I kind of wish I could train myself to be a bit more towards perfectionism than I am. I know it is a different problem than y'all are having, but sometimes it feels that when everyone is stressed about a project I am the only one laid back like "it will work, even if we're a little late" or, which is worse, "readers will point out a mistake if we missed it on the overview". I call it "community feedback", but others see it more accurately as "forgiving errors before tgey are even made".
Real perfectionism doesn't mean you do perfect work. It means you never (or rarely) ship, or perhaps never start. You don't ask for help, you feel anxious about perceptions. You reduce the scope until a task is trivial, or increase it until it is impossible. In both cases you give the job up as worthless or unreachable.
You don't want perfectionism.
> "It will work, even if we're a little late"
We should all aspire to reach this attitude in development teams. As long as you keep putting the work in until the product is polished we're fine.
perfectionism, like many other behavioral styles, is a spectrum
Most of the "perfectionists" are people that simply care a lot more than the average about details, not sociopaths.
Katsuhiro Otomo is a perfectionist, but he also enjoys his life and creating his art.
p.s. perfectionists most of the time acknowledge that thinks will work anyway, they simply also believe (and rightly so) that things could be better than they currently are. Most of the times they also know that perfection (or an incarnation of it) takes a lot of time.
We only talk about the extreme cases because of survival bias: they are the ones who will make extreme sacrifices, while the others will give up on perfection sooner or later, because they are not actually obsessed with it.
