Overheard a junior dev say 'just push it live and fix it later' and it hit me hard

I was grabbing coffee at a coworking space in Portland last Tuesday and heard a kid tell his friend that exact line. Dude had zero clue how much time we used to spend catching edge cases before launch back in 2009. How do you handle clients who push for that kind of rushed workflow?

2 comments

2 Comments

luna_wells5718h agoMost Upvoted

oh man, "push it live and fix it later" is basically my career soundtrack from 2014-2016 and my sleep schedule still hasn't recovered from that phase. i once pushed a typo to production that made our entire checkout button say "buy now and pray" for three hours before anyone noticed. the real trick with clients who want that rush is to ask them if they want their name on the blame when the credit card data leaks, since nothing slows down a sprint like liability talk. what's your go-to line when someone says "we'll catch bugs in QA" like QA is some magic bug vacuum?

michaelcoleman16h ago

I used to be on the other side thinking QA could catch everything until we shipped a landing page with an embedded cat gif instead of our actual hero image and nobody caught it for two full days. Now when someone says that line I just ask them what their personal cutoff is for "acceptable" bugs going to production, because suddenly nobody wants to put a number on it. It changed my whole view once I realized QA is just another set of eyes, not some safety net that can fix rushed decisions.