The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020) • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by Earw0rm » Thu, Jul 04, 2024, 12:39 PM UTC

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's more contextual than that.

In some cases, ship vs not ship, profit vs not profit, is the difference between a company thriving and failing to thrive.

In others, there are second- or third-order effects that render marginal profitability kind of irrelevant to the trajectory. This usually applies to either very large / institutional orgs, or situations where the business is leveraged by investors (VC or PE) such that the kind of honest profit earned by shipping an update or a new product won't meaningfully impact on the company's fate. In those situations, doing good engineering and cleaning up tech debt might make more difference to yours and your colleagues' lives, and maybe even your customers', than shipping.

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

#192

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 04, 2024, 12:44 PM UTC

vasco wrote: post #92

manmal wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#193

Post by another2another » Thu, Jul 04, 2024, 12:46 PM UTC

dclowd9901 wrote: post #95

vouwfietsman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 perfection…

Ask them to write the tests that will trigger the failure condition - i.e. make them prove that it's a possible thing that can easily occur.

If it is, then at least you have a simple test case to work with so they've done a chunk of the work for you. If it's not, then they'll spend ages trying to craft a test case for a scenario that's extremely unlikely.

People very often leave you alone when challenged to put in the work to prove their point.

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

#194

Post by pdimitar » Thu, Jul 04, 2024, 1:06 PM UTC

jve wrote: post #138

fabioborellini wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that depends on the job market you're working on. In some countries salaries are more affected by personal performance than in others. My first job as a developer made me work around the clock, day and night, for a below average (nationwide compared) salary. And I got yelled at. Since I didn't have enough work experience, my applications weren't responded to. There were no ways to improve conditions without cha…

> So, why should they give everything and get nothing back? How is that fair? Ofcourse it is fair. How can you say you get nothing back? They pay you salary you agreed on when signed contract. > My first job as a developer made me work around the clock Bad employer. Maybe doesn't obey the contract on their side and doesn't pay for overtime. Tough one until you level up your experience for sure. But I'd expect salary…

> You will be rewarded one day for being a honest and productive worker.

22.5 years later I can confidently say you are living in a comfortable bubble and have no idea what do most programmers go through every day.

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

#195

Post by Elinvynia » Thu, Jul 04, 2024, 1:36 PM UTC

portaouflop wrote: post #107

fabioborellini wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Salespe…

My experience working in this industry is very different and devs do get recognition and sometimes bonuses (if certain goals are hit). Devs are paid a premium, have generally much more relaxed work schedules than managers or any customer facing role. If you screw over your health working in a toxic environment that’s on you IMO - as tech worker you probably have more opportunities to improve your working conditions t…

Make the company 100 millions and you are lucky to see more than 10k of it.

If you believe otherwise I would question your real life experience.

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

#196

Post by tstrimple » Thu, Jul 04, 2024, 1:42 PM UTC

edg5000 wrote: post #48

I found that becoming an actual user of your own system changes the perspective entirely. I had this thing that I was making for myself, and it was not ready, not usable at all, or so I thought. After giving up on the project I decided to try and actually started using it as if I was a user. I realised that as users, we are used to countless minor issues, and we automatically find ways around that. When you are the c…

I think this is why ship it and iterate fast is often the best path. There will be deal breaking bugs in any software project. If your accounting package doesn’t account correctly, you probably shouldn’t just ship it. But if one of the reports displays twice for some reason, users can probably deal with it until the next iteration as long as that next iteration isn’t months to years away. But the reality is you wont even find what most of the “bugs” your users will encounter until it’s out in the wild with real users. And unless you ship it, you’ll not get to work on the bugs your users are actually impacted by.

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

#197

Post by achenet » Thu, Jul 04, 2024, 2:27 PM UTC

b112 wrote: post #190

piva00 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And minimalist work ethic is a poor one, regardless of hand wavy, trumped up, rationalizations. That's a very protestant work ethic worldview. Doing what is expected from what you're being paid in the best way possible is not a poor work ethic, it's a pretty rational one. The other side of it where one always strive to do more, to go above and beyond what you're being compensated for, and so forth can also be a qui…

Trying to bring religion into this is beyond amusing. I guess the Japanese are all protestants? Hardly. And rationalizing poor behaviour by saying it's rational is another good one. Lastly, you're trying to shift the discussion by claiming "best way possible" as opposed to others saying "do the bare minimum". These are very often not the same. The problem is, people don't "get it". There are people in this thread pro…

That's actually a very interesting point of view.

It's also interesting that you bring the Japanese into this. While they certainly to care a lot about producing high quality work, they also have one of the world's highest suicide rates.

I understand taking pride in what you build.

However:

1) it's important to not let that destroy the rest of your life

2) it's a lot easier to take pride in what you build when you're working on something you own[0]. As I believe I alluded to in other comments on this thread, and was kind of insinuating with the original comment that you replied to, deciding that extra effort spent on a dysfunctional enterprise project micro-managed by 3 competing orgs who spend their time changing requirements in order to win minor political victories (yes, this is an extreme example, please bear with me) is better spent on a personal open-source project, or even building something like a sport club or happy family seems to be the logical course of action when you care about what you build.

