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The Best Engineering Advice I Ever Got: “I Don’t Really Care, Just Make it Work”
Stop lettings “shoulds,” academics, and random blog posts stop you and your team from shipping
I used to work under a very academic tech lead. When he wasn’t re-writing features that had been done for days or weeks to make them more perfect — from a code and file organization perspective — he was reading blog posts about design patterns and how things should be in your codebase.
It had been three months since the date we were supposed to ship the first version of our app and we still didn’t have anything out. While the other members our of team were busy building and shipping features for v1, he was writing and rewriting, futzing with the file structure, and trying to get everything to be perfect. Eventually our CTO got wind of this as week after week would pass and the app still wasn’t out.
After the app shipped, our tech lead left the company, and I got promoted into his position. Then something weird happened:
My initial inclination was to continue the tradition. Not the rewriting, but the perfectionism.
Not long after, I was building a single sign on feature for our enterprise clients and I started waffling back and forth about the “best” way…
