▲ | jongjong 4 days ago | |
This article is highly relatable. IMO, everything is done better in startup land except one single thing; enterprise people are willing to concede that everything is complex. This is the one piece of wisdom that enterprise people understand (and often abuse to maximize their billable hours). Startup people tend to neglect complexity and repeatedly underestimate the harm which comes as a result of 'cutting corners'. The hilarious thing is that once in a millennia, a hot startup like Facebook comes along and grows at such an incredible rate, that they can basically get away with cutting all corners... Proving the exception, not the rule; most startups who try this same approach invariably go out of business because it turns out that technical debt is actually very expensive; not every company can afford throwing hundreds of highly paid engineers at the problem of refactoring a code base over and over... Not every startup can afford to rewrite an entire PHP engine from scratch to achieve a modest speedup. But the thing which is funny about this is that a startup like Facebook/Meta attracts so much attention that everyone is clamoring for their advice... Literally, everyone wants to take advice about reality from a company whose experience of reality is unlike that of any other company which has ever existed or will ever exist in the foreseeable future... I do believe that the average entrepreneur has more to learn about startups and software development from a bum on the streets of San Francisco than from a tech exec. |