Hot take though: why do we need so many people and processes and mysticism around software these days? It seems to me the reason why it’s so difficult to ship anything, let alone anything good and useful, is because there are so many people involved who don’t actually participate in engineering. They manage time lines and meetings and emails and talking to customers. And somehow they’ve made themselves essential to the process so that developers can’t ship code anymore.
Like… I know my users on a first name basis. I know how their business works. We’ve talked about the button and we want to run an experiment.
As a developer I might want to just try it out with them. Maybe the change will be a good fit for the product as a whole, maybe it will be a solution that only works for this one customer, maybe it means we need to be able to configure which workflow is used.
If I can’t just ship that and get the feedback I need without involving a handful of other people and being completely fearful that I could take down our service… what is wrong here? Is it that there aren’t enough “shippers” on the team or is it because the organization has made it difficult to ship anything?
That being said, this is the world we live in, and the article has a lot of great advice. I’m definitely used to/conditioned to think this way.