[afarrell]

A fraction of the ones that are successful.

I suppose what I really mean is: If your leadership subordinates (especially new joiners) are starting to struggle to coordinate, consider the possibility that you might already be at that point yet emotionally attached to the notion of staying small as you double or quadruple in population.

[papito]

I can guarantee you that most systems out there could serve production traffic on an old laptop, with well-written code and lean database queries. I have done things in MySQL v3 in 2006 that should not be done with a modern database even today (a taxonomy search engine 3 levels deep. Never again).

In the age when database trips and network trips are treated as "free", we somehow arrived at MORE complicated solutions, like microservices.

A "hello, world" problem in 99% of the cases is a "hello, world" problem. At Google - it is not. It's a scale problem. Everything is a scale problem at Google first, and a business logic problem second. The FAANG alumni has convinced the new generation of developers that everything is a scale problem.