I headed Engineering for a company that built a messaging application. A company acquired us and wanted to integrate our back end with their front end. This wa

I headed Engineering for a company that built a messaging application. A company acquired us and wanted to integrate our back end with their front end. This was a HUGE deal prior to acquisition and become Priority #1 after. We needed to hit a goal of roughly 300 messages per second of throughput. This was touted as being very serious for us and an all hands on deck activity. As it turns out, we already exceeded that threshold by about 20%. The front end, however, was only capable of < 5 messages per second and since no one at BigCo anticipated their side would be the problem, they had absolutely zero anticipation of having to solve anything on their end.