Is this supposed to be tongue-almost-penetrating-cheek, or is this author for real?
Let's assume the author is serious for a second; the company he/she is describing is just asking to get fed to the lions by a company that does not embrace mediocrity-as-policy mantra, and shows they actually give a damn about their product and their customers. Those customers they are pissing off, but aren't seeing leave, are staying because there isn't another option; as soon as there is, the exodus will begin. As it does, this company is screwed, because the mediocrity they worked into their codebase assures they will be able to react about as swiftly as rock can to someone threatening to kick it.
This is not the first appeal to mediocrity I've heard, but the authors or orators I've heard make this same appeal in the past are really offering an apology for their own apathy. They want this to be true, regardless of veracity, because then it will justify their own desire to not give a shit. They hope that their self-fulfilling prophecy becomes the same to everyone else, so no one is forcing them out of mediocrity. No one is making them actually work for their monthly lifestyle installment, and instead join them resting on past achievements, hoping this grants all of us a perpetual annuity.
On the other hand, if this is satire, it's really bad satire.
Oh, and to reflect on his clever quip about spelling: yes, I did catch the spelling mistakes, and they did piss me off. And I did finish the essay, in hopes that I would find a paragraph loosely reading "jk lolz" at the end. Since I didn't, this blogger now has the bozo-bit set. So much for mediocrity being good enough.
At first I thought he might be serious, but the practical examples made it seem more like a joke, since the subtlety was somewhat lost there. Like this part:
Once a product is released, focus on fixing bugs, not adding new features. All overacheiving companies try to do the latter and fail. Instead, have a single new functionality, maybe along the lines of ‘New ! Option to save your work’. The rest should be all bug fixes. This will dramatically improve the quality of your software and PC magazine will give it 5 stars.
I felt the same, but I found it rather amusing and decided to submit it. Although I have to admit somewhere between those lines, there might be a shred of turth, if only a shred.
Let's assume the author is serious for a second; the company he/she is describing is just asking to get fed to the lions by a company that does not embrace mediocrity-as-policy mantra, and shows they actually give a damn about their product and their customers. Those customers they are pissing off, but aren't seeing leave, are staying because there isn't another option; as soon as there is, the exodus will begin.
On the other hand, the vast majority of companies are mediocre ... and they stay around for decades literally. It doesn't mean that they don't give a damn about their customers - no, they do, it's just they could do it better, much better. If they really tried. And still the customers stay. This is a great mystery, but still true.
As an example, if I go to the site that lists Australian ISP's (http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/), I can see 228 ISP's listed. How's that possible that so many exist - are they all exceptional companies? Do they all provide the same quality of service? Are all plans equally attractive? Clearly no, and I guess that top 10 ISP's may hold some 80-90% of the market. But still the other 218 still have enough customers despite of being 'mediocre'.
Although there should always be room to compromise, I've always thought that our reach should always exceed our grasp; otherwise we'll never produce anything of quality. The article sounds to me like a simple attempt to justify apathy.
Waste of time. This is some kind of satirical article (I hope - if not, it's just so far off the quality curve that you can't even see the curve anymore), and not a very good satirical article at that. Somewhat bad writing ("towing" the line? Mistakes like this abound), not very imaginative.
Whether it was satirical or not, I'm not reading. Why? Because mediocrity is orthogonal to success. It's all about what works for a particular business. I personally wish to always be passionate about what I do and work with similarly passionate people, and that correlates pretty highly with striving for excellence, and that will influence the type of business I participate in. However that is no better a recipe for success than just being really driven to sell tchotchkes to a billion people.
This actually made some sense for me. Yes it did start to read like sarcasm, but no-one (and no company) can ever be brilliant at everything.
Trying to do everything perfectly will lead to burn out, but leaving some things badly done will leave you exposed.
What I took from the article was to be mediocre in almost everything you do is a sustainable approach - want to take payments, use paypal, sales and marketing? Adwords, some PR puffs and a voip number. Mediocre still means a job is done and to an acceptable standard. If it is quick and dirty, it is a lot better than not done at all.
As long as you do one thing better than mediocre, and everything else is covered, you stand a chance.
But yes, there is a lot of judgement between 'this quick and dirty is an acceptable mediocre' and 'this quick and dirty is worse than nothing'.
> My mediocrity undoubtedly teed you off a little, but did it prevent you from finishing the essay ?
Indeed, the author is correct, I finished the article (which, to be fair, had some interesting points) -- but will I return in the future or subscribe. To that, the answer is 'no'.
That reminds me of that silly game Mediocrity by I think Dougas Hofstadter: Three persons write down an arbitrary number. The one with the middle number scores a point. After an agreed upon number of rounds (5 or 7 or so), the one with the middle number of points scores a set. After a number of sets, the one with the middle number of sets scores the match.
