Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nrmitchi 1429 days ago
> A report from software platform LaunchDarkly revealed that nearly 7 in 10 developers (67%) have left a job due to pressure around minimizing deployment errors or know someone who has.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the statement, but this is a biased-as-hell source for this statement given that LaunchDarkly's product is feature-flag-management (to minimize deployment errors).

4 comments

The question from LaunchDarkly, btw, was as follows (asked to "500 software developers across a range of industries and job titles"):

> Have you or someone you worked with ever left a job due to pressures from over minimizing mistakes (i.e. avoiding rollbacks or failed deployments)?[0]

...Which I also would not be comfortable summarizing as "minimizing deployment errors"

[0] https://resources.launchdarkly.com/ebooks/release-assurance-...

In any reasonable setting this would be considered priming the respondent for a particular answer and should definitely not be trusted as an unbiased response.
Not far off from handing packs of free cigarettes to medical conference attendees, having an exit poll ask them which brand of cigarettes they have in their pocket, and using the results in marketing like ”69% of doctors smoke Narcoholic brand cigarettes!”
What does "over minimising mistakes" mean? I would expect that the target for 'mistakes', especially serious ones' is zero (while accepting that it may be asymptotic).
I think one they’re talking about 3 month long QA cycles for every deployment.
oh that is so sneaky and that would never fly in a scientific study.
It also bends credulity. It suggests 7 of 10 developers work for companies (or know someone who has) that fail to prevent onslaughts of their developers from leaving over deployment problems.
The "know someone how has" clause seems like it muddies the apparent purpose of the question (to gauge how common this is). 15/15 developers on my team either are me or know someone who is me, therefore being me is extremely common? There could be a small handful of people bouncing around from company to company for this reason and a large number of people at those companies would be able to answer "yes."
That seems pretty realistic. Do 7 in 10 of us know employers with headache creating deployment practices? Probably.
60% of the time, it works every time.
LaunchDarkly had a major outage in the past month so maybe they are feeling the pressure.