In Defence of Half-Arsing

79 点作者 OmarShehata超过 4 年前

19 条评论

I like to phrase it as acknowledged technical debt. And I think about it like this: when you buy a house, you don't use cash. You borrow. Debt is good as long as you pay it off, and don't get smothered in accumulated interest. Similarly, when you're starting to prototype a complex system with limited time and people resources, it's better to put in working kludges than to attempt a "really good job" on every single component. It's like "perfect is the enemy of good", but crappier. More like "good is the enemy of meh-it'll-do".The difference between a rough prototype and a minefield is that with the former, you record technical debt in the ledger You regularly pay it off, and watch out for interest (kludges on top of kludges, bad architectural decisions because of forced workarounds, or actual financial cost due to inefficiencies).

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shoo超过 4 年前

One situation that lends itself quite well to half-arsing is working to maximise the performance of a system that consists of a number of components, where the performance of the system is bottlenecked by the weakest performing component. You can get pretty far by (i) identifying what the bottleneck of the whole system is, (ii) figure out the cheapest/easiest move to eliminate the bottleneck, and then (iii) iterating. There's little value in full-arsing the performance of a ccomponent if it is not the system bottleneck and unlikely to become the bottleneck any time soon.E.g. suppose we've got a system with three components A, B and C, so that perf(system) := min { perf(A) , perf(B) , perf(C) } . Currently perf(A) is 0.3, perf(B) is 0.5 and perf(C) is 0.4, so the performance of the system is 0.3 since it is bottlenecked by A. You have an elegant idea to reengineer C completely which should lift perf(C) to the region of 0.9 -- 0.95 but it will take a few months to prototype and sort out the details. You've also got a lamentable idea for a hack to increase perf(A) from 0.3 to 0.5 -- it's a dead end and the hack cannot be extended in future, but can be cobbled together quickly. What's your move?<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints</a>

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waylandsmithers超过 4 年前

Because it worked for me in the earlier stages of the pandemic (at home with kids during the day, call in to meetings when possible, try to catch up at night) - I've posed this suggestion to the teachers in my family who are freaking out about the new school year:"Have you considered just doing a bad job?"

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andersource超过 4 年前

I would go even further and say that if the result is good enough for the requirements, it's not half-arsing, even if the result could be made better with more time and effort. In other words an outcome will be judged based on expectations and consequences, and not compared to "the best it could be" (unless someone expects it to be the best it could be).This highlights the importance of naming and terminology: if I say I will "prepare a report" people will expect one thing versus "throw together a few visualizations". Of course if it's the CEO it's inappropriate to just throw together a few visualizations. This shifts the issue from execution to alignment of expectations, which for me has the benefit of not feeling I'm doing a half-arsed job.

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dbergamin超过 4 年前

I can't really get on board - for most situations, risk of 'broken window' effect is strong unless your team all operate on the same page with a common understanding of what tradeoffs are acceptable.Perhaps reasonable in projects/tasks that you have full ownership of and intend to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. In general though, I think there's good reason to strongly prefer the 'if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing well' side of the spectrum.

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flohofwoe超过 4 年前

The one thing I remember from my ill-fated vocational training as a toolmaker (industrial tools, not software tools) is that one sentence our master hammered into our heads:"Not as precise as possible, only as precise as necessary."This wisdom from the physical world also came in handy in software development where I eventually ended up ;)

tmaly超过 4 年前

For some reason I kind of see it as a different application of the 80/20 rule.I can say with certainty, once you have a second child, you get really good at half-arsing. There just is not enough time to do everything you want to do.

commandlinefan超过 4 年前

As Dilbert says: "Our boss can't judge the quality of our work, but he knows when it's late".

cranium超过 4 年前

Linked to perfectionism, I think the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) plays an deterring role in half-arsing things. By reading a book from cover to cover, you have access to all the information available. By skipping chapters, you risk missing important information that (you think) could change your life.To counter this fear, it's a good exercise to express your expectations about the book and to judge what it can bring to you: is it really life-changing ? Or would you just want it to be ?In my opinion, it demands greater reading/evaluation skills to be able to skip pages to extract the most data, and a good resistance to FOMO.

noworld超过 4 年前

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”- G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World, 1910

amelius超过 4 年前

There's an entire industry built on half-arsing and it's called machine learning.Instead of understanding the system you are trying to control, you train the machine with some data and hope for the best.

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thenoblesunfish超过 4 年前

Meh. I think it's self-evident that sometimes you have no choice but to half-arse things, but my experience is that it's better to full-arse one thing at the expense of not being arsed at all with something else. A hidden advantage is that once full-arsed the first time, the second time a task is done, it doesn't take much more than half-arse effort.

VoodooJuJu超过 4 年前

“If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.”– Kurt Vonnegut

stdbrouw超过 4 年前

Too bad there's no good examples in the blog post. With regards to the color of the bike shed, if any color is good enough (even though there might be some perfect color that is very visible yet also soothing and pretty), then picking a color at random is not doing a bad job, it's doing an adequate job.Perhaps a better example would be a restaurant that half-asses their website because most customers find them on Facebook anyway. In that scenario, visitors to the website might think "ugh, this is useless crap" – ugly, hard to navigate, doesn't have up-to-date information – but it doesn't hurt the business enough for it to warrant paying attention to.

bartread超过 4 年前

I think half-arsing is fine if you're able to make a reasonable judgement of what you can and can't half-arse. It's certainly better than relentless perfectionism since this tends to mean you leave a lot of things undone - even things you should have done.Still, and this is where it's going to be hard to avoid sounding like a snob, the implicit assumption here is that everybody is qualified to decide what they can and can't half-arse. Manifestly this isn't so:- If you half-arse redecorating your bathroom by painting it with plain old matt emulsion paint rather than dedicated bathroom paint, and refloor it with laminate flooring that isn't water resistent, it's not going to last: the paint will peel and the laminate will, well, delaminate- If you half-arse building a concrete block wall by not putting in footings it will one day blow over in a strong wind- If you half-arse electrical wiring you create a serious hazard and risk injury both to yourself and others, as well as the possibility you may burn your house downThe problem is that plenty of people half-arse all of the above along with many more things that are immensely stupid to half-arse.Hence schools drum into people that it's important to do things "properly" because the world is rammed full of people who can't reliably decide when it makes sense (and is safe) to cut corners.

sidpatil超过 4 年前

This sounds similar to "worse is better" [0].[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better</a>

MaxBarraclough超过 4 年前

Interesting idea, but I think it could use a few more examples. What are some other good candidates for half-arsing?

plumbus420超过 4 年前

Reminds me of a quote by David Foster Wallace:> If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.

gridlockd超过 4 年前

Reading books has to be one of the most overvalued activities known to man.The problem is that book authors are not incentivized to deliver "the gist". If all the insights of a book, properly condensed, amount to no more than a pamphlet, people will give it a bad review.If instead a book has hundreds of pages, there mere act of giving it a "proper" critique becomes costly. Judging a book that you haven't read is frowned upon. Those who could be bothered to work their way through it, on the other hand, are less likely to be critical.