I was sitting in the cafeteria having lunch with some new engineers and the conversation somehow found its way to bashing a legacy part of the system. One of the engineers said: “I can’t believe they put these blobs in the database, that’s so dumb.” Many engineers, who join a company once it has already grown substantially, don’t have much experience in early-stage startup culture and subsequently love to hate on the architectural decisions made in the early days. This behavior really gets under my skin. As a person who started when the company was less than 25 people and now has grown to more than 1000 employees, I’ve come across these conversations a few times. Of course there are many hacks and bugs that linger while a startup team builds their rapidly growing system, but it’s challenging for people who arrive later in the development process to appreciate how the process of conceptualizing and constructing an entirely new product unfolds. Here are a few things to keep in pe
Mike Borozdin - Kubernetes @ Google. Previously: Dir of Eng @ DocuSign, Lead @ Microsoft. I help companies focus and engineers grow.