I actually thought the OP made some good points..!
The superstar coders are much harder to work with.
I think a lot of readers took this article the wrong way or were somehow offended by it. Why..?
This almost sounds a little like Eric Sink on software and is somewhat opposed to Paul Graham's philo, which is basically: the more super stars you have on your team the better. The OP sounds more in favor of building a cohesive team.
Better aim for perfection and only achieve good-enough that aim for mediocrity and "achieve" it... To get better you have to play at least a bit above your skill level, out of your "comfort zone". If you constantly play below your skill-level you will get worse.
"As far as I know, there is no company that says - We are ok. We could be better, but thats not our priority."
This author needs to get out more. Many corporate IT shops have this attitude. You can argue whether it is good or bad all you want, but it definitely exists.
Note: Technology companies should not have this attitude. But how many companies out there truly are about technology.
Is a grocery store a technology company? Your lawn service? Your local pizza shop?
Being startups geeks, we all tend to get tunnel vision. Most companies are not about technology.
Even mine, a large energy company -- Our customers don't give a crap about our technology. They care about what we pull out of the ground and how we pipe it across the country. Our IT work has nothing to do with our actual business. IT work measures it, does accounting, handles "office work", etc. It affects our internal costs and efficiencies. But that isn't our actual business, and our customers don't know and don't care about our IT shop.
It's an excellent point that many businesses are not really technology businesses at all. However, one could make the argument that it is still in the company's best interest to promote IT quality because that is the best way to keep the IT department from bloating into something that consumes far more resources than necessary. Good technology should be reliable, cheap, and invisible, but those things take a certain amount of quality.
I would argue that most non-technology companies would be best served by employing a single very good software engineer, maybe two or three if the company is very large. If the company is small then the one engineer doesn't even have to be all that brilliant. You can't do this if you have to administrate a typical IT ecosystem, but if your company is not a technology company, why do you need a typical IT ecosystem in the first place? (Because no one knows how to do anything outside of one, and even if you can find someone you can't find a replacement. Therefore every company must support a relatively large and complex ecosystem whether they want to or not.)
I don't know if it's satire or not, but if it wasn't meant to be, I didn't pick up on it.
Also, I read this graph, mouth agape, and quit. No, I didn't finish your article.
"Process. It is important not to use Agile methods, as it actually improves quality. While a reader has pointed out that ‘It is perfectly possible to use Agile methods and be a very mediocre organization’, why take the chance? Using a CMM or waterfall approach will ensure that there is sufficient rigidity in process to disallow attempts to achieve a high quality."
If he's serious, that just makes no sense, and would be a miserable, miserable place to work. If it's satire, well, I still wouldn't want to work wherever this guy does.
This is basically a worse variation on the better Worse is Better article by Richard Gabriel, focused on software design as business strategy instead of as a pure popularity strategy.
The core observation of Worse is Better is that the 50%-80% solution, designed to be easy to replicate, is more popular than a 90% solution that is more difficult to replicate, because the worse solution will spread faster, gain a larger community, and can then evolve to an 85% solution and will not need to evolve further because users will have been conditioned to expect less.
These arguments appeal because they are basically correct descriptions of a common phenomena, but if you simplify the message to "mediocrity is good" then you miss the point. Mediocrity of product is good, but only if it allows for a 50-80% solution to an existing problem and only if that is the problem that you want to solve. Mediocrity of skill is also good, but only if your goal is to look good to managers of mediocre software products and if you have no desire to move beyond your current domain of expertise at anything beyond a snail's pace. Note how Gabriel says that C is not good enough for AI: it is a great example of this, and also of what causes people to start believing in mediocrity; namely becoming overly discouraged after working on a problem that is far too difficult to solve with current tools and levels of understanding.
I think there is a correct observation in this article as well, and that is that putting a lot of effort into designing the right thing without getting any feedback from users up front or during the process is a terrible form of premature optimization. I agree with this observation and wish it were obvious to everyone, but clearly it is not. But the real question is who are your users and what do they demand? Here the writer goes off the rails by attempting to argue that users want mediocre software, when he really means that users want software that does something very similar to the software that they already have.
The distinction is blurred by the fact that the software that users already have was probably created by someone who sacrificed quality for time to market. The problem with not making this distinction is that you fail to recognize just how much quality remained after those sacrifices had been made.
