I often feel like I should write a "things you can skimp on, and things you can't" for a startup. There are are some things that if you do it right will immediately start paying dividends. For example, I worked at a startup that didn't take the small time to invest in automated deployment. There was one guy that knew how to manually deploy things, with the only copy of the correct prod configs on his machine. And since there were no standards for deployment, the 5 different sub-apps/services were each deployed differently. They could have literally spent less than 1 day building a proper CI/CD system which would have immediately made all their deployments painless and immediate. Instead when I got there it took many months to finally get CI/CD in place because (a) everything was always on fire so it was difficult to carve out the time to do it, and (b) retrofitting all the different systems to use one way of deployment meant I needed to retrofit 5 systems.

More importantly, my time at that startup was some some of the most stressful in my life, and for what, someone else's shitty code? I refuse to be a "code janitor" anymore. Of course all systems build tech debt over time, but it's not that hard to see which systems were built with a modicum of forethought, and which were just slapped together. Imagine if people building a house got a group together, gave everyone some tools and some lumber and said "go!" instead of actually creating a design, laying a foundation, etc. That's what a lot (not all!) of startup code is like, and I for one refuse to touch that from now on.