[whiterknight]

"Bad engineering" in adhoc ways tends to mean new ideas are being explored. Sophisticated deployments, logistics, procedures, tends to mean you're optimizing or extending existing system.

That's not to disparage the latter. making things work at scale is hard engineering. But when people praise the glory days, it may be a preference for working on new ideas in small projects.

[danpalmer]

There are most definitely trade-offs. Getting a small project off the ground now is hard because the size of the organisation puts so many requirements on you.

The way I like to look at it is that small things take a while, but big things happen remarkably quickly. For example, rolling out a "hello world" service might take a few days, but having that service serve 1M QPS is pretty much free (in terms of effort). At my previous place a new service might have taken an hour to set up a deployment for, but having it serve 1M QPS would have required overhauling several aspects of our infrastructure over months.