[throwway120385]

If your business is going to cease to exist in 4 months, who cares about scalability? Pay the interest when it comes due and when you can afford it. If someone is serious about building a company they will be okay with that.

[swiftcoder]

Yes, this is a very important aspect. An early stage startup needs zero-to-one engineers. People who build fast, aren't afraid to break things, and don't mind YOLO'ing a year of their career on a gamble.

If you find product/market fit before you run out of money... that's when you need to hire engineers who are in it for the long hall. People who focus on reliability and scaling. People who might stick around for 5 years to see if your startup becomes a unicorn.

[gedy]

Sure but then incentivize engineers to hack it out knowing they'll have to deal with the shit show if you become successful. Sorry but most "startup engineers" aren't , and it's basically bad for their careers to implement "the vision" in a throw-away manner.

[throwway120385]

I don't think it's true that it's bad for your career to do it that way. What happens a lot is we think we have to tell the story of how we gloriously implemented some powerful overkill technical stack in a startup with 4 months of runway to be taken seriously as a Real Engineer.

You can also tell the story of how you worked really hard to engineer a solution that was good enough to carry a startup to viability given the 4 months you had. I would choose the second person over the first person because they have a sense of practicality which is really important. But it can be career limiting to not communicate that in your resume somehow, so I understand how you can think it would be a bad thing. And as always you have to be aware that your employer is in that situation, and so if they don't tell you then you're screwed.

There are a lot of people out there who want to hire practical engineers. It's just a different market and you have to signal differently in your resume.

[datavirtue]

Let's be real. Most first builds are done by very low talent Indian and Vietnamese developers with zero technical direction. Once the business grows, real engineers and architects are brought in to fight the horrendous, almost laughable, mess to pull the company back from certain failure...without getting any credit.

[binary132]

unpopular opinion with engineers but unfortunately true

startups are generally moreso a business endeavor than an engineering one, although the engineering must correctly support the business

the engineering begins to take the driver’s seat as the tech debt and cost of scaling catch up to successful companies and begin to create excess drag

but for many years, such companies can typically still afford to throw away money to solve business problems, including these problems of scale

[rachofsunshine]

Depends on the business.

Some startups (like mine) are delivering a service, and the technology used to deliver that service is instrumental. Our back-end is an Airtable I configured myself, and it's been sufficient so far; better tech is not make or break for what we do. Other startups, like Flexport some years ago, fundamentally depend on technical function because that's the core of what they do.

One of the common mistakes founders make, in my expetience, is not asking which camp they're in. It's not a hard question to answer (usually), but it's an easy one not to ask.

[datavirtue]

I'm in full tech debt black hole right now. Avoid this shit, if at all possible. The excess drag is real AF and is greatly threatening the business.

[binary132]

I’m honestly happy to hear (sorry!) that it matters to someone’s business but the counterargument is of course that if it’s become a threat to the business then it should have taken a front seat sooner….