Not Releasing Late on Fridays, a Matter of Courtesy

Post from September 24, 2021, filed under Web Development (feed).

Why don’t we, in engineering departments, prefer not to release late on Fridays—or late on others days?

Occasionally, developers and stakeholders believe that’s because of a lack of confidence in our code and our systems.

The true reason is not that: Not releasing late is a matter of courtesy.

The assumption is that things can always go wrong.

The motivation is to respect our teams and ourselves, and not to risk our teams’ and our own work/life balance unnecessarily—a risk with particularly bad consequences on a Friday, when everyone has made plans or is in need of well-deserved rest.

That’s really all. Late releases can still happen if we consciously weigh the different factors: How important and urgent are the changes, how complex are the changes, how confident are we that the changes will work, how confident are we that we ourselves could fix issues, should they arise, who could otherwise help out, how quickly, how understanding would peers and managers be, how ready are we to take responsibility, &c.

But that must be a conscious decision, looking less at code and systems, but at—people.

That’s why we don’t release late on Fridays, or late on other days.

Thanks Chris Smith for the inspiration for this post.

About Me

I’m Jens, and I’m an engineering lead and author. I’ve worked as a technical lead for Google, I’m close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for O’Reilly. I love trying things, sometimes including philosophy, art, and adventure. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.

If you have a question or suggestion about what I write, please leave a comment (if available) or a message. Thank you!