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Comment by notenoughbeans | Hacker News Reader

Still a work in progress. I'm planning on sharing it once it's more ready.

Don't pay attention to the other "just ship it" comments, it'll be ready when it's ready. Too many people like to walk out that trite phrase when they have no knowledge on what you're doing or where you're at yet want to seem like they know something you don't. It's annoying.

First, at least in regards to my comment -- that's entirely reductionist. Second, I commented because it's one of the hardest things, in my opinion as an engineer myself, to overcome. You're interpretation of people wanting to seem like someone knows something they don't is at best uncharitable. My comment comes from a place of hopefully being helpful and giving someone a nudge for a thing that is definitely uncomfortable (showing your baby to the world) and showing some sense of camaraderie that a lot of us have been there.

Hey, I appreciate both of your advice. I have some usable features that work great on my dev environment, so now I'm mostly working on getting things reliably working in the cloud.

It might seem helpful but it's not. Obviously this is my opinion but it's disrespectful to the engineer doing the work to essentially shame them into releasing something that they have a vision for early.

Who knows what shape it's in, who knows if it's bugged? Releasing something to just get it out there and it's so bugged, the users run away.

I understand why you are saying what you are saying but maybe try to look at it from a different perspective because whenever someone says that to me, it's demeaning. I (we) know what we're doing and perfectly capable of judging when something is "done".

Edit: I'll make a quick edit because the below sounded too aggressive to me after reading it again like two minutes later. Your point that not everyone takes unsolicited advice well because it feels like it undermines their own skill and knowledge is noted and I have run into people who think similarly to you, but I think it's helpful more than not to a wider group of people and it helped me so I will consider the thought in a given situation but I will likely continue to give the advice.

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Right which is why I qualified it with "If you have a small set of useable features". Honestly, feeling shamed is your hang up, same with feeling demeaned. I've had that said to me and it motivated me and was helpful, because I had been holding back.

I guess we'll agree to disagree because I don't know you and I don't want to like armchair psychology here. But, I'm certainly not going to tiptoe around every word though just because someone somewhere may be offended, especially in this case where I believe most people would find it helpful.

I'm also not directly targeting you, my comment was to the OP. There was another comment that said very similar things that you alluded to, which kind of helps prove my point that this advice is parroted everywhere without any consideration for the developer themselves and their unique situation.

> "perfectly capable of judging when something is "done""

The actual statistics don't bear this out. Many projects fail because they never get started or take far too long. It's so incredibly common that every business 101 includes the saying that "perfect is the enemy of good", and even HN states that product velocity and iteration is directly related to startup success.

Also it's rather extreme to call this demeaning. Perhaps you should look at it from a different perspective of it being a fair question based on massive collective experience and encouragement to find success.

I qualified this as my opinion while also considering the other (potentially well-meaning) side. Unsolicited advice may be well-intentioned...or not, especially when it's a project you've been working on that means a lot.

As they say in the start up world "Ship It!"

I've seen lots of advice that says people ship too late. I'm not sure if that's the case here, but something to consider.

In my experience that's a trap, if you have a small set of useable features, release it now and get feedback from real people.

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