Pursue excellence – but accept that you’re only human

“Hi, I’m Alan Temaficoni. I’m here for my interview for the software engineer position.”

“Take a seat.”

The interviewer set Al a challenge: to identify the purpose of a snippet of program code. Al took one look at it and recognized it as some flavour of ‘c’, though, being not entirely familiar with that language, he wasn’t sure which. After considering the code’s structure, his first thought was that it might be instructions to accept an input string and reverse it, using recursion.

Unfortunately, Al had never fully grokked how recursion worked. He was fond of saying that the dictionary definition of recursion should read, ‘recursion (n): see recursion’. Naturally, this thought popped into his head right then, but he dismissed it quickly: he was on a timescale here. Not wanting to give his prospective employer his first impression of what he thought the code might do, in case it was the wrong answer, he began trying to work through an example to confirm that the code actually did what he thought it did.

As the minutes ticked by, Al began to sweat. Try as he might, he couldn’t get his head around it – and, of course, that made the task even more intractable.

“Time’s up.”

Al looked up at his tormentor, confident of just one thing: that the fear in his eyes would be evident. “I think it takes a string and reverses it using recursion,” he managed to stumble out.

“Absolutely right. What took you so long?”

As he tried to explain that it had actually been his first thought, but he wanted to check so that he didn’t give a wrong answer, and he was more familiar with ADA than c, and recursion had always been his nemesis, Al realized that he was beginning to babble incoherently.

The interviewer raised a hand, and offered some advice:

Never let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘good enough’.

Al didn’t get that job.

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Al was working against the clock to finish up a project. He’d been toiling at it all weekend and was short of sleep. Though the essential guts of the task were complete, a few loose ends and inconsistencies remained.

Al yawned and stretched. Then it struck him: these issues were relatively trivial; they might never even be noticed. And then the memory of the advice he’d been given in that interview years before wafted into his head.

Never let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘good enough’.

He finished up his summary report using that phrase to excuse any remaining flaws. It was the last thing he wrote before hitting the sack.

Upon waking the following morning, Al was reminded that our brains don’t stop working even when we’re asleep. Forefront in his mind was the (somewhat ironic) thought that, although he’d congratulated himself the night before on having found what could be considered an acceptable resolution to the ‘almost-but-not-quite-complete’ conundrum he’d faced, in the cool light of the morning, the choice struck him as being more than a little disingenuous.

He needed a better answer, but he was out of time. The project deadline was that morning; Al had no choice but to submit it. Fortunately, his mind had worked on the riddle overnight, and it offered him a solution. He amended the closing words of the summary report, adding:

… uh, no, on second thoughts I can’t subscribe to that; it sounds to me like an excuse for sloppy work. Granted, perfection is an unrealistic goal; but if all we ever strive to achieve is just what’s good enough, and sit back on our laurels once we’ve accomplished that, not only is perfection out of reach, excellence is, too.

I think the motto I live by is:

Pursue excellence – but accept that you’re only human.

– Alan Temaficoni

Header image adapted from
‘silhouette photography of person‘
by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash