Perfectionism - one of the biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry

It can cause immense stress and can lead to burnout 🤯 Don't worry, we're sharing our mistakes, so hopefully you'll avoid some!

Intro

Perfectionism is one of these things that hurt us without even realizing it. We may think it’s great to put so much effort into ensuring the result is “perfect”, but at the end of the day, we never finish it and it becomes an endless “work in progress”, which is a big problem.

This article is done in collaboration with Jordan Cutler, Senior Software Engineer at Pinterest and the author of the newsletter High Growth Engineer.

We both made a lot of mistakes thinking that perfecting is the way to go and after some time we realized that progress is so much better!

And today, we are sharing our stories with you! Let’s start with Jordan’s first.

Jordan’s story dealing with perfectionism

Early in my career, I spent a lot of time writing code. In fact, I shipped over 1200 pull requests (PRs) in my first 3 years as an engineer, averaging ~1-2 PRs per day.

While the code velocity was high, I was focusing on the wrong things. Most of the PRs were dedicated to “perfecting” our codebase.

At the time…