Comment by simonw

Comment by simonw 15 hours ago

And honestly, even then YAGNI might still win.

There's a big opportunity cost involved in optimizing prematurely. 9/10 times you're wasting your time, and you may have found product-market fit faster if you had spent that time trying out other feature ideas instead.

If you hit a point where you have to do a painful migration because your product is succeeding that's a point to be celebrated in my opinion. You might never have got there if you'd spent more time on optimistic scaling work and less time iterating towards the right set of features.

Fripplebubby 15 hours ago

I think I see this point now. I thought of YAGNI as, "don't ever over-engineer because you get it wrong a lot of the time" but really, "don't over-engineer out of the gate and be thankful if you get a chance to come back and do it right later". That fits my case exactly, and that's what we did (and it wasn't actually that painful to migrate).

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kevstev 12 hours ago

At my last job I took over eng at a Series B startup, and my (non-technical) CEO was an ill tempered type and pretty much wanted me to tell him that the entire tech stack was shit and the previous architect/pseudo head of eng was shit, etc. And I was like no... some tradeoffs were made that make a ton of sense for an early stage startup, and the great news is that you are still here and now have the revenue and customer base to start thinking in terms of building things for the next 3-5 years, even though some of things are starting to break. And even better, nothing was so dire that it required stopping the world, we could continue to build and shore up some of the struggling things at the same time.
He seemed to really want me to blame everything on my predecessor and call some kind of crisis, and seemed annoyed by my analysis, which was confusing at the time. But yeah, there are absolutely tradeoffs you make early in a startups life, you just have to know where to take shortcuts and where you at least leave the architecture open to scaling. My biggest critique is that they were at least a year, if not two, past the point where they should have left ultra scrappy startup mode that just throws things at the wall and started building with a longer view.
I have also seen a friend build out a flawless architecture ready to scale to millions of users, but never got close to a product fit. I felt he wasted at least 6 months building out all this infra scaffolding for nothing.

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simonw 15 hours ago

Yeah, that's a great way of putting it.

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morshu9001 14 hours ago

Yeah the "only if" is more like a "necessary, not sufficient." The future migration pain had better be extremely bad to worry about it so far in advance.

Or it should be a well defined problem. It's easier to determine the right solution after you've already encountered the problem, maybe in a past project. If you're unsure, just keep your options open.

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simonw 13 hours ago

A few years ago I coined the term PAGNI for "Probably Are Gonna Need It" to cover things that are worth putting in there from the start because they're relatively cheap to implement early but quite expensive to add later on: https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/1/pagnis/

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