3 ms·
Ask HN: Is There a Technical Decision That Snowballed and Crippled Your Startup?
I began thinking about how some decisions that seem innocuous or well-intended or naive or desperate eventually grow into very large problems that are resource sinks and from which recovery is difficult or not possible (i.e. fatal). I ask the community because I am curious about patterns that may exist or pitfalls that can be or have been identified (and any good stories/anecdotes!).
- RNeff 8y agoIn one multi company contract situation, we spent more than six months arguing about which object-oriented database to use. Always arguments about C versus C++ versus Java. Many technical decisions are based on strong opinions, and not any facts like benchmarks. There are decisions that went bad after the fact. Like a database vendor that went out of business, or operating system updates that killed third party libraries, or changes in pricing or licensing, or bugs the vendor would not fix.
- dpflan 8y agoThanks for sharing. That's an good point about subjectivity (opinion) versus objectivity (facts + benchmarks). In those 6 months was there an attempt to benchmark the two leading candidates?