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The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

kitze.io

21–30 of 316 posts

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#21
post #15

> so I started getting suspicious if someone actually shared the video of my app with these people because they were solving literally the same problem I once met a guy who had a good idea about an app, something that became fairly mainstream two years later. He asked me to code the app for free and we'd share revenues. When asked what his contribution would be, he offered to "run" the company and otherwise his 50% w…

I mean handling sales + marketing + accounting and everything else required to run a company is worth 50% (maybe more). But of course while you were probably competent enough to "code it up", odds are he wasn't competent to "run the company".

i’ve recently had a revelatory experience with my cofounder, who is focused entirely on sales. we were pitching our product/services to the company execs- and he just owned the room. He definitely oversold, hallucinated a little bit, said some (many) things i never would have said, but he didn’t lie. I have a highly diminished opinion of my talents than compared to reality and i know it. And i can’t fix it, i’ve tried.

In that meeting, there are times i wanted to interject to add some context, they very skillfully pulled me away from talking too much and qualifying everything.

We got our first sale. Big client, big company, very important sale.

Came out of that meeting daze because that’s when i internalized it - im worth no more than half the company. It was truly revelatory. I’m writing all the code, all the “hard” work is on me. I dont care.

Before that, i spent two years on my own project with zero traction because i didn’t even want to sell it, i just wanted to make it better. by the end i was gasping for air.

If you can find a good decent person who has a great network and a knack for sales (and is fine doing administrative work) by god, let go of your ego and give them room to cook and have faith in yourself to ship.

I spent the first half of my career deriding and diminishing the effort of salespeople. Never again.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#23
I wish someone would solve my problem for me. I'm working on the problem because there are no solutions that I can just go and buy. Someone else putting their blood, sweat, and tears into solving my problem, they're the ones who have to deal with being on-call for it, they're the ones who have to maintain it, would be a joy.

Why is it so important for you to be the one to solve this problem? Why is it so important for your solution to the problem to be a business? Running a business is about creating value for yourself and for your customer - if you're obsessed about the problem, be thankful that someone else is putting so much effort into solving it; if you're obsessed about the customer, then you would've shipped something to the customer a long time ago to get feedback.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#24
post #9

I wholeheartedly agree with this, when I started working on Kviklet we were a team of 3 and one of us was a lot more perfectionist than the others. It took a lot of convincing to even put our (tbf shitty) first website version up. Much more to release our repo. We lost that "co-founder" early on, but man I'm glad we released early and tried to sell. It didn't work and we found no buyers but imagine we still were work…

> Pull Request-like Review/Approval flow for database queries Terrible description IMO. a query should not need approval. Should use mutation or edit or update or modification. Even if query is technically correct it just sounds wrong and confusing.

I'm not quite sure what you mean. Maybe statement instead of query would be more accurate but I think people get the gist of it just fine.

Also, I disagree a manual query like: "select * from credit_cards;" should probably go through an approval flow if you have a table like that in your prod env.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#26

> Even though they were working on it for the past few years it's still slow, buggy, and super unpolished, it doesn't matter, because they shipped. > Their mobile app is terrible and it needs 10 seconds to sync. It doesn't matter, they shipped. And I'm looking forward to every single update they release. > Their backlog of things to do is huge, but it doesn't matter, they ship every single week, and the app is growin…

Yeah I so agree. Specially post the AI boom, there's just this intrinsic itch I see of taking a product that queries chatGPT and slaps an AI label on it to make it a product. (I'm look at you Rabbit R1).

I do understand that it does foster some air of competition and hence there's a the capitalistic push of doing better than the other person. But then, a lot of sub standard software leaks through which shifts the whole benchmark for acceptable user experience.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#27
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean handling sales + marketing + accounting and everything else required to run a company is worth 50% (maybe more). But of course while you were probably competent enough to "code it up", odds are he wasn't competent to "run the company".

i’ve recently had a revelatory experience with my cofounder, who is focused entirely on sales. we were pitching our product/services to the company execs- and he just owned the room. He definitely oversold, hallucinated a little bit, said some (many) things i never would have said, but he didn’t lie. I have a highly diminished opinion of my talents than compared to reality and i know it. And i can’t fix it, i’ve trie…

When you watch a great salesperson in action it’s like magic. It’s like watching a chess player find moves you couldn’t have found in a million years.

They chose the right words that converted to motions of neurons in your counterparty that caused action by them to give you money. Crazy.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#29
post #19

There's massive caveat with all of these "and then the story ends because we didn't just ship it :(" stories: sometimes the value of the "app" you're working on is in the technical details that cannot really be "hastened" and you can't "just ship it". Also, and this is something a lot of the managerial class people don't want to hear: Your job as a sw engineer/architect is to resist the "just ship it" pressure from t…

This entire comment reads as someone who has a purely adversarial relationship with their coworkers with little trust. Sounds exhausting!

Seeing you‘re a CTO, I‘m a bit concerned for your staff (if any) if your first reflex is blaming the developer for not trusting their boss.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#30

There's massive caveat with all of these "and then the story ends because we didn't just ship it :(" stories: sometimes the value of the "app" you're working on is in the technical details that cannot really be "hastened" and you can't "just ship it". Also, and this is something a lot of the managerial class people don't want to hear: Your job as a sw engineer/architect is to resist the "just ship it" pressure from t…

> Your job as a sw engineer/architect is to resist the "just ship it" pressure from the management as much as possible.

Wow. That reminds me of what the guy who was fired said.

I’ll never understand him. He lives in a house that’s below sea level, with one kid and one wife, and it gets flooded every 4 years. He was raised 30% during Covid, job was quite comfortable, he was competent for it, then stopped pulling his weight. Wouldn’t it be easier to keep pulling weight and try to build something that works, rather than deploying energy for union tactics, and then live in a twice-more expensive above-sea-level house?

Yes it would. Sometimes people get stuck in a victimization loop.

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