In startups a lot of technical debt is more organisational debt and lack of role specific hiring and poor decisions at a higher level early on when you do have

In startups a lot of technical debt is more organisational debt and lack of role specific hiring and poor decisions at a higher level early on when you do have to move quickly. For every "full stack engineer" you want a real systems architect, a technical writer, a testing manager/writer, a db administrator/architect, a UX designer. Plus at least one person for serious taking care of early stage devops/sysadmin/IT so that whatever you have isn't fully evolved out of the side 5 minutes someone gives it. You don't want to give the most agency, to the most opinionated and outspoken developer, but the least experienced. Especially if they argue for heavy handed engineering solutions they think are "correct" and this is almost the first ever real job they have had post university. But everything they say sounds great, and its the "right" thing you read online so they must be a good engineer, unlike these other silently working peons. You almost always end up with something brittle everyone else has to work around, leaving a pile of adhoc architecture and code that cannot be reused. The original hotshot "architect" you promoted above the others then gets annoyed and loses a sense of ownership because their "vision" has not been met by all of these other insufficient "full stacks". This is the recipe of every toxic BS startup out there. The solutions are simple, know what the fuck you are doing building a team and dealing with software. Have people who are head of software who have done more than a masters in writing a ToDo app in Java one time.