If you succeed you will fail
As an engineer, I&#x27;ve never personally understood the desire to release anyway, even when a system has known critical deficiencies like this one. Sure, perfect is the enemy of good, but I&#x27;d also argue that inoperable is the enemy of good - it only serves to erode trust in your product, if your team chose to release an unusable product.<p>Some years ago, I worked on a system not quite as bad as what the author described, but close. We released a new product with a known, quite bad security vulnerability (I&#x27;d made sure our product team was _extremely_ aware of this), as well as no monitoring to speak of. The deadline had been communicated for around one year, but nobody had ever really discussed the significance of the date, other than it was what we were all death-marching to, and we needed to deliver.<p>What did that date turn out to be? The head of product management&#x27;s birthday, which was revealed to the rest of the company on the highly-celebrated the launch date. People were just kissing ass. I left several months later.<p>It feels unconscionable to me that a company could have launched an incomplete, insecure, customer-facing product just to give a birthday gift to a leader, but I suspect this sort of thing is common.