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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

My experience is that "finishers" frequently have a hard time in their careers because they do the "80% of the work that gets 20% of the results." and aren't perceived to be productive as the "programmers addicted to novelty/who have a hard time internalizing business goals."

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You can do the 20% that gets the 80% of the results, though, and still ship. I’d consider that “finishing”. Whereas a lot of devs get distracted even before that point and don’t ship.

Shipping means getting to 100% of what is necessary. So if are getting 80% of the results and shipping, that means that somebody else is doing 80% of the work.

Let's put it this way. If Christopher Columbus was looking for the new world and he got 80% of the results the reward would be a watery grave.

Except he did get 80% of the results. His stated goal was to make it to India. He did the important part, which was to prove that you could cross the ocean to reach another land mass.

The other 80% of the work was sailing around the southern end of South America, and building the Panama Canal so you could actually reach Asia by sailing west from Europe.

Yes, there's a big difference between someone who can target 'results' and someone who immediately loses all interest once they reach the transition point between figuring the system out and implementing the plan to finish.

I'm looking for the opposite of a person who leaves a trail of proof-of-concepts behind them without actually delivering anything real people can use.

So, you might want to look at experienced software devs that care a lot about the user experience as they will have delivered software that people use and therefore will have experience with that last mile.

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