Comment by kevstev

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.