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Comment by goalieca | Hacker News Reader

How many of us are coding projects that will never ship!?

Édit: bonus. How many have never shipped anything during their career?

Agree with this! When I worked at Disney I was blown away to meet very talented people who had been their for seven years and never worked on a game that was released to the public.

But there is a utility in this. We work on software, in which a small team can create a thing that has utility for millions of people for years. With that potential upside, it makes sense to spend the resources on a project even when the odds are less than 50/50 that you will meet the success criteria.

Another bonus: how many have shipped a project that remain unused?

It's not uncommon that we get responses back from people we email about support renewals after the first year that indicate the software was never installed, and everyone who knew about it is no longer at the company.

I assume people must be buying stuff to use up excess budget at the end of fiscal years.

God, that's depressing.

At my first startup, we sold exactly one license of our software. A famous news channel bought it for $120,000, the VP responsible for the purchase left for a new job a few months later, and our product was never installed nor used.

Wow, this hits close to home. I have shipped exactly 1 feature that has helped anyone, and it's only helped a few 10s of thousands of people. And the product which uses the feature is probably going to shut down soon.

Yeah, solidly 80-90% of my time working has never really led to anything like enough benefit to anyone to justify it. Much of it's never benefitted anyone at all. There's a ton of stupid money in software right now. Enough to waste tons of our time on 9 things that don't work for the 1 that does.

Doesn't make it feel good to be a part of such an impersonal and abstract process, especially when software's already kinda impersonal and abstract on the best days.

Speaking as a dev of 8 years who has shipped a fair amount, that... sounds like a cool accomplishment. My work has been integral to the professional lives of like, 40 people - extremely small scale applications for scientific endeavors, mostly. I'm pretty proud of it. I'd be really proud of building something that helped ~20k people.

If it makes you feel better this feature was an enhancement to an in-app messaging system. So like, they could have just used email.

10s of thousands is great, and much more than many developers will experience. A lot of developers (outside of tech companies especially) create software for "internal" or corporate use, often by one division. The various projects I supervise/work on have between 10 and 100 users. The total user count for all my projects together is less than 1000.

On the other hand, there's a good segment of those users who basically "live" (w.r.t work) in the software; every time I walk by the customer users area I see it front and center on their screens, which is a good feeling.

My job is to shut down deprecated products, does that count? (It is a lot harder than it sounds)

If you'd be willing to share, I'd love to read some high level bullets about your work.

Seconded, I'd love to read a write-up on what that job is like.

I had a CEO once tell us the story of previous work in the pet food industry. They had a food product that had low sales and they wanted to discontinue the product. He did what seemed obvious and raised the price. Sales went up. Customer surveys indicated they thought it was a premium product.

The very first anecdote (IIRC) in Cialdini's Influence is about exactly that effect. Seems to happen most when people don't have a good way to evaluate product quality (which is most of the time, really—consumers with the time and information access to be well-informed about more than a tiny fraction of what they buy is a first-week-of-Econ-101 fiction, like physics' "spherical pig" but even less connected to reality)

I would think the obvious thing is to stop shipping the product, isn't it?

Bonus+: or will ship projects that are pointless.

I'm not sure that's the metric that motivates me: better to work heroically on an ambitious project which ultimately fails than to add tiny features to something popular-but-mediocre.

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