alt Hacker News> You learn the most valuable information from watching how things break and then fixing them.
Trust me, you get plenty of experience in this as a founding engineer in a startup.
Many of these comments make me wonder how many people here have actually worked at an early stage startup in a lead role. You learn a lot about what's maintainable and scalable, what breaks and what doesn't, in the process rapidly iterating on a product to find your market.
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Lots of stuff breaks only after 5 or 10 years. Because you most likely don’t have people who originally built stuff and knew why it was like that.
Then customers and market changed so you also most likely have different customers.
I had to undo a lot of over-engineering to fix performance issues that was implemented in good faith by people who ultimately left the company and they thought they did a good job future proofing our product.
I am with company from start and now it is 11 years. I knew why they built it like it was so I was able confidently what to fix. But it still took almost a year to undo stuff that was making our current customers miserable.
> how many people here have actually worked at an early stage startup in a lead role
Obviously very few, because these roles are impossible to get into. What else did you expect?
> Trust me, you get plenty of experience in this as a founding engineer in a startup.
Now be part of the team of folks that keeps that application running for 10, 20, 30 years. Now be part of the transition team to the new app with the old data. Those tasks will also teach you a lot about system stability, longevity, and portability... lessons that can only be learned with more time than a startup has.
I'm a founding engineer in a startup right now, and I was a founding engineer in a startup acquired by a large company. So then I became a part of a large company.
The technical challenges are _very_ different between these environments. In a small company you have to deal with technical breakages all the time, but you don't really have systems-level problems.
I don't think HN has been frequented by startup engineers with leadership responsibilities in any density in a long time. It's very obvious to me reading a lot of the comments here that most folks are ICs somewhere in a large, bureaucratic software organization. That's why there's so much BOFH style commentary here these days.
(For readers, I don't think there's anything wrong with that but it just means that certain perspectives are overrepresented here that may not be more reflective of the broader industry.)