When Growing Online Pressures Backfire

[Renegade]

I'm looking for camera lenses, and this is one that I checked out:

http://www.sigmaphot...-apo-dg-os-hsm-sigma

(But only because I found it somewhere for almost half price.)

Now, there's a video from a Sigma tech rep there, and man... Painful...

She's obviously not comfortable with the taping, and the video really isn't doing much justice to the product. There a reason for hiring actors and voice actors: the rest of us tend to bugger it up with stuttering, pauses, bad intonation, etc.

It seems like there's always more and more pressure from technology to "do things", but, a few things seem to get lost in the message.

It's really hard to get some things done properly.

Does anyone get those kinds of pressures at work? Where you're asked to do things that you *can* get done, but you know it won't be quite right? Ever have to settle for "good enough"?

[Target]

I'm currently working on a tool that will extract a stack of information from some of our systems in order to build a report whose value i am far from convinced of.

It was someone else's idea, and despite the fact that they're clearly motivated purely by convenience, and that they haven't really thought about either the requirements, the intended audience (minimal input so far, and mostly from another area with completely different requirements), or the possible use/value of the final outputs they managed to catch the attention of our manager, and, well, you know how it goes...

It had been floating around for about 12 months and there were rumblings about engaging a 3rd party to build the damn thing.  Having just seen the 'mock ups' I was rather concerned that we were going to buy a pup, so I said so.  This was interpreted by my manager as a wish to be involved (is there a pattern emerging here?)

To rub salt into the wound whatever I come up with probably won't even be the final solution - looks like another group (a group that 'specialises' in these sorts of apps but which had 'avoided' involvement to this point) will take my workings and use it as the basis of 'their' solution 

[JavaJones]

Does anyone get those kinds of pressures at work? Where you're asked to do things that you *can* get done, but you know it won't be quite right? Ever have to settle for "good enough"?

-Renegade (April 15, 2011, 12:02 AM)

One word (and a smiley): Yes. 

- Oshyan

[nudone]

Erm, yes. It was a revelation to my young idealistic naive unemployed self that the real world works on the principle of "just good enough". And quite right too; otherwise nothing would ever be "completed".

I wish I'd accepted this fundamental truth at an earlier age.

[40hz]

Erm, yes. It was a revelation to my young idealistic naive unemployed self that the real world works on the principle of "just good enough". And quite right too; otherwise nothing would ever be "completed".

I wish I'd accepted this fundamental truth at an earlier age.

-nudone (April 15, 2011, 02:26 AM)

+1 w/nudone.

"Not everything worth doing is worth doing well" was the hardest work lesson I ever had to learn.

[nudone]

That deserves to be on one of those office demotivational posters.

[40hz]

That deserves to be on one of those office demotivational posters.

-nudone (April 15, 2011, 03:04 AM)

It actually from Tracy Kidder's book Soul of A New Machine. It was attributed to a manager in the design team responsible for developing Data General's first 32-bit minicomputer back in the late 70s.



(Some really good insights to be found in Kidder's book. Right up there with Fred Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month; Gerry & Dani Weinberg's On the Design of Stable Systems; and just about anything by Tony Demarco. Good story and a fun read too! )

[nudone]

"I'll buy that for a dollar", well, 1 pence plus postage to be precise. Just ordered from amazon.

Thanks.

[Renegade]

Erm, yes. It was a revelation to my young idealistic naive unemployed self that the real world works on the principle of "just good enough". And quite right too; otherwise nothing would ever be "completed".

I wish I'd accepted this fundamental truth at an earlier age.

-nudone (April 15, 2011, 02:26 AM)

+1 w/nudone.

"Not everything worth doing is worth doing well" was the hardest work lesson I ever had to learn.

-40hz (April 15, 2011, 02:49 AM)

Very much agreed.

Success incorporates 2 very important attitudes:

1) Can do!
2) That'll do!


I think I kind of monkeyed up what I wanted to say in the original post... Oh well. This is one direction anyways~!

[cranioscopical]

I think I kind of monkeyed up what I wanted to say in the original post...

-Renegade (April 15, 2011, 07:30 AM)

It wasn't perfect but probably good enough 

[J-Mac]

Wow! Now that's a LENS!  (Felt that I had to capitalize that lens!)

Jim