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Weird take. Since when does “pushing code” equal “releasing to production”?

FWIW, I love this mentality for healthy, work/life-balanced teams. It works if you structure around it. I often get the itch during the weekend to do a little work, so I go for it, because I can balance my days as I see fit. Ride the wave of creativity when it arrives, go do something else — like taking a hike, or running errands — when you can’t get shit done.



I assumed the GP was just concerned about somebody pushing code to a shared trunk branch that happened to break a build. Though as it happens I do know of some shops that literally do have a CI/CD pipeline that's so automated such a push would result in a production update (of course such a set-up wouldn't even allow a push if it did break the build, or cause any of the steps in the pipeline to fail). But yes, I'd normally interpret "pushing code" as pushing to your own feature branch, in which case I'd wonder "is it really so unusual for devs to do this out of hours"? I've certainly done it on weekends before, but with no expectation that anyone would review/merge the changes until normal business hours.


> pushing code to a shared trunk branch that happened to break a build

You revert that commit, then. It's broken. A revert shouldn't be take as some mark of failure or personal offense, it's just that your commit breaks the build, so it's getting removed from `main` until such a time as it doesn't do that. It happens to us all, from time to time. Those reverts almost always carry what at any profession organization should be an implied "feel free to bring this in a PR again, with fixes".

(And ideally, a bit of introspection as to "why didn't CI catch the failure when it was still on a branch?")


"You revert that commit, then. It's broken."

Personally I don't see why it's likely to cause major issues to allow people to merge PRs outside of business hours either, but depending on your team workflow and build pipeline (which may not be fully automated for any number of reason) it's not that hard to imagine cases where it's preferable to ensure all pushes to trunk occur during business hours (e.g. for cost saving reasons maybe you don't keep particular services running 24x7 that are needed to allow your integration test suite to run fully).


> e.g. for cost saving reasons maybe you don't keep particular services running 24x7 that are needed to allow your integration test suite to run fully

We did this at an employ of mine. They were on-demand, and spun up when you committed.

I was mostly responding to what appeared to be the fear of "but what if someone broke main off hours!"


It’s blatantly obvious that the quote from the article isn’t talking about pushing to #main and potentially breaking production during the weekend. If a team practices true CI/CD, they surely have excellent safeguards and 1-click (if not automated) rollbacks in place.

I imagine the only people who would think otherwise have some pretty dysfunctional repo setups and/or policies.


I sadly suspect the number of development teams with dysfunctional repo setups/policies somewhat outnumbers those with best practice configurations! Actually I can't say I've ever worked anywhere that would truly have qualified for the latter category.


Is that with the understanding that your employer is more amenable to you taking time off during the weekdays if you do happen to spend time working on the weekends? Because many employers would want to have it both ways and not allow you to take time off the weekday just because you worked during the weekend.


Yes, everyone at my $WORKPLACE is free to adjust their work schedule to whatever best suits them; we don't care about ass-in-seat or hours of work, we care about output and impact.

This isn't just lip-service, either. May be hard to believe from a US perspective, but for a Norwegian based company, it can be taken at face value. It's the best place I've worked in my 22+ years.

Minor asterisk; we do have a few hours every week where you should be present (check-ins, meetings, all-hands, etc), but it's <5h/week for most people.


No worries, it's very believable as I worked in a role like that as well. However, there were certainly issues like production-related, getting unblocked by teammates, etc that necessitated being on during much of the workday, so most people didn't work weekends on top of that either. It wasn't the US-centricity that caused this outcome but rather technical issues. I assume if your company does not have the same issues then it's much easier.


In reality, most people are working core hours, say 10am-3pm local time. Most are in UTC +/- 2 hours. I’m an outlier, remote from B.C, Canada.

It’s usually best to stick with a “normal schedule” for family/socializing reasons, anyway.

But, it’s incredibly freeing, being able to work when the mood strikes. I used to be a night-owl, often getting super creative in the evenings. I could force myself to bed, sure, but a 3-4 hour stint in the evening would regularly produced outsized returns. 8-9am+ couldn’t remotely compete, creativity-wise, so why force it? Build a culture around trust and impact, it works out a lot better than anything else I’ve seen in practice.

I rarely do late nights anymore, having transitioned to 6-7am starts, an hour or two hiking around lunch with the dogs, and a small handful of hours of wrapping up & planning for tomorrow. But that was all my choice :)




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