[ForHackernews]

I dunno, I've lived the other side of this where people made boneheaded choices early on, the product suddenly got traction, and then we were locked into lousy designs. At my last company, there were loads of engineers dedicated to re-building an entire parallel application stack with a view to an eventual migration.

A relatively small amount of upfront planning could have saved the company millions, but I guess it would have meant less work for engineers so I suppose I should be glad that firms keep doing this.

[jasfi]

More experienced software engineers can usually make the right design decisions that don't mean rebuilding when/if it comes time to scale things. This is usually about avoiding bad decisions because they know better.

[fragmede]

In the abstract, it's impossible to judge decisions. What's worse than a company that spending millions on refactoring? Not being able to spend money on that because the company went out of business before launch because the devs were too busy engineering the most perfect, webscale architecture for the system that they weren't able to launch a product before running out of runway.

[OutOfHere]

How is this done? And how is it not done?