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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I think the article does a very good job of defining the term "shipping" in the context of large organizations, where it you genuinely do need to please upper management - if you want further career advancement, in any case.

It's a bit cynical, but that doesn't mean it's not true.

If you want to ship software without worrying about upper management opinions, go work somewhere smaller.

You can still please end-users AND upper management at the same time. That's what I would aspire to do in that situation.

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> If you want to ship software without worrying about upper management opinions, go work somewhere smaller.

Really your option is to work for yourself. There is no company of any size > 1 where you don't have to worry about owner/manager/executive opinions.

Even with a company of size=1, you have to worry about customers.

but those are hopefully much closer aligned to endusers than your upper management. Unless you make some ad spyware

Or anything for corporate use where the customer is a beancounter and the user is an employee, stereotypically.

Or education, where it's possibly a politician or a government beancounter and a student.

It's much easier when 'upper management' is 3 individuals you can have a normal conversation with, than a hierarchical hivemind above you that does inexplicable things for random reasons.

People are also usually suddenly much more reasonable and cooperative when you're discussing something face to face with them and not through third parties :).

It's also like this in small companies, like the one I work for, and I think rightfully so. One of the mobile app projects I was involved in got bogged down for months due to the lead engineer's need to refine and polish the perfect UX and architecture which kept breaking features we'd already completed. This cost us a lot of money and the product didn't look or function to an end user that much different. Management had enough and pulled the guy off the project because it just wasn't getting shipped and what he was doing didn't align to their goals. After he left i was able to tie up the loose ends and ship it live within two weeks. The only way i was able to do that is I knew every component of that system, our deployment infrastructure, our support staff, the real goals of our management team, etc.

> if you want further career advancement

Job advancement rather. Career advancement is possible by making users happy and telling executives at other companies "I did that". It's a better story if you had to fight for it.

If end-users do like it upper managment notices it but it will take time, generally you iterate faster against upper managnent. Same kinda applies when end users dont like that stuff so you cannot lean too heavily to opticks game.

Yes this. Large orgs can just keep throwing mud on the wall until something sticks.

If you're a smallco you don't have that tolerance on margin of error, small fuckups directly reflect on your pnl.

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