> I haven't once come across one of these mythical perfectionists that everyone is constantly retelling cautionary tales of, who endlessly rewrites perfectly serviceable software and never releases
Oh, I have. A LOT! In my friend group theres at least 5 of these right now. They work day jobs (that they dislike), they try to build a side hustle but never get it off the ground because they endlessly rewrite perfectly serviceable software and never release, the reason is:
- they believe that running a startup only requires writing a good product
- they avoid releasing because thats "judgement day" and might flop
- they think if they code it "just right" a money Waterfall will open up magically like a lottery ticket win and be instant success
- they believe that because theres the occasional exception to these rules above, it will happen to them too (everyone thinks they are the special exception,) because thats easier than accepting building a successful business takes discipline, hard work, and doing the tasks you dont want to do.
You havent come across them because by definition they never release and they dont share (they are embarrassed it might fail) so theres thousands and thousands of them, grinding away under false assumptions. They enjoy the act of building (which is totally cool!) but think thats all there is to it. Convinced that just one more rewrite is the thing holding them back from success - because they'd rather rewrite than talk to users. Millions of people doing this, millions of dreams that will die, because /just one more rewrite/
Just because you havent seen them, doesnt mean they aren't there
I couldn’t care less about solo developers who never release their hobby projects. The cautionary tales are always about potential coworkers, and as far as I can tell that stereotype simple doesn’t exist in the business world.
I have not just worked with but had code rejected by these people. “Don’t fix that bug, we are going to write an entire new structure that will make it irrelevant”, “don’t upgrade that library, we are going to rewrite our code to not use it”, “don’t improve exception handling, fix all the bugs that throw bad exceptions”. Not at all surprisingly, all of those planned upgrades took at least two years after my attempted improvement was rejected (the library I didn’t upgrade stuck around for six years).
I'm just like that, but minus the expectation of release/money/success. To me, the building and programming itself is the reward, and I have no motivation or desire to release anything I work on--or any belief that it would/should make money for me. To me, the hours spent fine sanding down and polishing my code, always approaching but never achieving perfection, is its own reward.
I would say thats a different thing entirely, an amateur in the original sense of the word
Latin amator, French amateur, means lover.
In this sense, it means somebody who is doing something because he/she loves it, not as his/her profession. It is not a large semantic shift to infer that he/she is not as skilled.