Microsoft is a good example of this. Many people like to point out their lucky breaks, their rapacious acquisition strategy, and their monopoly preservation techniques, but it is also important to remember that Microsoft, for all its bloated bureaucracy, began with a strong technical culture and has managed to retain much of that culture as it has grown. It has an excellent research division, one of the few remaining in industry (not that Microsoft is much better at leveraging it than, say, Xerox was). If Microsoft is mediocre, and it is, its level of mediocrity is higher than most people's best effort. If you think you can beat Microsoft at anything remotely large scale with a strategy of mediocrity, well, you deserve what you get.
Linux is another good example here. It is a prime case of worse is better culture; initially based on a clone of a conservative OS design, never having ambitions beyond POSIX compliance as a way to spread everywhere, and repeatedly trying and failing to get a foothold on the desktop by slavishly copying Microsoft. Apple may not beat Microsoft, but it is thrashing Linux on the desktop with a strategy of tight control and emphasis on quality. Linux is mediocre all right - too mediocre to succeed outside of the server market, and even there it is probably not as good as whatever BSD best fits your needs. The real success of Linux is when it leverages its large porting culture to spread to platforms with no alternatives. And you probably aren't even as good as the core Linux developers. Hope you're not as ambitious.
Take a look at Google, perhaps the biggest challenge Microsoft has faced yet. Did they get where they are today by being more mediocre than their competition? Quite the oppo...
I've seriously been thinking about such issues; there is a definitely a point of diminishing returns. Deciding when to cut your losses on maintaining code that is on the limits of your ability to follow is difficult.
23 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 30.9 ms ] thread..:: Concentate on stability first ,and then excel in thoughtful and considered directions ::..
This mediocre rubbish is just that
Let's assume the author is serious for a second; the company he/she is describing is just asking to get fed to the lions by a company that does not embrace mediocrity-as-policy mantra, and shows they actually give a damn about their product and their customers. Those customers they are pissing off, but aren't seeing leave, are staying because there isn't another option; as soon as there is, the exodus will begin. As it does, this company is screwed, because the mediocrity they worked into their codebase assures they will be able to react about as swiftly as rock can to someone threatening to kick it.
This is not the first appeal to mediocrity I've heard, but the authors or orators I've heard make this same appeal in the past are really offering an apology for their own apathy. They want this to be true, regardless of veracity, because then it will justify their own desire to not give a shit. They hope that their self-fulfilling prophecy becomes the same to everyone else, so no one is forcing them out of mediocrity. No one is making them actually work for their monthly lifestyle installment, and instead join them resting on past achievements, hoping this grants all of us a perpetual annuity.
On the other hand, if this is satire, it's really bad satire.
Oh, and to reflect on his clever quip about spelling: yes, I did catch the spelling mistakes, and they did piss me off. And I did finish the essay, in hopes that I would find a paragraph loosely reading "jk lolz" at the end. Since I didn't, this blogger now has the bozo-bit set. So much for mediocrity being good enough.
> After all, you have to keep in mind that your customers are pretty mediocre too.
Once a product is released, focus on fixing bugs, not adding new features. All overacheiving companies try to do the latter and fail. Instead, have a single new functionality, maybe along the lines of ‘New ! Option to save your work’. The rest should be all bug fixes. This will dramatically improve the quality of your software and PC magazine will give it 5 stars.
On the other hand, the vast majority of companies are mediocre ... and they stay around for decades literally. It doesn't mean that they don't give a damn about their customers - no, they do, it's just they could do it better, much better. If they really tried. And still the customers stay. This is a great mystery, but still true.
As an example, if I go to the site that lists Australian ISP's (http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/), I can see 228 ISP's listed. How's that possible that so many exist - are they all exceptional companies? Do they all provide the same quality of service? Are all plans equally attractive? Clearly no, and I guess that top 10 ISP's may hold some 80-90% of the market. But still the other 218 still have enough customers despite of being 'mediocre'.
Skip.
Trying to do everything perfectly will lead to burn out, but leaving some things badly done will leave you exposed.
What I took from the article was to be mediocre in almost everything you do is a sustainable approach - want to take payments, use paypal, sales and marketing? Adwords, some PR puffs and a voip number. Mediocre still means a job is done and to an acceptable standard. If it is quick and dirty, it is a lot better than not done at all.
As long as you do one thing better than mediocre, and everything else is covered, you stand a chance.
But yes, there is a lot of judgement between 'this quick and dirty is an acceptable mediocre' and 'this quick and dirty is worse than nothing'.
Indeed, the author is correct, I finished the article (which, to be fair, had some interesting points) -- but will I return in the future or subscribe. To that, the answer is 'no'.
The superstar coders are much harder to work with.
I think a lot of readers took this article the wrong way or were somehow offended by it. Why..?
This almost sounds a little like Eric Sink on software and is somewhat opposed to Paul Graham's philo, which is basically: the more super stars you have on your team the better. The OP sounds more in favor of building a cohesive team.
