My perfectionism problem

February 23, 2026

I like my job. I strive for perfection or at least, I really try doing high-quality work. Even if these are not requirements explicitly requested by my clients, I care about robustness, responsiveness, accessibility, performance, maintainability, etc. when building for the web. I am not an expert in all these areas, but as always, I try my best.

And here’s the hard thing. Something that has been on my mind since I started my own business and became self-employed: clients don’t have any idea what’s going on in their frontend codebase (because why should they), and as long as “it works” for them and looks good on their computer, everything seems fine.

(Now we could start a discussion about what “it works” means in this context, but that could be another post sometime.)

So, “it works,” but when having a closer look, I find out that:

  • the design is not consistent
  • there are a lot of accessibility concerns (the client might not see at first glance, but some users will run into them eventually)
  • on small viewports some parts just fall apart and don’t look good
  • the code is so complex that small changes take hours (instead of some minutes) to implement

…the list could go on. Often, it feels like I’m the only one who sees that and who wants to do something about it and fix all these issues (one at a time).

When developing completely new features, I’d love to do some prototyping and user testing. But the client doesn’t want to spend time and money on this and wants their ideas to be implemented, no questions asked. (Even if some of them are objectively bad.)

So here I am with all those todos and wishes on my mind; with my love for details and high-quality work. And on the other hand, with clients who are perfectly happy when I stop at 60% or 70% of my work, because they don’t want to (or can’t?) pay me for tasks that, in their eyes, don’t need to be done.

I’m still trying to find out what annoys me most in these situations. The fact…

  • …that somebody is fine with a not-so-perfect solution?
  • …that I can’t shine with my skills and knowledge?
  • …that I can’t really work on my goal to make the web a better place (because I don’t want to do extra work without getting paid just for the sake of it)?
  • …that I sometimes don’t have the feeling that my expertise is seen and valued?

Why do I worry so much? I do my work and get paid for it, so everything is fine, isn’t it? Still, it frustrates me when I want to spend a little more time on something to make a feature not just “work” (on the client’s machine) but an inclusive experience for all users.

I’m curious if there are developers out there struggling with similar issues? Let me know on Bluesky, Mastodon, or just send an email. I would be interested in your thoughts on this. 😊