for one, the other will suffer.

This is why even the best companies have in parts chaotic internal sub-structures and teams.

The modern world has driven cost/benefit thinking into every single dimension of creation and production - of physical goods, services, software, entertainment, and even art and music. The “artist’s statement” that sits on the wall has cut out the critic - the artist wrote it - and cut out the audience - they tell you what their art is, you can no longer think for yourself. And people lap it up because to do less would not be “engaging” in an optimal way.

“Optimizing” is shorthand for finding that n-dimensional envelope, with no regard to what lies nearby.

Turns out that the natural world, and most people, operate best in scenarios with slop, give, slack, buffer, or whatever term you want to use. That is the humane way to function.

Good-enough seems to be the sweet spot. After that I think you run into diminishing returns.

90% of the time "perfectionism" is pure procrastination. Being self-aware of this fact is a requirement for shipping anything of value.

Not sure you can talk about perfectionism without clarifying between "healthy" perfectionism and "unhealthy" perfectionism.

Both exist, but often people are thinking of one or the other when discussing perfectionism, and it creates cognitive dissonance when two people thinking of the two different modes are singing perfectionism's praises or denouncing its practice.

First decide on what your overall goal is and use that to determine how much you should work or not work on something.

For example if your goal is to make as much money as possible, your efforts might change vs a goal of impressing your manager or getting a particular project done.

looking at these comments, it seems perfectionism is ill-defined.

it seems to be positive - perfectionism is not giving up, it is excellence, it is beyond mediocre.

it also seems to be negative - it is going too far, it is avoiding/procrastinating, it is self-defeating.

I wonder what the perfect definition would be?

The article which causes HN to hurriedly redefine perfectionism, thus solving the problem . . .

Perfectionism is what leads to good results. Many people who aim directly for good enough come short.

"Perfectionism" is just avoidance. You don't want to work on something because it won't be "good enough". The keep part there is: you dont want to work on something.

Avoidance has a approach/repel dynamic. You are attracted to it because you want the reward, but repelled by it because you think it's difficult. "Don't spare the rod" parenting, beats children until they stop avoiding things (ie., an approach-side policy: encourage approach). You can also break tasks down, make them less core to your identity, rewards etc. (repl-side policy: make it less repulsive).

A lot of people try the approach-side policies, and beat themselves up, etc. which works sometimes but not always. "Perfectionism" is often caused when people beat themselves up to do something thereby making that very thing seem even more difficult/essential/important/etc. which makes it even more repulsive.

"Perfection" is the propaganda of a mind doing everything it can to avoid a task, often also caused, by pathological demand avoidance wherein avoidance can become extremely elaborate in justification to the point of apparent delusion.

Ignore all this superficial language. The heart of the behaviour is in what isnt being done; that's the truth of what's going on.