[Smudge]

> it seems like there is a lack of strong technical leadership and a lot of big decisions are being made without thinking them through

I didn't get that impression at all. The ability to do it right (tm) the first time is quite often hindered by the need to iterate quickly and focus on growth and/or revenue. You'll eventually end up with an increasingly-more-painful monolithic core system, but that's an okay trade off if it got you to a place where your business really takes off.

At that point you have a few options. You can do a major rewrite, re-architecting everything from the ground up. Or, you can take Soundcloud's approach, and slowly migrate the old system to a more service-oriented architecture, reducing the amount of dev resources you need to throw around.

The trick is that the slow migration will be different for every business, and it depends on the needs of the platform and the way things were constructed initially. Just like you can't blame the technical leadership the trade-offs made early on, and you can't blame them for experimenting and iterating before finding solutions that worked for them. (After all, hindsight is 20/20.)

[jbwyme]

I think iterating quickly is great for product decisions where you don't know how people will react. Technical decisions, however, can be objectively evaluated up front given the right experience. I don't think a migration from a monolithic system is particularly exceptional.