I wasted a lot of time being a perfectionist. I viewed my work as art and it had to be perfect. Later I realized it’s not my work at all, it’s my employers. I had also come close to burning out and I backed off quite a bit. The switch flipped.

My work is a little sloppier now. If I feel bad all I do is remind myself of the cool things I learned in my spare time. I’m better for it, and so is my collective body of work.

Hi, I wrote a post about perfectionism and how to deal with it. I think that in a startup culture leaders are pretty aware of this issue as they have faced it before (when building a product). Unfortunately, when it comes to new hires, especially ones completely new to startups, they don't understand how valuable their time is and what exactly they are being paid for. Many time it's not the perfect code that matters, but half broken feature that can be pushed to users to validate their needs.

What's your opinion? How many times have you had to deal with a colleague that wanted everything to be perfect?