Rounding up
I’ve noticed that people almost always round up. Maybe you’ve seen it too.
The almost-candidate becomes close enough. The design is fine if you don’t look too close. The code looks good to me. That’s rounding up.
It’s a kind of gravity that pulls things toward the easy option. You feel it most when you’re tired or under pressure to get something done.
So you do it, and it feels like progress.
But it’ll cost you later. The next hire gets compared to this lower bar. The next promotion too. Over time, your standards get squashed under the weight of all that rounding up, and “close enough” sticks around.
And it’s not only your standards that get hurt. When teams drop the bar to move faster, it’s always the junior people who suffer most. They pick up bad habits and mistake them for good ones. Those are hard to lose, especially when they don’t know they’re bad yet.
This is the slow death of standards. How organisations forget to do great work, one round-up at a time.
That’s all standards really are. Choosing not to round up.