This post seems like the author is early in their career and is realizing everything in the world is half broken and not perfect. What stood out to me is when h

This post seems like the author is early in their career and is realizing everything in the world is half broken and not perfect. What stood out to me is when he said “you could build what takes weeks in an enterprise in a weekend.” I don’t know about everyone else but I’ve become a much much better engineer since college and I still have to carefully handle every edge case for production and write a lot of tests before shipping something and I really don’t think code I write in a weekend will be production ready at a large company. Truth is by any metric, the massive systems in place by Amazon are pretty amazing examples of scalable software. At my day job at least managers have seemed to figure out that they set the high level goals/milestones and then let the engineers figure out how we want to get to those goals. This system has worked pretty well (of course the deadlines can get tight and we accumulate technical debt) but once we hit a milestone we deliberately decide to take some small amount of time to fix technical debt, as long as we kept track of it as we scrambled which also requires some discipline. The way things distill up to management is for my VP he doesn’t know what details you did on x day, he wants to know did you help implement y one of our org’s high-level goals. This system works to some degree and I haven’t thought of a better one yet.