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And the best thing is that until it’s a problem you can focus on product/market fit and delighting your customers. Overengineering is a plague amongst SWEs, an
by com 2y ago
And the best thing is that until it’s a problem you can focus on product/market fit and delighting your customers.
Overengineering is a plague amongst SWEs, and almost as dangerous as failing to sell the product in the market.
- whateveracct 2y agoI think cargo cutting stuff like "Postgres for everything" is also a plague. I agree you don't want to overengineer, but if you're a leader and your policy is basically "engineers can't ever be trusted to do hard things" then you're a bad leader. Sorry if this comes off as brusque, but I've seen good engineers want to use Elasticache for the right reasons and seen "leaders" tell them no because "caching is one of the hard problems in computer science." Leadership-by-folksy-saying is sadly a real thing.
- com 2y agoI worked in a Postgres for everything business, and the IPO and later value creation for customers and investors (including me) had been stratospheric. Not dealing with loads of technology choices in the early days is a boon. Once we hit more than $100m in rev it made sense to allow a bit more optimisation for purpose - but only when we had cash flow to pay for it. Otherwise all these fancy-shmancy choices are just dressed-up tech debt.
- whateveracct 2y ago> Once we hit more than $100m in rev Yeah my original comment was about experiences working at places with this kind of monetary success (if not more) and stubbornly not evolving. Low trust eng leadership philosophies will do that though.