Yeah, I was worried that I'd painted the second company as the bad guys. They were not. They made different choices. And both have been extremely influential in terms of process, but... influential at different extremes.

At the perfectionist company we were six weeks away from final release - for a year. On the other hand, that company's codebase almost brought me to tears with its conceptual unity and perfection. And some process was worthwhile for us; we were adding fintech features to a userbase of hundreds of millions.

At the speedy company we did social media, so there were way lower stakes. Projects turned around really fast. LAMP stack all the way. The attitude was that code would always be kind of sloppy and unpredictable, and there would always be unforeseen disasters. To cushion shocks like that, they invested a lot in their feature flag and deployment system.

These are both paths borne of wisdom and experience.

But here's where culture comes in. The culture at both companies was that these weren't choices that worked for them, but the optimal choice for everyone. At either company I think most people would think the other company's approach was not just bad, but literally impossible.