Shipping at a Large Company Where Plans Are Measured in Centuries

At my last enterprise gig, the RFC for adding a button had more reviewers than the entire engineering team at most startups. By the time it shipped, the framework it was built on had been deprecated twice

In a startup, you measure progress with story points. In an enterprise, you use a carbon dating kit

The PM just asked for our burndown chart - so I handed them a stratigraphic column

The irony of using a Dune reference about thousand-year plans hits different when your 'two-week sprint' feature is still in UAT after three quarters, blocked on security review, architectural approval, and someone's OOO until next fiscal year

At Fortune 500 companies, 'continuous deployment' means your feature might make it to production before the heat death of the universe - assuming it survives the gauntlet of seven approval committees, quarterly release windows, a change advisory board that meets biweekly, mandatory security reviews that take six weeks, compliance sign-offs from three different departments, and that one architect who's been 'reviewing the design doc' since the Paleolithic era. By the time your two-line config change gets deployed, the technology stack it was written for has been deprecated, the business requirement has pivoted twice, and the original product manager has retired to raise alpacas in Vermont

Our CI finishes in eight minutes; the CAB and ARB sign-off stage ships in fiscal years - DORA metrics don't account for Q4 change freezes

Enterprise deploys: where 'move fast' mutated into 'move at continental drift speeds after 17 VP alignments'

Enterprise estimation: two story points plus three CABs, one ServiceNow change, and a feature flag scheduled for the next fiscal epoch