[1920musicman]

That's an interesting point. Can't say I agree based on my experience in both small startups and mega-corps.

Startups are so chaotic and fast-paced that one usually only needs 1-2 years (if not less!) to see how earlier decisions pan out. Very frequently the stack and the codebase undergo monumental changes in that short period of time due to the changes in business requirements and scale.

Mega-corps are vast engineering efforts with hundreds if not thousands of daily contributions. While I could technically go back and try to evaluate my choices from 6-7 years ago, it would be fairly hard to decouple my individual contributions from the changes that happened afterwards (functional/non-functional feature requirements changed since then, the codebase is unrecognizable, etc). 6-7 years is just too long of a time frame for certain eng areas (web/native product is a primary example). Saying that, I can imagine that there are slower-paced areas where this time frame is more relevant, e.g. database engine development.