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Never Ship on Fridays

octomind.dev

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Re: Never Ship on Fridays

#31

Post by viraptor »

I think the author read "inadequate" in a different way than it was written. The way I read the tweet is not "then your practices are shit", but rather "then your practices are not ready yet". I.e. as an assessment, not judgement. It's a bit of a "you must be this high to ride" situation for Friday deploys. With 64 releases, I don't expect the release pipeline to even be ready for this - we're doing a few releases a day and I'll still choose not to do some of them on Friday afternoon. (Especially dns changes that could bring down everything)

Then there's a risk of something going wrong regardless of how well you're prepared. Don't release on Friday is stupid, ignore Fridays is stupid. How about "work on your release processes, so that the scope of what you're comfortable releasing on Fridays grows over time"?

Re: Never Ship on Fridays

#32

Post by redserk »

mvdtnz wrote: post #20

Just another reminder of the absolutely terrible state of our industry. Imagine anyone in any other industry taking this ridiculous stand. "Oh we don't fit roofs on Fridays, in case our roof leaks and we need to bring the roofer back in on the weekend". "We don't do Friday wisdom tooth removals, would hate for the dentist to have to fix a problem in the weekend". "No we don't fit tyres on Fridays, our tyre guy doesn'…

I really don't agree with any of your examples here, or the combativeness of your comment.

Roof work is usually a fair bit more deterministic than software.

For car work, it's not uncommon where I am for the tire guy, the vehicle inspector guy, or the guy who knows how to work on my brand of car to have unavailability.

My dentist has scheduled work earlier in the week with the explicit intent that if something goes wrong, I can be seen quicker. I appreciated this gesture, even if it wasn't exercised.

Re: Never Ship on Fridays

#33

Post by missingcolours »

mvdtnz wrote: post #20

Just another reminder of the absolutely terrible state of our industry. Imagine anyone in any other industry taking this ridiculous stand. "Oh we don't fit roofs on Fridays, in case our roof leaks and we need to bring the roofer back in on the weekend". "We don't do Friday wisdom tooth removals, would hate for the dentist to have to fix a problem in the weekend". "No we don't fit tyres on Fridays, our tyre guy doesn'…

Actually what's happening in those examples is that issues DO happen on the weekend, the customer just suffers or calls someone else to patch things up till it can be addressed correctly. Difference with tech work is that your employer typically suffers.

Re: Never Ship on Fridays

#34

Post by microflash »

A few years ago, I was working on a legacy system that required preparing changesets for a release by hand. There was no version control. The entire release workflow was manual. The release sizes were massive. During those days, it was given that a release would take an entire day. We were averse to Friday deployments then.

Fast forward a few years, we now have version control, a proper CI/CD with rollbacks for failure and small well-scoped releases. Cutting down the release sizes had two positive effects: easier rollbacks and, quick and precise feedback about the release's status. These days, we release things whenever they are ready and Friday is no different than any other day.

Re: Never Ship on Fridays

#35

Post by natbennett »

gnulinux wrote: post #11
treffer wrote: post #7

"Never ship on Fridays" is pretty high up on my antipattern lust. It's a nice way to phrase "how about we work 20% less at the same pay? It will help reduce the number of bugs / incidents we ship each year!". And it will help with that. But why do I say 20% reduction in work? Bugfixes and features that get fixed/finished on Fridays will ship 3 days later. Do your average lead time increases by >0.5 days. This impacts…

This is really really ridiculous. I've never worked for a company that has releases every day, even every day of the week except Friday. That's not how it works. The most I've seen was 2 days (Tue, Thu) but 3 was fine if you insisted too too much. In my current company we have only 1 day a week release: Tuesday. No other day is allowed or is even possible without someone spending tons of time doing manual things that…

I’ve worked at multiple places that release every day. It’s not that hard.