This author needs to get out more. Many corporate IT shops have this attitude. You can argue whether it is good or bad all you want, but it definitely exists.
Note: Technology companies should not have this attitude. But how many companies out there truly are about technology.
Is a grocery store a technology company? Your lawn service? Your local pizza shop? Being startups geeks, we all tend to get tunnel vision. Most companies are not about technology.
Even mine, a large energy company -- Our customers don't give a crap about our technology. They care about what we pull out of the ground and how we pipe it across the country. Our IT work has nothing to do with our actual business. IT work measures it, does accounting, handles "office work", etc. It affects our internal costs and efficiencies. But that isn't our actual business, and our customers don't know and don't care about our IT shop.
I would argue that most non-technology companies would be best served by employing a single very good software engineer, maybe two or three if the company is very large. If the company is small then the one engineer doesn't even have to be all that brilliant. You can't do this if you have to administrate a typical IT ecosystem, but if your company is not a technology company, why do you need a typical IT ecosystem in the first place? (Because no one knows how to do anything outside of one, and even if you can find someone you can't find a replacement. Therefore every company must support a relatively large and complex ecosystem whether they want to or not.)
Also, I read this graph, mouth agape, and quit. No, I didn't finish your article.
"Process. It is important not to use Agile methods, as it actually improves quality. While a reader has pointed out that ‘It is perfectly possible to use Agile methods and be a very mediocre organization’, why take the chance? Using a CMM or waterfall approach will ensure that there is sufficient rigidity in process to disallow attempts to achieve a high quality."
If he's serious, that just makes no sense, and would be a miserable, miserable place to work. If it's satire, well, I still wouldn't want to work wherever this guy does.
The core observation of Worse is Better is that the 50%-80% solution, designed to be easy to replicate, is more popular than a 90% solution that is more difficult to replicate, because the worse solution will spread faster, gain a larger community, and can then evolve to an 85% solution and will not need to evolve further because users will have been conditioned to expect less.
These arguments appeal because they are basically correct descriptions of a common phenomena, but if you simplify the message to "mediocrity is good" then you miss the point. Mediocrity of product is good, but only if it allows for a 50-80% solution to an existing problem and only if that is the problem that you want to solve. Mediocrity of skill is also good, but only if your goal is to look good to managers of mediocre software products and if you have no desire to move beyond your current domain of expertise at anything beyond a snail's pace. Note how Gabriel says that C is not good enough for AI: it is a great example of this, and also of what causes people to start believing in mediocrity; namely becoming overly discouraged after working on a problem that is far too difficult to solve with current tools and levels of understanding.
I think there is a correct observation in this article as well, and that is that putting a lot of effort into designing the right thing without getting any feedback from users up front or during the process is a terrible form of premature optimization. I agree with this observation and wish it were obvious to everyone, but clearly it is not. But the real question is who are your users and what do they demand? Here the writer goes off the rails by attempting to argue that users want mediocre software, when he really means that users want software that does something very similar to the software that they already have.
The distinction is blurred by the fact that the software that users already have was probably created by someone who sacrificed quality for time to market. The problem with not making this distinction is that you fail to recognize just how much quality remained after those sacrifices had been made.
Microsoft is a good example of this. Many people like to point out their lucky breaks, their rapacious acquisition strategy, and their monopoly preservation techniques, but it is also important to remember that Microsoft, for all its bloated bureaucracy, began with a strong technical culture and has managed to retain much of that culture as it has grown. It has an excellent research division, one of the few remaining in industry (not that Microsoft is much better at leveraging it than, say, Xerox was). If Microsoft is mediocre, and it is, its level of mediocrity is higher than most people's best effort. If you think you can beat Microsoft at anything remotely large scale with a strategy of mediocrity, well, you deserve what you get.
Linux is another good example here. It is a prime case of worse is better culture; initially based on a clone of a conservative OS design, never having ambitions beyond POSIX compliance as a way to spread everywhere, and repeatedly trying and failing to get a foothold on the desktop by slavishly copying Microsoft. Apple may not beat Microsoft, but it is thrashing Linux on the desktop with a strategy of tight control and emphasis on quality. Linux is mediocre all right - too mediocre to succeed outside of the server market, and even there it is probably not as good as whatever BSD best fits your needs. The real success of Linux is when it leverages its large porting culture to spread to platforms with no alternatives. And you probably aren't even as good as the core Linux developers. Hope you're not as ambitious.
Take a look at Google, perhaps the biggest challenge Microsoft has faced yet. Did they get where they are today by being more mediocre than their competition? Quite the oppo...
pg talks about the priorities for HN in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830035