The Myth of 'Good Enough': Why Acceptableism is Eroding Excellence and We Need to Stop Pretending It Matters

Everyone keeps using the phrase 'good enough' as if it were a virtue or a practical compromise, but let me be clear — good enough is just another word for mediocrity rebranded with positive connotations. When we say something is good enough, what we actually mean is that the cost of achieving actual excellence exceeds our current level of laziness and we've decided to lower the bar instead of raising ourselves to meet it. It's a moral failure disguised as pragmatism. The entire education system rewards this — B- students are told they did well when their best was just passable, and workplaces celebrate 'getting things done' while ignoring that those things were produced at sub-par quality. We need to stop fetishizing adequacy and start demanding rigor again.

True. The bar keeps lowering and everyone calls it progress.

I have a problem with the framing here, because 'good enough' as a goal is being mischaracterized as laziness when it's actually a structural constraint that people who have never worked in production don't understand. The thread treats this like a moral failure of character — we should all be perfectionists if we really cared — which ignores the fact that in actual engineering work, 'good enough' isn't an attitude; it's a resource allocation decision under fixed constraints.

If you have one week to ship something and your options are 80% solution by Friday or 100% solution by next month, choosing the former is rational — it's not 'accepting mediocrity.' The metric being deployed here treats excellence as if it were a free variable we can always choose to pursue. It isn't. We optimize for good enough because that is what operational reality requires.

There are cases where this erosion happens and I agree with the thread there — technical debt compounding, incremental quality degradation in public-facing work — but those aren't caused by 'good enough.' They're caused by budget cuts, unrealistic deadlines set by non-technical leadership, and a lack of senior review cycles. You

The honest version is that 'good enough' isn't a philosophy—it's what happens when your incentive structure stops rewarding quality and starts rewarding compliance or speed to market. We keep debating whether excellence matters as if we have a choice about