What to Do If You're Not Detail Oriented

Wes Kao recently wrote about what to do if you're not detail oriented. She opens with a story that will make you wince: someone at her company sent a newsletter with "Maven" misspelled as "Maven" three different ways. The reader's takeaway wasn't the content. It was "these people don't care about what they ship."

This hits close to home for developers. We all know the code review where someone left a debug console.log, or the PR description that says "fixes stuff." It's not that the person is bad at their job. It's that the details make it look like they don't care. And in this industry, looking like you don't care is almost worse than being wrong.

The four-question self-check

Wes's framework is four questions you ask yourself before anything goes out the door:

1. If I were signing off with my name, would I make this better?
2. Is there sloppiness that might reflect poorly on me or my company?
3. Am I passing the burden to others to fix my errors?
4. Does the work I ship represent my ability?

That third question is the one I think about most. When you ship sloppy code, someone else finds your bugs. Someone else cleans up your half-thought-out architecture. You've outsourced your quality control to your teammates. That's not collaboration. That's making your problem their problem.

You don't need to be perfect

The part of Wes's piece I found most useful is this: you don't need to be in the 95th percentile for detail orientation. You need to be good enough that it stops being a blocker. Good enough that your manager doesn't have to be your safety net.

Wes herself was disorganised in college and early in her career. She built systems to compensate: checklists, calendar reminders, a "clear formatting" reflex in Gmail. The skill is trainable.

For developers, the equivalent might be a pre-commit checklist, a PR template that forces you to verify things you normally skip, or just the habit of reading your own diff before you ask someone else to.

The bar is lower than you think

The bar for "detail oriented enough" is genuinely low. Don't let your typos be the thing people remember. Don't let your messy output become your brand. Ship work that wouldn't embarrass you if it got forwarded to 50,000 people.

Most developers I know are capable of this. They just never built the habit of looking at their own work before someone else does.