by Serguey Shinder
On a Monday morning somebody from the product team asked me whether we could import a particular partner's file format. I said I would look at it. I then spent four days building an importer, with a parser, tests around the malformed cases, a mapping table, a migration for the two new columns it needed, and a pull request that two people reviewed carefully on the Thursday afternoon.
She had needed an answer on the Tuesday, to reply to a customer. And the answer was no, because their format carried a delivery grouping that our order model has no place for and never will without a structural change nobody is going to fund. Thirty minutes with one sample file and a throwaway script would have told me that on the Monday afternoon. Instead I found it out on Wednesday, kept going anyway because by then I had the parser working and the grouping felt solvable, and deleted the whole branch on Friday.
Nobody had told me what the work was for. That is true and it is also not much of a defence, because I did not ask, and the reason I did not ask is more uncomfortable than the reason I did not know. I defaulted to the most finished thing I knew how to build, because a finished thing is the only kind of work I have ever been praised for. Nobody has ever thanked me for a script they never saw. The habit was not diligence. It was a preference for the sort of work that is visible when it lands.
What we changed is embarrassingly small. Every request now arrives with one of three words attached, agreed at the start and out loud. A sketch is something I will throw away and it gets hours. An answer is a number or a yes or no and it gets a day. A product is a thing customers touch and it gets what it needs. The word is chosen by whoever is going to act on the output, not by me, because they are the only person who knows what decision it feeds.
The distinction I now carry is that quality is not a virtue you hold in the abstract, it is a fit against a purpose that usually belongs to somebody else. When nobody states the purpose you will not do nothing. You will fill the gap with your own standard, which is the highest one you have, and you will spend other people's time and your own evenings buying something excellent that nobody wanted. The failure does not feel like carelessness at any point. It feels like doing a good job, right up until the day you delete it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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