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Comment by sunir | Hacker News Reader

I would like to share the relevant part of my comment here as well.

I want to caution that it is still better to update on Tuesday morning in case the update fails. Updating before or on the weekend can lead to your releases spiraling out of control with no staff monitoring or just a skeleton crew.

It is better to have your whole team available and awake. I also worry that you might forment resentment by making everyone work every release weekend. Releases will likely become more infrequent, and lead to bigger changes and bigger failures.

Please consider that Balsamiq did recover. May be harder to do so on Saturday.

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In our B2B environment we pretty much have to do weekends. Our clients have little system usage during this time and I am more secure knowing we have more time to recover.

I will tell you, though, that weekend updates are planned ahead of time and schedules adjusted to ensure no one is caught off guard.

I agree. you can get around the skeleton crew issue by asking everyone to be at hand, nearby in case shit hits the fan. no biggie if all take turns manning the update.

If you're releasing frequently, which you probably want to be, then that's a lot of weekends you've just ruined.

I once worked in a company that planned releases for late Friday afternoon. Not only were the vast majority of our (primarily B2B) customers more concerned with their weekends, but if things did go wrong, we could revert to our old version and spend Friday evening debugging the failure/pushing the release again.

Sounds like a pretty crappy thing for morale, hey? Thing is, it wasn't - we used to turn the Friday push into a bit of a party and when we had to stay Friday evenings, we'd take the next Friday off. All in all, some of the best experiences I have ever had in technology were at those Friday afternoon push parties (or alternatively, the Friday evening 'can we please fix this and go home' sessions)...

If you release on a weekend, you're right: you might lead your employees to resent you.

However, if you don't release on a weekend, you might not even have any employees that can resent you if things go bad consistently.

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