
Mediocrity is underrated (or better is the enemy of good enough) - dragonquest
http://nayna.org/blog/?p=11
======
azanar
Is this supposed to be tongue-almost-penetrating-cheek, or is this author for
real?

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.

~~~
russss
This is either bad advice or bad satire. I'm fairly sure it's the latter.

~~~
mmt
I'd say this is _mediocre_ satire.

------
lifeisstillgood
This actually made some sense for me. Yes it did start to read like sarcasm,
but no-one (and no company) can ever be brilliant at _everything_.

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'.

------
fjabre
I actually thought the OP made some good points..!

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.

------
synnik
"As far as I know, there is no company that says - We are ok. We could be
better, but thats not our priority."

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.

~~~
toadpipe
It's an excellent point that many businesses are not really technology
businesses at all. However, one could make the argument that it is still in
the company's best interest to promote IT quality because that is the best way
to keep the IT department from bloating into something that consumes far more
resources than necessary. Good technology should be reliable, cheap, and
invisible, but those things take a certain amount of quality.

I would argue that most non-technology companies would be best served by
employing a single very good software engineer, maybe two or three if the
company is very large. If the company is small then the one engineer doesn't
even have to be all that brilliant. You can't do this if you have to
administrate a typical IT ecosystem, but if your company is not a technology
company, why do you need a typical IT ecosystem in the first place? (Because
no one knows how to do anything outside of one, and even if you can find
someone you can't find a replacement. Therefore every company must support a
relatively large and complex ecosystem whether they want to or not.)

------
roqetman
Although there should always be room to compromise, I've always thought that
our reach should always exceed our grasp; otherwise we'll never produce
anything of quality. The article sounds to me like a simple attempt to justify
apathy.

------
fhars
That reminds me of that silly game Mediocrity by I think Dougas Hofstadter:
Three persons write down an arbitrary number. The one with the middle number
scores a point. After an agreed upon number of rounds (5 or 7 or so), the one
with the middle number of points scores a set. After a number of sets, the one
with the middle number of sets scores the match.

------
swombat
Waste of time. This is some kind of satirical article (I hope - if not, it's
just so far off the quality curve that you can't even see the curve anymore),
and not a very good satirical article at that. Somewhat bad writing ("towing"
the line? Mistakes like this abound), not very imaginative.

Skip.

~~~
dasil003
Whether it was satirical or not, I'm not reading. Why? Because mediocrity is
orthogonal to success. It's all about what works for a particular business. I
personally wish to always be passionate about what I do and work with
similarly passionate people, and that correlates pretty highly with striving
for excellence, and that will influence the type of business I participate in.
However that is no better a recipe for success than just being really driven
to sell tchotchkes to a billion people.

------
Hexstream
Better aim for perfection and only achieve good-enough that aim for mediocrity
and "achieve" it... To get better you have to play at least a bit above your
skill level, out of your "comfort zone". If you constantly play below your
skill-level you _will_ get worse.

------
thenduks
> My mediocrity undoubtedly teed you off a little, but did it prevent you from
> finishing the essay ?

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'.

------
jrwoodruff
I don't know if it's satire or not, but if it wasn't meant to be, I didn't
pick up on it.

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.

------
srn
I've seriously been thinking about such issues; there is a definitely a point
of diminishing returns. Deciding when to cut your losses on maintaining code
that is on the limits of your ability to follow is difficult.

------
10ren
It's about priorities.

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

------
toadpipe
This is basically a worse variation on the better Worse is Better article by
Richard Gabriel, focused on software design as business strategy instead of as
a pure popularity strategy.

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.

------
angstrom
Mediocrity is the swan song of a dieing company.

------
tezza
This fart of a blog entry should be restated as ::

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

This mediocre rubbish is just that

