There is a management saying I have been hearing all the years I was in engineering:
“It’s time to just shoot the engineers and release the product.”
The implication, of course, is that engineers will fiddle with something for all eternity, trying to make it absolutely perfect before releasing it to the customers. Cost and schedule be damned!
And there may be some truth in that.
It’s been my experience that there are only two things that will induce an engineer to finally claim that something is finished.
- Fear (i.e. management threats)
- Becoming bored with whatever it is and wanting to move on to something new
If it were not for those two things, nothing would ever get released and we’d have no smart phones, laptops, microwaves, or anything else.
Biff Sock Pow 
I think this applies to authors also. I always seem to reach the boredom threshold before I attain perfection – and don’t get me started on the terror of deadlines!
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Hi Annabelle! Thanks for stopping by. 🙂 Yes, you’re right. There are a lot of parallels between writing, and writing software. Both require creativity and inspiration, and it is hard to schedule those things. They tend to come when they darn well feel like it. And deadlines are indeed terrifying, but without them, I don’t think I’d ever accomplish a darn thing! Ha ha!
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See management should learn this. Engineers do get bored, so if you offered us another (toy to play with) project to work on we’d drop the old one pdq!
Carrots work much better than sticks, and if you don’t offer enough toys ….er tools you’ll lose us to our more interesting projects at home. It’s nice to be your own boss: Need a more powerful PC? Got the money? There we go!
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I have a similar problem with psychometricians:
“How much data do you need?”
“ALL THE DATA.”
“Can’t you do it with this amount?”
“DATA. ALL THE DATA.”
“But–”
“DATA.”
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So true!
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I think there might be an analogy here somewhere… Something to do with blog posts. Let me think about this for a while. Happy Friday!
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