| Someone once wrote, in their bestselling business book: "Good enough is fine
A lot of people get off on solving problems with complicated solutions. Flexing your intellectual muscles can be intoxicating. Then you start looking for another big challenge that gives you that same rush, regardless of whether it's a good idea or not." This is somewhat different than what's written in this article: "Arguments like “but it works” or “it gets the job done” are tell-tale signs of someone happy at the lowest level of the technical hierarchy and your cue to just quietly back out of the debate." And here's the deal: they're both right, but you need to recognize when each situation is right. The terminology for this is called "maximizers vs satisficers". I wrote something about that and programming here: http://journal.dedasys.com/2006/02/18/maximizers-satisficers... And the book that is widely cited is this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More... But getting back to the discussion: there are times when you really should be looking for the best whatever it is you're looking for. But if you try and do that all the time, you'll spend all your time looking (or worse, deciding everything sucks and you can do it better yourself) and not enough time doing what it was you set out to do. Which, in the end, simply means that you have got to do the thinking and make your own difficult decisions, rather than listen to trite advice from business books or blogs, or hacker news comments, no matter how insightful they may sound! |