> cobbling together hardware that gets them into trouble when the mad scientist moves on to a new gig.

If you think that standards based x86-64 hardware running Linux and ZFS, or FreeBSD and ZFS is something that is super unreliable and requires a "mad scientist", then yes, you are definitely in HPE and Dell's target market.

I laughed at the “mad scientist” comment because every startup I’ve worked for has had a “mad scientist”. They are always very opinionated and have a lot of political capital because of seniority. The weird concoctions they create… the minute they leave all the remaining engineers immediately replace most of it with off the shelf stuff.

Home built web frameworks (which apparently aren’t “bloated” and “slow”), piles of bash scripts because they never heard of Salt (or whatever is the latest config management tool)…

Almost always they think they are “saving money” by doing what they do, rarely do they ever consider the opportunity costs to rolling the entire software stack from the hardware to web stack on their own.

Good times.

There is a survivorship bias at play here. You experienced the startups that survived long enough to need to evolve their tech stack, and presumably the 'mad scientist' tech stack had some part to play in that.

> Home built web frameworks (which apparently aren’t “bloated” and “slow”)

Well, let me show you something: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/31624

This is a performance regression of Django's ORM for deleting rows from a table, a query that should be about as simple as it gets:

    delete from tbl;

And yet it's orders of magnitude slower because it somehow generates a bloated query. So yeah, let me tell you, the frameworks that people are using off the shelf–there's a pretty good chance that they're 'bloated' and 'slow'.

> piles of bash scripts because they never heard of Salt (or whatever is the latest config management tool)…

Well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? If you're trying to get a project off the ground as quickly as possible, you kinda don't care about 'whatever is the latest config management tool', you will use what is already in your toolbox that will get the job done.

the op was talking about hardware, I think. but you are spot-on on the mad scientist. we are just in the process to de-clutter all the non standard, hand made, highly customized, never documented, stuff produced buba coworker that, unfortunately, passed away.

btw, we also wrote a HA cluster software for sun solaris in year 2000...

I run 10 years old HP servers, something like DL580G5, with care-packs (extended, paid warranty). We needed to flash firmware, 2 motherboards broke and they sent spare parts to replace. Probably with less enterprise-y server firms it may be difficult to find spare parts after 10 years..