This is what I encourage my staff to do. We have a company-wide bagel breakfast in the morning, and then no more meetings. We also skip our daily “async slack stand-up” on Fridays. My expectation for the day is that you prioritize personal development, long-term planning, or just “deck clearing” if you’ve had a long week or desire something less mentally demanding for the day. Obviously, thing happen that can interfere with the ideal, but it’s pretty rare and, when it happens, I make it a point to figure out if there’s a way to avoid it going forward.
What we don’t do, is “no deploy Fridays”. We deploy all the time, and maybe somebody wants to do some minor bug or light UI cleanup. I’m certainly not going to stop them. Requiring an “off-day” for deployments is a major red flag for me.
Except when the Friday deployment breaks production and one of your employees needs to fix the issue on Saturday instead of relaxing with their family.
You seem to be getting down voted but this is important. Unless the company is paying staff to be available and on call over the weekend people have lives to be getting on with and wouldn’t be able to respond to an issue as quickly than during the week.
I understand this isn't a perfect world and problems happen but we also shouldn't live in constant fear that a deployment will break production. There should be processes in place that prevent broken code from even getting to the point where it's merged into master.
The biggest extreme that I've faced was a team where there was a 36 hour window between Wednesday and Thursday where deployments to production were allowed and it was a nightmare getting any code out especially with most deployments involving 10-20 new commits so if something did break we had to rollback a lot and rack our heads to figure out what went wrong.
I agree. Employers, teams, and employees need to have clear expectations and communication around availability, including how that is related to compensation, but also how it relates to the design of the systems themselves, the planning that goes into rollouts, and a culture of quality and accountability.
Also, sites "go down" for more reasons than deployments, and often, a deployment is one of the fastest or only ways to fix or work around the issue.
What we don’t do, is “no deploy Fridays”. We deploy all the time, and maybe somebody wants to do some minor bug or light UI cleanup. I’m certainly not going to stop them. Requiring an “off-day” for deployments is a major red flag for me.