What industries have you seen teams deploy on a Friday afternoon?
It meant that issues would sit undiscovered over the weekend until Monday morning, and lead to a week starting in chaos.
Much better to get fast feedback while the deploy could be monitored against prod traffic.
I don’t think most people fully appreciated how much work a handful of us did to make sign off faster and deployment less error prone.
I’ve worked with several people who either confessed to or were accused of having taken up pastimes that would guarantee they weren’t available during times they shouldn’t be expected to be available.
Management gets rewarded for getting more work out of us and there’s always someone pushing boundaries trying to leach a little more work out of the staff they have. These same people seem to think burnout is a big mystery, because to admit they caused the problem would be to admit they did something wrong.
Friday deployments make no sense if you have teams that work Monday-Friday.
The whole point of WLB is that we don’t live like monks.
Do you know how every feature toggle in your system works? Do you know the potential blast radius of those toggles? Can you speculate on the surprise surface area that might be additionally exposed by impedance mismatches and side effects (ie, unanticipated shared state)? Hell does every engineer who wrote a feature toggle know this about their own code? You know who I’m talking about.
If you’re having problems in production that can be anticipated, why are you still having those problems? How long should those be tolerated before someone gets fired?
Example, got a feature with a new required field? Add empty field, synthesize a default value for existing rows, start accepting data, validate that data, require the data, use the data.
If you’re doing deployments once a week, you end up juggling two stories so you’re not sitting on your hands the whole time, and two stories divided your attention, so the odds of fucking it up go up anyway even though you’re being careful on paper.
Meanwhile one of your coworkers is doing the same dance on another feature, so you start tripping over each other as team size increases.
>I don't like working weekend [sic] anymore [sic] that [sic] anyone else.
Many organizations do have round the clock staff but maybe they have the most staff during 9-5 on a particular time zone. So end of day Friday is guaranteeing you'll get a different shift of worker diagnosing failures, i.e. not the author of the deployed change, and possibly fewer available people.
The reason you don’t want to push on a Friday, or overnight, or weekend, is your experts and the top bosses tend to work m-f 9-5, so pushing early in the day and early in the week ensures more people are available to fix problems and run comms.
It’s easy to think things aren’t going to go to hell, but look at the huge companies that screw things up. Amazon. GitHub. It could happen to you, too.
I never said things don't go to hell sometimes. That's why you build a good team and train your people.
For industries that serve customer bases that are down-cycled on weekends, the dominant effect is "Deploy on Friday to minimize customer disruption chance."
For industries that operate with a 24/7 uptime expectation, the dominant effect is "do not deploy on Friday so you don't have to pay for your expensive software engineers pulling extra hours on a weekend. Much better to have disruption while the folks most qualified to fix it are in-house and alert."
If something goes down on Saturday there’s a good chance I’m out of cell service
Hey software engineers - you know that working weekends is unusual, right? Like... please tell me someone has at least negotiated your right to only work 5 days a week so if you're working a weekend you get Monday and Tuesday off.
If not... Has anyone told y'all you should unionize?
What seems to be unique in American companies is you’re expected to work shifts or nights but also work m-f 9-5 at the same time, which is really weird.
Same with of call, if you get called at 3am on an on/call rota for a specialised third line escalation many companies still expect you to work the next day, and they might not even pay you for being on call?!
The other option is to fail during the workweek. If the software is directly generating money for the users and the developers are judged on what actual business value they provide then failure during business hours is worse.
People literally fought, bled, and died for our right to not do capitalism 24/7/365, because with no back-pressure that's what the efficiency engine will demand of us.
People fought hard for the 40 hour work week and 2 day weekend.
You think that should be given up?
>You think that should be given up?
Not really what I said. My point was that in an era of transition where we started with a 40 hour workweek and a two day weekend, the positive outcome could be a 30 hour workweek and a three day weekend or more. That transition period from one to the other is extremely precarious for everybody and is what we are in currently. It isn't going to transition until a great deal of people make it so, and they only do that when the pain reaches home for them. In the interim, your advice is counterproductive. My take away from this past election: the overwhelming majority are not going to change until it gets real for them. Your advice is to light yourself on fire in the meantime.
I mentioned the fact that I’m often out of cell service on weekends (I like to hike and camp) and so it’s a bad time for an outage.
Are you saying labor conditions need to get worse for everyone in order to get better?
If so I disagree and think we should be advocating for better labor conditions for everyone while protecting things like weekends