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Comment by rollypolly | Hacker News Reader

  No tasks longer than one week. You have to ship
  something into live production every week – worst
  case, two weeks.

Does this actually work? What I mean is, no matter how much you break down a task, aren't certain sub-tasks going to take more time than this?

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In my experience, tasks that take longer than one week sometimes take two weeks. But if they don't make it within two, they basically never ship. It's like you can go out and have one drink, or two, or many. But never three...

That's such a great way to put it. You hit the nail on the head. For the rare exceptions to this, you better be damn sure it's worth the time, and that you really need it. Because if you think about it some more, you will probably discover you're better off not doing it at all.

I've had a few tasks like this that we just ended up scrapping, even after several weeks of work, because we found we didn't need the monstrosity of a feature as much as we thought we did.

I feel like the author sort of answers this question with the following statement:

  It’s not perfect. We ship too many features, many half-baked.
  The product is complex, with many blind alleys.

It sounds like his team is more focused on just getting something out and improving it iteratively than it is on producing a polished product that is architected beautifully.

This is a great approach. It's also not always appropriate for everyone.

I wonder if refactoring work is allowed to meet this requirement, even though it's not customer-visible?

Promise you will deliver the refactored code in a week, set out some metrics, ship it.

The other devs will be happy someone improved the code. Like the guy said, it's better they ship what they want than not ship what you want

Brilliant IMO

We do regular one-day long refactoring sessions where everyone refactors. But yeah, our codebase is not a thing of beauty. We're more focused on figuring out what users actually want, and we'll rebuild it when it's falling over.

At my job, our policy is no task longer than 3 hours. Longer than that and our clients start questioning the invoices.

It does if your problems are simple...

Even complex problems can be chunked down into smaller things. That's pretty basic.

True, but...

  You have to ship something into live production every
  week – worst case, two weeks.

In your experience, have the smaller pieces always been in a state that can be pushed to production every week? If not, how was that handled?

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