Carragee Consulting

What other’s use as a proxy for quality

As a high schooler my brother spent a summer working for a friend’s dad as grunt labor at a kitchen and bathroom remodeling company.

Our parents weren’t very skilled at DIY projects and he didn’t come to the job with honed skills in the trades. Along with basic wiring and other remodeling specific skills, he learned something else that summer that he told me too.

At the end of every day it’s important to clean up the job site and put things visibly back in order. The client may not know if you’re doing an excellent job on their remodel project, but they do know if their house is clean.

I think about this sometimes when I’m doing documentation or annotating code or writing emails.

Care and attention to visual style and spelling are easily recognizable signs of quality even to lay people in your field. When you gloss over these, you sow seeds of doubt on deeper levels.

That said, I’m still a terrible speller and editor.