Which isn't to say don't do the best you can at work - ship the code they ask you to ship, write it well, add unit tests, all that jazz. But then once that's done, you can either focus on being the best employee for Megacorp, which is likely to be soul-crushing, because you'll have extremely little reward for your effort, or you can be the best employee of You, LLC, where you natural human desire to make something beautiful can express itself in a way that is much more rewarding for you, both financially and emotionally.

[0] https://paulgraham.com/own.html

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

#198

Post by throwaway84751 » Thu, Jul 04, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

fabioborellini wrote: post #185

throwaway84751 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like a toxic workplace, but you should do yourself a big favor and try to put that behind you. If you keep that mindset in your new job, your perspective will be negative and you risk burning out. If you work at a traditional workplace, think of yourself as a professional. Do the best work you can during business hours, without ruining your health. The company is paying you to make decisions that are best f…

I'm sorry to say but I'm very much burned out already. It all went well for a while after switching jobs, but the lockdowns and remote work ruined what was left of my life. My friends noted that they don't miss me, my company switched to completely remote etc. I can now only sleep and work, I can't even think of anything else anymore. I did put that behind me after switching jobs. My initial outlook and attitude on p…

It sounds like you have ended up in a bad situation. There's no real suggestion I can provide for how you can improve your situation, other than to try to find a way to disconnect. (Meetups, walking, museums, hobbies).

Maybe that means talking to a professional therapist to find out how you can handle the situation. They get paid to help you, and there is no shame in that

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

#199

Post by worthless-trash » Thu, Jul 04, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

zogrodea wrote: post #68

worthless-trash wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say if you take hacker news advice about what works, you're a bit of a fool. HN readers are in the pool of people who would be your competition.

In my case, I was talking about technical things like data structures and IMGUI/RMGUI, which I don't think anyone feels motivated to trick others about. :)

Ah, i see, apologies I misread the concept.

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

#200

Post by piva00 » Thu, Jul 04, 2024, 2:42 PM UTC

b112 wrote: post #190

piva00 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And minimalist work ethic is a poor one, regardless of hand wavy, trumped up, rationalizations. That's a very protestant work ethic worldview. Doing what is expected from what you're being paid in the best way possible is not a poor work ethic, it's a pretty rational one. The other side of it where one always strive to do more, to go above and beyond what you're being compensated for, and so forth can also be a qui…

Trying to bring religion into this is beyond amusing. I guess the Japanese are all protestants? Hardly. And rationalizing poor behaviour by saying it's rational is another good one. Lastly, you're trying to shift the discussion by claiming "best way possible" as opposed to others saying "do the bare minimum". These are very often not the same. The problem is, people don't "get it". There are people in this thread pro…

It's not beyond amusing, the protestant work ethic is the tradition from where a lot of nations have derived their work ethic from. Just like the Japanese derived their work ethic from their traditions, bringing it up is just clearing the way that yes, it's a religion-originated way of thinking about work, there's nothing wrong about that and you getting hung up on it is what's truly beyond amusing.

> Lastly, you're trying to shift the discussion by claiming "best way possible" as opposed to others saying "do the bare minimum". These are very often not the same.

Because the discussion gets murky exactly at this point. Doing the bare minimum means not going out of the way to solve issues for others, like Americans working outside of their working hours and bosses expecting that should be done. I have many work colleagues in the USA who are beyond annoying by trying to prove themselves by working outside of what they are paid for, with the thought they should go "above and beyond" instilled in their minds. It just creates issues for other cultures who do not prize themselves in sacrificing their lives for the job.

The other side of it is doing the best work you are willing to do, with the limitations you currently have (skill, health [physical or mental], time, etc.), that's what I call "bare minimum" for myself. I won't be wasting my time trying to come up with new products, new paths of generating revenue, simply because I'm not paid for that, when I am in that spot I definitely offer the best help I can but I won't be fighting political infights, depriving myself of a life to work another 2h/day to setup a new project for some higher ups, and so on.

> I am advocating that yes, do the best you can do. Take joy, deep internal joy in doing your job correctly, because of what you build. This indeed does not mean doing the bare minimum, by some broken, made up rationalized excuse.

You don't need to take deep internal joy of doing your job correctly, at all, one just need to have a work ethic that doing your job correctly is the right thing to do, it's what I'm being paid for, and that's the bare minimum. If that means I can slack off a little bit because I'm aware I can deliver what's expected so be it.

Perhaps we are talking past each other here because I do not disagree mostly with you, I probably just disagree with your approach to it (and hence what I called a derivative of the protestant work ethic).

> As I said, a good work ethic is not a protestant thing, it is a human thing.

Not necessarily, if your work is bullshit and you are not paid enough for it without much chance to do something else because of life's circumstances there's absolutely no inner motivation to have good work ethic.

> We can expand this to everything. What are you being compensated for? Are your ethics formed around what's profitable?! Madness!

Much the opposite, what's profitable is usually the least of my concerns ethically-wise, I would even say it is most times detrimental to ethical behaviour.