My first boss once asked me in a performance review if I was a perfectionist. I was and told him so. He then explained something that left an impression on me: the value of shipping something that works even if it’s not elegant. I think there’s a happy medium between getting stuff done and getting stuff done ‘the right way.’

A lot of young engineers seem to miss the forest for the trees and this can be seen early in a project’s timeframe. Sometimes customers don’t help either because they lack the vision to know what they are really asking for as well. I know there’s a problem when people start suggesting solutions, elegant or otherwise, before the user requirements are fully fleshed out.

I work in an industry where CI/CD isn’t really a thing due to qualification/validation, so getting things perfect for re-using or servicing codebase is really inconsequential, but you’ll see people fall into the trap of ‘this has to be genericized 100% so we can use it everywhere.’ In reality nothing really gets re-used in such a way that it’s effective in reducing effort. I’m not saying it’s that way for everyone, but in my company’s pseudo programming space this is true.