When I was in high school in college, I worked a lot of different part-time jobs in the restaurant industry, usually in the back of the house. And in fact, a lot of the lessons that I still use today, I learned from that industry. You might’ve seen my relate these lessons in some of my other previous blog posts, such sweeping the walk-in.

Why it’s OK to Let People Fail – Knuggets of Knowledge

Be Realistic About Skill Expectations – Knuggets of Knowledge

But today I wanted to talk about a different one, the analogy of the health inspector. So the way it works is typically you have a health inspector come to your restaurant on a periodic basis and give you a score, something like 1 to 100 or A to F, scored on how clean and compliant the restaurant is. You might’ve seen some of the score cards posted at a restaurant you’ve been to. 

I remember one time we knew the inspector was coming so we spent a week or two cleaning and getting the restaurant kitchen as clean and compliant as we could. And when the inspector came and finished, they gave us a score of 99, not 100. I was just a kid so I didn’t know better to keep my mouth shut, so I asked why we didn’t get a 100. The reason in the writeup was something kind of bogus, but the inspector said to me “it’s not my job to give out 100s because no kitchen will ever be perfect. You have to, as a kitchen, know that you can always do better and be cleaner.”

At the time, I thought the inspector was being wise and professional. But looking back, I realize that inspector was demonstrating a problematic mindset that I see replicated in workplaces all the time. When your job is to find problems, you’ll always find problems – even when they don’t meaningfully matter. That kitchen was spotless, safe, and running smoothly. The “flaw” that cost us our perfect score was essentially invented to justify the inspector’s belief that perfection doesn’t exist.

I see this same dynamic play out constantly in code reviews, design critiques, and project evaluations. There’s always someone who feels compelled to find *something* wrong, even when the work is genuinely excellent. They’ll nitpick variable names, find errors in font sizes, or question stylistic choices that have no bearing on functionality. Like that health inspector, they’ve convinced themselves that being overly critical is the same as being thorough.

But here’s what that inspector didn’t understand: sometimes the pursuit of finding flaws does more harm than good. Our kitchen staff had worked incredibly hard for weeks to earn that perfect score. Instead of celebrating their achievement and reinforcing the behavior we wanted to see, the inspector’s arbitrary criticism demoralized the team.

The lesson isn’t that standards don’t matter – they absolutely do. But when you’re in a position to evaluate others’ work, ask yourself: is this feedback genuinely improving the outcome, or am I just finding problems because I think that’s my job? Sometimes the most professional thing you can do is recognize when something is good enough, celebrate the effort, and let the team move forward with confidence.