[projektfu]

If you have a team of 5, and one wants to implement terraform or some other package like that, what is the current cost to the rest of the team that is unfamiliar with the new software? Will that one person be hobbled for the next few months trying to get their work done and support the other engineers who get blocked by tech they haven’t learned as well? Was the system viable using shell scripts or however it was originally set up? Is it going to tick off another developer who put effort into the current orchestration?

[p_l]

Would you even have cross-cutting concerns in a team of 5? Given previous experience, it's quite common that if you have a team of 5, it will be reasonable to assume everyone is sharing a bus factor of 1~1.5 and one person will be the infrastructure master. Letting them use whatever tools to leverage until you can have more runway is good.

[projektfu]

I agree, unless the introduction of a tool for everyone could slow down 4/5 of the team. Startups usually have inexperienced people but the successful ones have talented people. Sometimes hiring an inexperienced big company employee causes these issues because they “know how it should be done” instead of having the experience to exercise judgement. It’s not a management failure to say, “let’s think about that in 5 months after we have a working product.”

The tradeoffs are not obvious. It could be that terraform is as important to this startup as version control would be, they just don’t know it. But if it ain’t broke....

Btw, I’ve worked at a startup (25 years ago) that had no version control and I was the one who identified the problem and introduced it. I also was unaware we needed it or what it could do for us before we had our first pucker-up moment with the source code. After version control we moved faster and slept better. Or we would have if we weren’t pulling all nighters.

The startup failed anyway.