Vertically integrated web based businesses like Google have a tremendous advantage that comes from being able to prototype something and then instantly have it available to all customers with a simple push [1] out to production.

There were of course different levels of thing, Gmail was a 'big' thing, updates to the calculator one box, were 'small' things. But everything has a certain amount of technical debt [2] associated with it. This was especially true of infrastructure changes as there were often many subsystems that might be affected in one way or another and each of them usually had some sort of 'porting' effort to get with the program as it were.

"Shipping" was getting something running in production without having it be kicked out by SRE [3]. "Finishing" was having everything that was affected by the change that had been in production before shipping fixed and/or updated to run with the new system. As with most large systems I've had exposure too there is a big chunk of obvious stuff that is affected and then it asymptotically approaches zero. People seemed to start leaving at the 3dB [4] point.

[1] "pushing" is the process whereby a new capability is delivered into the production clusters that are customer facing.

[2] "technical debt" is the requirement that additional work is going to be required later (the debt) to resolve issues that aren't show stoppers initially.

[3] SRE see "The Roads must Roll" by Robert Heinlen.

[4] "3dB" is 3 decibels. In engineering or control systems the 3dB point is where the signal has been reduced in strength by 1/2. Also known as the 'cutoff' point for a filter.