[dasil003]

Yes I understand all this, hence my comment about enterprise software.

My key point is that people fetishize scalability, IMHO because of individual incentives towards wealth and power. However in practice making something scalable often means making it horrible. "Leaders" who get paid by scope and headcount are incentivized to build big frankenstein projects that are fundamentally disjointed. This makes it very hard to fix problems that come up once the practitioners dig in, because the structure imposed from above already precludes a solution.

This isn't universal, certainly there are problems where it can be broken down cleanly by specialization, but it really depends on the interfaces and communication bandwidth/abstraction leakiness between the working groups.

[deltasixeight]

Agreed. I'm not fetishizing scalability. I am saying that it is an inevitability.

If you can avoid it great, but if you continue growing. You must face it.