Shipping is capturing value

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2024-11-26 06:30:02

This great essay from Sean Goedecke went viral two weeks ago, drawing fury and fervor alike for a Moral Mazes-esque analysis of how engineers at large companies should think about shipping:

Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped.

This essay reminded me of Zach Holman's on 'Double Shipping' from 2018, in which he argues the same point — shipping is not an actual concrete event so much as a social construct by which we proselytize:

One of the things we did all the time at early GitHub was a two-step ship: basically, ship a big launch, but days or weeks afterwards, ship a smaller, add-on feature. In the second launch post, you can refer back to the initial bigger post and you get twice the bang for the buck.

It's very easy — and comfortable! — to be cynical about this kind of stuff. Certainly there are organizations notorious for prioritizing shipping in a pluperfect sense — Google, for instance, and their promo-doc-driven culture. Certainly there are organizations that wither and die because their engineering culture is insular and insufficiently collaborative. Certainly there are great engineers who build great things and are washed out of the company because they "didn't politic enough". Running big technical organizations is an unsolved problem; there are few strictly correct answers.