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Even if you release multiple times every day, refusing to release on Friday still makes sense. It’s not about expecting bugs, it’s about guaranteeing that your devs’ time is their own. If you aren’t okay with paying your devs for time they spend dealing with their own problems at home (without charging them their PTO time for it!) then you shouldn’t be okay with making them work on weekends, no matter how rare it is.
The author ended up creating a strawman. Allen’s argument was pretty clear: if your deltas are small and your deploy system is fully automated, then no one should be afraid of the risk of deploying.
Given that, if I deploy on a Monday morning and there is a bug on the new release, you revert, reproduce the issue in staging and push only new code when it is fixed. Same thing if I were deploying on a Thursday afternoon or a Friday at 7PM.
Only inexperienced developers* are unafraid of deploying right before leaving the office.
There’s an entire untapped universe of possible new ways that things can go horribly wrong.
*Experienced developers who hate their boss and their colleagues, too, technically.
possible new ways
Name two, please.
XML
How is that not easily reversible?
It’s not about how hard the problem is to reverse, it’s about respecting the team enough not to call them on Saturday.
Again: if the changes are small enough and you have automated checks in place, they should not require manual intervention.
Plus, what happens if a deploy on Thursday has a bug which only is manifested on a Saturday?
In one of my jobs, they were automatically locking any push 2 hours before the shift ended.
Now that’s a team that knows what they’re doing!
If something goes wrong, devs have to give up their weekend to fix the issues, leading to burnout and dissatisfaction.
Correct in spirit, but the words “burnout” and “dissatisfaction” are weasle words that spinless middle managers use.
The correct terms are “abruptly quiting without notice leaving the company fucked and our stock worthless”.
A minor point, but worth clarifying.
As someone who has experienced burnout before: that’s exactly what it looks like.