Re: Never Ship on Fridays

#36

Post by nosefurhairdo »

microflash wrote: post #34

A few years ago, I was working on a legacy system that required preparing changesets for a release by hand. There was no version control. The entire release workflow was manual. The release sizes were massive. During those days, it was given that a release would take an entire day. We were averse to Friday deployments then. Fast forward a few years, we now have version control, a proper CI/CD with rollbacks for failu…

Completely agree. Also, we have significantly lower usage on Friday into the weekend. Would rather catch a bug and quickly rollback Friday with fewer users impacted, rather than arbitrarily force devs to wait until Monday to queue up their releases during our peak usage.

As in most things, context matters. Tired of "always do x" and "never do y" opinions.

Re: Never Ship on Fridays

#37

Post by erik_seaberg »

mvdtnz wrote: post #20

Just another reminder of the absolutely terrible state of our industry. Imagine anyone in any other industry taking this ridiculous stand. "Oh we don't fit roofs on Fridays, in case our roof leaks and we need to bring the roofer back in on the weekend". "We don't do Friday wisdom tooth removals, would hate for the dentist to have to fix a problem in the weekend". "No we don't fit tyres on Fridays, our tyre guy doesn'…

Roofing isn’t unskilled, but building codes make it sort of a commodity. If you just invented a new type of roof, I would not want you to install the very first one on Friday night and then send home every available expert to party or travel or whatever for the next two days.

Re: Never Ship on Fridays

#38

Post by wise_young_man »

mvdtnz wrote: post #20

Just another reminder of the absolutely terrible state of our industry. Imagine anyone in any other industry taking this ridiculous stand. "Oh we don't fit roofs on Fridays, in case our roof leaks and we need to bring the roofer back in on the weekend". "We don't do Friday wisdom tooth removals, would hate for the dentist to have to fix a problem in the weekend". "No we don't fit tyres on Fridays, our tyre guy doesn'…

The thing is that the one roof doesn’t affect all your entire customer base. That isn’t quite a fair comparison to make due to the nature of software scale, but I can relate to the sentiment.

Re: Never Ship on Fridays

#39

Post by winrid »

mvdtnz wrote: post #20

Just another reminder of the absolutely terrible state of our industry. Imagine anyone in any other industry taking this ridiculous stand. "Oh we don't fit roofs on Fridays, in case our roof leaks and we need to bring the roofer back in on the weekend". "We don't do Friday wisdom tooth removals, would hate for the dentist to have to fix a problem in the weekend". "No we don't fit tyres on Fridays, our tyre guy doesn'…

The core of your argument is that it's the worker deciding this, and that they don't want to fix issues over the weekend.

That's not true.

It's the business deciding that they don't want to ship bugs on Fridays and then take the hit for customers having a bad experience over the weekend if the issue can't be resolved. What if you let someone deploy on a Fri and then they go skiing for the weekend? Sure, someone else can step in, but maybe it takes them an extra 2-3 hours to solve the problem. That might cost you a renewal.

Re: Never Ship on Fridays

#40

Post by spcebar »

mvdtnz wrote: post #20

Just another reminder of the absolutely terrible state of our industry. Imagine anyone in any other industry taking this ridiculous stand. "Oh we don't fit roofs on Fridays, in case our roof leaks and we need to bring the roofer back in on the weekend". "We don't do Friday wisdom tooth removals, would hate for the dentist to have to fix a problem in the weekend". "No we don't fit tyres on Fridays, our tyre guy doesn'…

The consequence of a bad deploy can be millions of dollars for a client or business. Depending on the industry, it can be a million dollars in the course of an hour. If a dev team works Monday to Friday, then it's likely they're going to be harder to reach and coordinate with during the weekend. It usually costs less money to wait an additional business day than to get a team of engineers in on a weekend to try and fix a problem in production.

If a roof leaks on a Sunday and the roofer doesn't work Sundays it's going to be similarly difficult to get the roofer to come and fix it. The difference is the order of magnitude of money lost for a leaky roof vs a software fuckup at a pharma company or a business conglomerate.

It's ultimately the responsibility of the developers to test their code sufficiently so that there never is a weekend problem to begin with, but the reality is there will always be bugs that crop up in production, and you can only control that so much. You can usually control deploying on a Friday though.

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