Engineering organizations often celebrate craftsmanship. Most non-functional requirements or expectations like stability, longevity, accuracy, security, maintainability, and performance are the result of excellence in the craft of engineering.
But past a certain point, and in certain contexts, that same commitment to excellence can become a hindrance to the business and a detriment to your career. Here are a few examples:
❌ When a standard of excellence hasn’t been documented, or when your personal standard is different from one that is documented, your criticism of other people’s work can seem arbitrary and demoralizing, leading people to stop asking for your feedback.
❌ When you hold a dogmatic opinion on disputable matters of style and aesthetics, you can increase the cost of creation as people incur an outsized effort to duplicate your style with no real benefit to the business or your customers. This used to be one of my big challenges, until someone had the courage to let me know I was “gold-plating” our software and documentation.
❌ You can tend to emphasize one non-functional requirement at the expense of another. For example, excellence in performance often comes at a cost of maintainability, while an overemphasis on maintainability can sacrifice stability or security.
When you hold out your personal favorite standard of excellence as an irrefutable measure of quality for everyone else, you can actually hurt your reputation and your influence.
If you’d like to explore balancing excellence with influence in your workplace, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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