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Comment by devoutsalsa | Hacker News Reader

>> A small, quick software team moves faster than the enterprise wants to go.

Ha. I’ve worked on a team that worked much faster than other teams. We’d sit around trying to find work to do, and when a project showed up, we’d knock it out fast because we needed something to focus our nervous energy on. Then we’d run out of things to do and get bored again.

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It's pretty common that I have to deal with support issues that were fixed six months ago, but the client has never taken an update in all that time...

Are the updates easy to apply? Plenty of software is incredibly hard to update. Take postgres for instance, you need to take take the whole database down or come up with a complicated replication based upgraded strategy (which it doesn't "just do" out of the box)

Restarting software can be pretty problematic if it's used in a high volume context unless it supports some form of high availability natively.

On top of that, plenty of software has poor backwards compatibility (usually not intentionally) which means a significant amount of testing is required to make sure the update didn't introduce a regression (even for minor version and patch upgrades).

seems to me like a good kind of boredom

I suppose it’s better than being stressed out. But it took a long time to be comfortable with it. I kept think I’d get fired, as I just wasn’t doing that much. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to work that way.

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