Re:How a startup can survive technical debt
by Roritharr on Sunday January 03, 2021 @02:33AM
(#25620243)
I ONLY know this story. In the past 15 years I've only seen "started out underfunded and as a mess" and ""never went live because of overengineering", nothing really in-between, but I'm in Europe where Seed Fundings are pretty small.
Re:How a startup can survive technical debt
by boffinism on Sunday January 03, 2021 @03:04AM
(#25620381)
Actually it did work 'because of' the junior dev. They couldn't afford a senior dev, so the only viable path to success was to hire a junior. If the point of the original anecdote was 'don't hire a junior for your startup' the point of mine is 'sometimes do'.
Re:How a startup can survive technical debt
by xupybd on Sunday January 03, 2021 @03:41AM
(#25620502)
I've seen this a few times. Terrible code but successful company. The companies could not have afforded better programmers. Instead of seed funding they funded with debt, technical debt.
The hardest part is explaining to the owners why it's so expensive to fix everything. They don't understand how it was so cheap to build yet so expensive to maintain.
The startup I'm currently working for has the same story. A junior wrote most of the code, but we got hired at the first round. It will take months to solve the spaghetti, but it might work, but I'm very experienced handling even huge and terrible code bases (300-500 thousand of lines of legacy code).