Your personal standards for good enough programming should be significantly above the standards set by management and many of your programming peers, but you ve got to recognize that there are times when tamping down your perfectionism is a necessity.
I ve urged you to be the best programmer that you can be. Now that you have that down, welcome to the world of good enough, in which your mission is to code to the business problem and no more. Think this might not be the strategy for you? In this chapter, I hope to bring you around.
Forget about writing the perfect program. Your company can t afford to have you spend time doing that.
Virtually every job anywhere ”and certainly corporate programming ”requires a certain performance level. That is the level that management determines to be good enough performance. (Your personal standards for good enough programming should be significantly above the standards set by management and many of your programming peers, but you ve got to recognize that there are times when tamping down your perfectionism is a necessity.)
Over time, your output as a programmer must exceed the amount the company expends for your work on the project. Remember, everything is economic. All of the programming projects that are assigned to you have some benefit that is probably estimated in monetary return or some productivity gain that can be translated to money.
The corporate programmer is often the biggest of the project s costs. If your projects consistently take much more time than expected, or more than those of other programmers doing similar work, you will eventually bear the consequences. Good-enough programming means cranking out lots of good-enough , if not gourmet, programs.