Who’s going to fix the bad projects?

The article Can You Get Better Doing a Bad Job? by Jim Neilsen cites Woody Harrelson as saying, “I think when you do your job badly you never really get better at your craft.”

Of course that’s true on the surface: If you manage to avoid learning anything else, then you will only ever get better at doing a bad job. The author expands on this point as follows,

“Experience is a hard teacher. Perhaps, from a technical standpoint, my skillset didn’t get any better. But from an experiential standpoint, my judgement got better. I learned to avoid (or try to re-structure) work that’s being carried out in a way that doesn’t align with its own purpose and essence.”

I agree with the highlighted bit especially. Any experience can be “good” because there is always room for seeing how you can make something useful in the midst of madness, how you can extract enjoyment out of even a poorly managed project. You can hone your programming skills; you can hone your diplomatic skills; you can learn how to turn it around. Maybe. At the worst, you learn how not to turn it around.

Dumpster fireBut then he writes that he “learned to avoid (or try to re-structure)” work that he doesn’t like. This is fine, but I would flip those two, to read “I learned to try to restructure (or, in the worst case, avoid),” in order to emphasize that someone should be trying to impart order to chaos—it might as well be you, if you’re so damned smart.

If everyone were avoiding bad projects, then where would good projects come from? Does everyone think that they’re so precious that good projects have to be prepared for them before they’ll even consider participating?