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I would say most startups are guilty of this, though they don't attempt to formalize the measurements.

At least from a few places I've been recently, "productivity" is viewed as the number of PRs you push through. QA of any sort is viewed as a waste of time, and it's far better to just push a PR today then take an extra day sanity check your work. On top of this user facing, demo-able, code is much more important than any back-end or infra work. This means the priority is rapidly releasing 90% of the way done products/features and moving on to the next thing.

Heck if there's a small bug in the code you just shipped (and of course releases are nightly because that's how you show that you're really moving) all the better since it means you get another easy PR when someone else discovers it.



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That makes sense, given how startups (at least those VC funded) are defacto quasi-scams with a goal of creating an illusion of an unicorn, and then quickly flipping it in an IPO, and happily running away with the money. For such purpose, creating functionality that looks as if it works, but in reality is incomplete and buggy, may be just as good as the real thing. It's all about maintaing the charade until the key people can exit rich (preferably as quickly as possible).

This does align pretty well with my experience. Especially when I've seen multiple ideas that are clearly valuable to customers but not flashy enough for VCs get quickly deprioritized.

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