One thing I’ve learned is that you should be wary of spending too much time on things that customers don’t see. Customers don’t care about backend engineering unless it results in benefits they can actually see, and if you spend too long on invisible features they’ll think your platform is stagnant and move somewhere else.

this goes to show that one person can make a difference, the lead architect all by himself was able to destroy a company and moral.

Ironically posted on Medium, which showed me the text, then blanked the whole screen to replace the text with light grey polyfills, and then showed me the same text again... several seconds later.

That's because Medium is a bunch of APIs and (micro) services, not a monolith like it should be.

Heck, it could be plain static HTML because it's just text for crying out loud!

Instead, it uses a GraphQL query through JSON to obtain the text of the article... that it already sent me in HTML.

Total page weight of 17 MB, of which 6.7 MB is some sort of non-media ("text") document or script.

This is user-hostile architecture astronaut madness, and is so totally normal in the modern internet that nobody even bats and eye when text takes appreciable amounts of time to render on a 6 GHz multi-core computer with 1 Gbps fibre Internet connectivity.

Your customers hate this. Your architects love it because it keeps them employed.

Does this story seem kinda…fake…to anyone else? Like, obviously companies do sometimes make decisions this stupid, but the way this is written seems a little too carefully optimized to make for a morality play of the kind HN enjoys. (And there's a potential motive, since there's a whole bunch of links to paid books and such, somewhat clumsily tied to the main narrative.)

Microservices solve people problem not technical. Till ~20 backend devs no point in moving to it. Monoliths are better in terms of performance, reliability and dev speed.

I am pretty sure it was a lack of demand that killed the startup. Either of these are valid problems and quite easy to deploy and work with.