Code Deployment Freezes: Part 1

At the end of last year, code deployments were frozen at many tech companies. Why was this done, what are the benefits, and what are the tradeoffs of this approach?

Happy New Year and welcome to the first issue of 2023! I hope you had a restful time during the holiday period.

If you’re a software engineer at a tech company, there’s a good chance the final two weeks of December were more peaceful than usual, not only because of colleagues going on holiday, but because of deployment freezes. These are often referred to as “code freezes,” short for “code deployment freeze.” In this article, I’ll use the term “code freezes” to mean both “code deployment freeze” and “deployment freeze.”

Today, we cover:

1. Big Tech and code freeze approaches. How do Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, Apple, Google and other larger tech companies go about deploy freezes during the holidays?

2. Code freezes at other companies. Details from N26, Podia, Bold.org, T-mobile and several startups.

3. Code freeze upsides. Fewer outages, people disconnecting and other reasons these freezes are helpful.

4. Downsides of code freezes. A rush to get changes in, risky refactorings, merge issues, and other problems the freeze introduces.

5. Companies which don’t do code freezes. A major e-commerce platform and a large SaaS provider don’t do code freezes. What did the teams there observe, as a result of this?

This is Part 1 of a two-part series. In Part 2, we’ll parse the results of a survey on code deployment freezes that I created, analyze trends across various industries, and the trends we observe based on the stage and size of companies. If you have a few minutes, you can take part in this survey.

1. Big Tech and code freeze approaches

It’s common for most of Big Tech to have two week-long code freezes during a year: