I think that this blog post is hiding the fact that a team of engineers had their evening robbed from them, at no fault of their own, for something that was ultimately kind of trivial. There are numerous reasons why it's a bad idea to make engineers burn the midnight oil to rush the finishing of a product -- the first among them being Hofstader's law. If your team actually needed an additional day of work, and you didn't already have your product in the bag, you had no good reason to be courting the press in the first place. Mistakes happen in the news cycle. This is usually why you do an unadvertised soft launch shortly before a press release's publication date. This was a lack of due diligence, and not on the part of the engineering staff.

I think that there's this misconception in the startup world that the shipping of a stable product and its actual introduction in the market are efforts that are in parallel, in real time. In actuality, it makes a lot more sense to implement a lag of roughly one week between finishing a stable product and putting it out to the public. Many shops refer to this as "staging" or "vetting a release candidate". This doesn't seem like something that the folks at Cue considered before diving head-first into a hurried hackathon.

The last thing a responsible organization should do is punish the people responsible for making a stable and useful product by making them rush the last 10% of their efforts. I don't doubt that this kind of hurried time to market will result in another all-nighter down the road. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that after the 20th time hearing "Y Sin Embargo", the team was fatigued, annoyed, and ready to take shortcuts. So there, we have technical debt that could have been avoided if everyone just agreed to stick to their guns with the original release date. But most likely, the best solution would have been a soft launch preceding the any publication by at least a couple of days.

Let's be honest: if the immediate traffic from a little pre-arranged press is what makes or breaks your product, you're doing it wrong. As an engineer, if I see you have to put your entire organization into crisis mode over something like this, then I'm going to start taking recruiter calls more seriously.