Heard a founder say 'we don't fix bugs on Fridays' and it clicked for me

I was at a meetup in Austin last month and this guy running a SaaS with 50 employees was talking about their release schedule. He said they never push fixes on Fridays because it always led to emergency calls over the weekend. I used to think my team should just be available 24/7 for any issue. But after hearing him explain how they lost a weekend every month chasing bugs, I changed our whole deployment cycle. We now freeze code from Thursday afternoon to Monday morning. Has anyone else tried something similar to protect their team's time?

2 comments

2 Comments

umabailey18d ago

Twenty four seven availability for bug fixes? That sounds exhausting and unsustainable. Nobody should have to live on call like that.

lee73318d ago

Nah, I gotta disagree here. Some of us choose that life because we actually care about the people using what we built. If a critical bug is keeping someone from doing their job at 2am, I'd rather get a call than have them stew on it all night. It's not about being a martyr, it's about taking pride in your work. You set boundaries like rotating shifts or having an escalation system so it's not one person burning out. But writing off round the clock support as unsustainable? That's how you end up with software that breaks on weekends and nobody gives a damn.