if you are not embarrassed by the shit you say online, maybe you aren't saying enough LOLOLOL

[rone]

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

       — Reid Hoffman

This little nugget has been floating around the Internet long enough and it's time for me to step on its neck.  This cheeky morsel of wit is emblematic of why using the Web is so fucking awful, why sites will push out some flashy garbage and hope that it somehow infects its luserbase like shoveling out junk RNA and hoping it turns into a retrovirus.  It's pretending that making Internet-based products is just another facet of the creative process, while at the same time playing the other end and calling it "engineering", when the truth is closer to it being the result of people coding features nobody but Product wants instead of fixing the features that everybody uses, all while under pressure from the VC-ridden board or the crony-ridden major stockholders and yet, somehow, something not entirely offensive emerges, because there's someone who deeply and personally cares, at least until they burn out and move on.

Hoffman's quote is the bizarro version of "Perfect is the enemy of good."  It is a deep exercise in bullshitting oneself and everyone around.  If you ship something embarrassing, you've set your standard.  That's who you are.  Don't laugh it off, and for fuck's sake don't spin it as an inspirational quote.  Have some fucking dignity.

Comments

[catbear.livejournal.com]

No one pays for dignity except the kin of the recently deceased.

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

It's so tautological that it seems like Football Coach Wisdom, like the time some talking head asked Bill Parcells "is this team better than their record suggests they are?", and he replied something like "No, that's silly. You are exactly as good as your record says you are."

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

"Perfect is the enemy of good." is true enough due to diminishing returns. But "good", being the satisfaction of at least the specifications that have been agreed to, is in contrast to Hoffman's claim. It's basically a continuum..

Perfect ------ Good --- Fair --- Poor ------ Crap

The Hoffman quote suggests that goods should be engineered towards the right-hand side of the continuum. Maybe because it's "fast" or "cheap" or perhaps even "agile".