Re:If it's a nice problem to have, don't solve it now
by hinkley on Monday August 10, 2020 @12:58PM
(#24111402)
"My customer data is too big to back up with an rsync cron job" is a nice problem to have.
"My customer data isn't backed up" is a stupid problem to have, and if your friends and coworkers aren't stopping you, then you need a better class of friends.
Re:If it's a nice problem to have, don't solve it now
by ggggtez on Monday August 10, 2020 @11:21PM
(#24116856)
No don't you see! If you get sued for misusing your customer's data, that means you have customers! So getting sued is actually a good thing!
Make your money and burn down the building on your way out!
"My customer data isn't backed up", is a nice problem to have when you're just launching a new service and don't have any customers. But it's still a problem you'd probably like to solve relatively early. There won't be a moment where missing backups are an immediate problem but also still easily solvable; they're either a future problem or you're unavoidably about to lose a large number of your customers.
As a less on-the-nose example, sometimes when I'm building software, I can anticipate that something will be a problem two or three months from now. In those cases, I have a decision to make. If the code is disposable, I can ignore the problem and solve it later. But if I'm working on core architecture, spending an extra 2-3 days to solve the problem now can save me 3 weeks of refactoring in the future.
Many businesses start agile and become slow and cumbersome over time precisely because of this reason. They can't keep up the pace they started at because the technical debt, compliance issues, and future problems end up weighing them down over time.
I think there's just a balance to be had here.