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

kitze.io

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

#91

Post by thekitze »

andrewstuart wrote: post #41

I've got three separate applications all "close to finished" and I've been working on them for years (along with many other things). Just as I'm getting real close to being finished enough to release - something changes - life changes - or some other thing changes - or I don't believe in the product any more - then I do believe in the product again - then blah blah blah. Always "legitimate" reasons - outcome always t…

Sorry to hear that. As someone who actually shipped a lot of things, i'm still going through the "I believe in it" and "don't believe in it" cycle almost daily. Don't let that stop you.

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

#92

Post by vasco »

manmal wrote: post #29
treve wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The person is adversarial, that is clear in their comment. There's literal adversarial quotes like "only do X if good for you, otherwise do the opposite". On the other hand you went straight to googling a random commenters job and attacked that.

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

#93

Post by thekitze »

rob74 wrote: post #89
thekitze wrote: post #69

Author here! I need to update this article. Years later, I actually got motivated by the comments on HN (whenever this gets posted). P People are always like "why don't you just ship your app?" ... so I did! I'm happy I went through with and it's way WAY better than any competitor in this category Check it out at https://benji.so (landing page is still w.i.p)

Hi! Looks great, maybe I'll give it a try... Is it named after this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benji ? I was a huge fan of him (them?) when I was about 6-8 years old! ...and sorry about expressing my frustration (and suspicion) about you not mentioning the name of your "competitor"! I guess now that you have released your own app, the chances of you mentioning it are even smaller (if it's still around at all)?

It's named after my dog Benji haha. Yes you're right, I'm not gonna mention any competitors, especially on a viral HN article :) There's a chance I might make a /comparison page in the future though.

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

#94

Post by katzenversteher »

vouwfietsman wrote: post #80
Culonavirus wrote: post #14

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…

> It's worth repeating: Unless you have a stake in the company, it is NOT your job to make sure the company is the most profitable it can be. Your job is to create great software This is a terrible take, and one I generally see as a signal of lack of seniority in a software dev. It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit. The thing is though, that p…

>> Your job is to create great software

>It really isn't, your job is to make a great product. Making a great product often, but not always, requires great software.

I believe that depends on the role you have. If you're a software engineer I think you should try to create great software. If you're responsible for the product you can decide it might be better for the product to ship earlier or with the current state of software but I think you should not keep your software engineers from trying to make the software great. You can try to shift their focus on a different (software) topic that you think is more important if you don't like what they are currently trying to improve.

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

#95

Post by dclowd9901 »

vouwfietsman wrote: post #80
Culonavirus wrote: post #14

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…

> It's worth repeating: Unless you have a stake in the company, it is NOT your job to make sure the company is the most profitable it can be. Your job is to create great software This is a terrible take, and one I generally see as a signal of lack of seniority in a software dev. It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit. The thing is though, that p…

I 100% agree with you. I’m in a situation at the moment when I’m nearly constantly having to check myself against other devs. I don’t do hacky work and nothing I do isn’t extensible or easily refactorable. But I constantly get feedback from another dev on my team wanting me to polish out a change to perfection against every feasible possibility. I try to employ YAGNI reasoning to them, but they just have a perfectionist standard.

Look: job 1 is making safe software, job 2 is making money and job 3 is perfecting the architecture.

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

#96

Post by vasco »

zogrodea wrote: post #34
treve wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It reminded me of that quote wrongly attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto (who created Mario and Zelda and other classic games). "A rushed game is bad forever, but a delayed one may eventually be good." Of course it may not apply to software today (except to the extent first impressions count) because modern software tends to be continuously maintained (and modern games often are too, to a much lesser degree, with post-rel…

Games were not updatable at the time of the quote, which makes an incredibly huge difference from products that can be regularly updated to fix issues.

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

#97

Post by fabioborellini »

vouwfietsman wrote: post #80
Culonavirus wrote: post #14

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…

> It's worth repeating: Unless you have a stake in the company, it is NOT your job to make sure the company is the most profitable it can be. Your job is to create great software This is a terrible take, and one I generally see as a signal of lack of seniority in a software dev. It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit. The thing is though, that p…

> This is a terrible take, and one I generally see as a signal of lack of seniority in a software dev. It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit.

Developers aren't compensated for any extraordinary achievement, though. Unless they own a notable share of the company. So, why should they give everything and get nothing back? How is that fair?

Salespeople and managers usually consider technical guys pariah. They can always be outsourced or otherwise replaced, and they can be blamed, for example for failing to meet impossible targets. If there's success, it always is a manager's achievement.

Developers also get roughly the same pay for both working minimum and for screwing their lives and healths on powerpoint-driven death marches. The compensation for extraordinary success goes to shareholders, and maybe managers or even salespeople.

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

#98

Post by thekitze »

solatic wrote: post #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 f…

author here: for me it was important because after a while the app I was using was stale and wasn't shipping updates anymore. Also, as I was learning more about productivity, I reached the limits of the app. I wanted more features and I was coming up with tons of ideas that I could implement into my app, and other devs wouldn't care about implementing these ideas. I wanted control. So I finally shipped Benji (https://benji.so)

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

#99

Post by starfallg »

vouwfietsman wrote: post #80
Culonavirus wrote: post #14

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…

> It's worth repeating: Unless you have a stake in the company, it is NOT your job to make sure the company is the most profitable it can be. Your job is to create great software This is a terrible take, and one I generally see as a signal of lack of seniority in a software dev. It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit. The thing is though, that p…

>It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit.

To generalise this, it's everyone's job to create value. This may or may not result in profit, but ultimately aligns with the goals of the organisation.

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

#100

Post by zogrodea »

StopHammoTime wrote: post #31

It's unfair he didn't include the name of the app in the article (or it's unfair that I can't see properly, if he did). I want to see what this problem was he was trying to solve!

The author posted a comment here about that, and that this article is about https://benji.so/ . Sounds like HN comments were persuasive in releasing the app that triggered the article.

Comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40872817

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