Comment by kronin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kronin | Hacker News Reader

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> On other nitpick is that startups live and die with automation by their lean nature. They have fewer resources and must automate everything they can. It's built into startups mindset.

I am at a medium sized company. We acquired a startup. They did not "live and die with automation", instead they contracted out the production operations. A dozen customers, all on snowflake systems which were constantly tweaked directly in prod with no documentation or audit process.

My experience on the acquirer side is that startup engineers like to just build stuff and deploy it. Design? Testing? Documentation? Automation? None of that existed in this company in any fashion. And they are themselves grating against a modicum of process. Please explain what you want to do, why, and provide a high level design. You are going to replace the whole auth system, it's not something you just "figure out" as you go along... Sigh.

> A dozen customers, all on snowflake systems which were constantly tweaked directly in prod with no documentation or audit process.

I've directly seen this at all sizes of companies. I worked at a billion+ revenue company and watched my boss edit stored procedures directly on production (for way more than a dozen customers). I ended up encrypting them in prod to force him through the build process I made.

The point is that there is wild west going on everywhere, and the size of the company is only one factor. There are startups with great engineering and big companies with terrible engineering. It's just the state of software right now.

> My experience on the acquirer side is that startup engineers like to just build stuff and deploy it

This has been my experience exactly. Automation has a high upfront cost where that payoff is in the long term. As a startup the priority is on income now. Not cost saving that pays off over the next year.

Yes, but I'll be the first to admit it's a lot of fun to be able to work like that... from time to time.

Context is important also, a lot of young companies are still trying to figure out their optimal business model, so agility really is more important; adapt or die (kind of).

Lastly, you have to consider why anyone would ever work for a startup; they often pay less, more stress, less security, unpredictable environment, etc... but you get to do ridiculous experiments in production and try to build something cool. It's part of the incentive structure.

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