[pixl97]

This somewhat depends on how big of program/application you are making.

Again, this is something I set bite enterprise style applications quite often as they can be pushed out piecemeal where you can get things like the datastore/input APIs/UI to the customer quickly, then over the next months things like reporting, auditing, and fine grained access controls get put in, and suddenly you find yourself stuffed working around major issues where a little bit up up front thinking about the later steps would have saved you a lot of heartache.

[withinboredom]

This is where 'knowing the domain' lets you put a ton of stuff in all at once. If you have no clue what you're doing, you have to learn the lesson your talking about. As long as you can avoid joining teams that haven't learned this lesson (and others like it), you'll be fine.

I once joined a team where they knew they were going to do translations at some point ... and the way they decided to "prepare" for it was absolutely nonsensical. It was clear none of them had ever done translations before, so when it came time to actually do the work, it was a disaster. They had told product/sales "it was ready" but it didn't actually work -- and couldn't ever actually work. It required redesigning half the architecture and months of effort across a whole team to get it working. Even then, some aspects were completely untranslatable that took an additional 6-8 months of refactoring.

So, another lesson is to not try to engineer something unless your goal is to "get it working". If you don't need it, it is probably still better to actually wait until you need it.