Asking for a quality product, is a lazy ask.
Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from me.
Tommy
I can’t stand it when someone asks for something “high quality” or “clean” or some other vague, meaningless adjective. It drives me nuts—not because I don’t care about quality, but because they haven’t done the work to define what they actually want. This pet peeve has only grown as I’ve tried to get better at my own requests—whether it’s working with tattoo artists or designers on a website. Describing what you want is hard, sure. But that’s no excuse for being lazy about it. You don’t need perfect language—you just need to try harder than “make it good.”
We aren't building your Grandfather's dining room table here, we are building tables to saw on top of.
Mr. Calloway - Stage Set Design
I think that this irk, was born when I was taught that Quality isn’t a single attribute—it’s contextual. Sometimes referred to as Quality Attributes, these are aspects of a solution that are above and beyond the basic functionality being asked for. In engineering, we often refer to these as the the “-ilities”: reliability, scalability, usability, maintainability, and so on. These are different dimensions of quality, and which ones matter most depends entirely on context. A high-quality dinner table isn’t judged by the same criteria as a high-quality workbench. One might prioritize finish and aesthetics; the other, durability and load-bearing strength. The same holds true for systems and teams. The measurements we use to define and improve quality need to reflect the environment we’re operating in and the purpose the system is meant to serve.
Overstating is lazy too
Another way this shows up is when a random company in 2025 says that there are going to build a world-class datacenter. It's almost hard for me to keep a straight face. Yeah, you are going to build a "wOrlD cLAss DaTa CentEr" with your team of 3 engineers, in the matter of twelve months. The company thinks that they will build a best-of-breed datacenter with their staff of three people, that this datacenter is going to some how stack up against a hyper-scaler (AWS, Azure, GCP) that is employing 20 people just for network security, not to mention the teams that are "stacking and racking" hardware, the teams that are providing physical security, and the teams that are staying up through the night to monitor it make sure everything is happy. I have no problem with building the best that we can build but a team of three is not going to build anything world-class. And that is fine, there is no problem with making something good enough, let's just be above board about what it is.
A Better Way
Ok, enough of my complaining. How can we work through this, and be better?
Asking for Visual Work
Often times it's easier to bring a collection of visual elements to help tell your story.
- Build a pinterest board, collect a variety of images and put them all together.
- Even better, is to then annotate those images with what you like and don't like about those images
- Sometimes saying what you don't want can be more powerful for the artist
- Write up a paragraph or two about what you want to achieve with the images
Asking for Software Features
Talk about the business process, talk about the problem - don't worry about the solution. Can you describe the problem without specifying the solution?
- Bring your company's standard way to document their standard operating procedures
- Understand the scale of this process
- how many times per day is this going to happen
- if it messes up, how big of a deal is it?
- if you want two systems to work together, can you describe the business process as two humans doing the work? (The computers will just do it faster, but its the same work)
Closing
In the end, do the work ahead of time to define what you want. Explore how the world describes these things. Mimic these things. Write them down, use a tool to convert your spoken word into text. Use AI to convert your ideas into text.
JUST. DO. THE. WORK.
