[duncanawoods]

I love that quote too. To add to "always seek excellence", here is his "how":

> Livingston: What is the key to excellence for an engineer?

> Wozniak: You have to be very diligent. You have to check every little detail. You have to be so careful that you haven't left something out. You have to think harder and deeper than you normally would. It's hard with today's large, huge programs.

How many times on HN do we hear about actual engineering excellence vs. the hack, the weekend mvp, the "if your product doesn't embarrass you, you've released too late" dogma?

[sdoering]

> if your product doesn't embarrass you, you've released too late

In the age of shallow work, this is the dogma, that justifies shitty things being released as a philosophy of continuous improvement.

In my opinion no lasting and great product can be built that way. Only more shitty things that flood our market. You collect feedback on your shitty app and implement optimization? How does that differ from design by committee?

To be timeless and produce the highes possible quality you have to go deep, understand the problem you are trying to solve and solve it once and for all.

Solve it to and above the best ability you can bring to the table at exactly that moment in time.

[overcast]

You ever see the first few versions of Facebook and Twitter? http://makers.crew.co/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/OG-Twitter....

The point is, if you have a good idea, regardless of how complete it is, get it out there and see if it warrants going further.

[Retric]

I don't think you can defend Facebook or Twitter as timeless or high quality. Even Google is kind of meh at a technical level.

[overcast]

I was directly responding to "In my opinion no lasting and great product can be built that way." Facebook, Twitter, and certainly Google have been proven to be long lasting. Google is ubiquitous at this point!

[Retric]

Android for example is good enough, but far from Great IMO. Granted, this is all subjective but an overhead sprinkler whose sensor is a part that melts/deforms with heat is timeless solution that just works (1879 https://www.google.com/patents/US218564) . An electronic sensor could work, but has far more failure modes. Now compare this with say Facebook whose design regularly undergoes significant revision.

[TimJYoung]

Excellent comment.

I'm not sure that many software companies today are aware of how corrosive it is to the company's culture to not strive for excellence and integrity, and to encourage the same from every employee. What exactly does it accomplish to ship a product that is buggy or half-completed, just so that you can hit a deadline ? Do these companies think that the customer isn't going to notice ? It's much better to be honest with a customer about issues when you become aware of them, and allow the customer to plan accordingly.

[sdoering]

And striving for excellence might produce something that lives on way beyond it's time.

Just to name an example, I would name the designs[0] of (or inspired by) Dieter Rams[1].

[0]: http://www.cultofmac.com/188753/the-braun-products-that-insp... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams