[jmorton]

most garages are ill-equipped barns

To abstract and paraphrase (wildly): there are 10x work environments, and 1/10x work environments.

It seems to me that the least productive environments let "now" trump "great" – so attracting (and retaining) the top 0.1% of talent becomes necessary for a company to survive. I wonder which costs more in the long run.

When I make technical decisions, I think hard about how to keep things simple so that a reasonably smart and attentive person can use or extend whatever system down the road.