The responsibility to quality

Any time you make something, there's an important question: is it any good? When it's something that you've put out into the world you can usually determine based on some combination of whether you like it, whether other people like it, and whether it works properly. But what about before you've released it? Some things don't have an easy objective measure of goodness, nobody else has had a chance to judge it yet, and your own opinions can sometimes be a bit clouded on the subject.

One of my favourite videos is of Ira Glass, host of This American Life, talking about The Gap. Not the American clothes retailer, but the distance between your taste and your ability. When you're first doing something that you like, you're often not able to produce things that live up to your own standards. I would say that even if you're quite skilled, you still don't usually have the ability to impress yourself: you've heard all your jokes before, you've seen the sausage being made, you know where all the rough edges are. It's hard to know what the reception will be until you try it for real.

But then you run the serious risk of releasing crap. I've previously written about professional responsibility, the right kind of perfection and crap that comes back to haunt you, so you could say I have some skin in the "don't release crap" game. And there's the rub: do you release something when you're not sure it's good and risk releasing crap, or do you wait and risk not releasing it ever?

I'd like to make the argument that responsibility comes with power: to the extent that you're able to determine if something is good or bad, you're responsible for not making it bad. What I mean is that as a novice programmer you shouldn't feel afraid to put out bad code, or as a novice writer you shouldn't be afraid to write complete dreck, because you haven't earned that responsibility yet. There's no excuse for making mistakes that you know are mistakes, but when you're starting out you don't have those instincts yet.

Similarly, even when you generally know what you're doing there will always be a frontier where you don't; every time you try something new there's some part of it that is risky, and the risk is that it will be crap in a way that you don't know enough to realise. And that's okay too. If you're not sure whether something's good or not, that's exactly the time to let go of that responsibility.

If you're in a situation where lives are on the line, or the risks are otherwise enormous, the right way to let go of that responsibility is to put it in the hands of someone who does know. But sometimes the risks aren't so high, and even so there might not be anyone else better to give that responsibility to. In which case, the only person remaining is the one who receives the thing after you're done with it: your audience.

If you make something and it's good to the best of your knowledge and ability, I believe you have discharged your responsibility to quality. Whatever remains is up to the people who use it to decide if it's good enough for them.