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I've worked at decacorns that used code freezes... Usually they were last minute "oh fuck we took down the whole website 3 days in a row now and this has cost m

I've worked at decacorns that used code freezes... Usually they were last minute "oh fuck we took down the whole website 3 days in a row now and this has cost millions of dollars" kinda reactions. The reason they had to do code freezes is because all the other practices were such dog shit. (Mostly from a product and biz perspective) Eng was usually driven with a whip to meet insane deadlines - thus the instability and bad quality and outages... I wouldn't expect any different at many of these other companies. Whether they are worth $1b or $10b or $100b rarely has any correlation with quality of eng output.

wpietri 4y ago
Indeed! Honestly, I'd expect a moderate inverse correlation between valuation and code/practice quality. I suspect that's obviously true for large, successful companies. We've all heard stories about people at stable companies with terrible dev practices, because ultimately dev practices don't matter for companies with sufficiently strong market positions. Are some of them good even though they don't have to be? Sure. But plenty aren't. But I'd also think it's true for the whatevercorns. For raising that kind of money, big public drama is vital. Look at WeWork or Theranos. Great at dramatics, great at raising money. Technical competence for them was at best irrelevant to getting the next valuation bump. If the execs favor dramatic announcements over slow-and-steady gains, I expect that will influence how promotions happen and gradually trickle down to dev practices in a lot of places.