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The thing is, at least from my experience, the engineers working in startups know the solution they're implementing is overkill. Its just that everything ends u
by arduinomancer 8y ago
The thing is, at least from my experience, the engineers working in startups know the solution they're implementing is overkill. Its just that everything ends up getting built assuming the startup is going to take off and become the next huge unicorn.
A lot of the time design meetings in a startup revolve around "Is this scalable?" or "What happens when we have 10,000 users or 1 million users?".
I think the problem isn't choosing overkill technologies, the problem is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist yet and probably never will.
- lclarkmichalek 8y agoThere's also sometimes a lack of discipline (or at least, I lacked discipline when I worked in startups) when it comes to focusing on the impactful stuff, not the fun stuff.
- ska 8y agoThat's just bad engineering practice unless you can articulate why there isn't a transition path to more scalable tech when you actually need it. Usually in practice there is, and certainly for most companies. You can probably point to counterexamples, but to reuse the OP's term "you aren't them, either"
- TheHegemon 8y agoUnfortunately I've definitely seen cases where scalability wasn't taken into account and now it's impossible to bolt-on after the fact.
- wrs 8y agoMy rule of thumb is to assume something significant will have to change in the architecture when you get 10x bigger. At any given moment, you shouldn’t have made that change yet, but you should know what it will be and be ready to make that transition. But don’t gum up the current system with what you’ll have to do at 100x bigger.