This is the sanest answer. No amount of leadership is going to help an incompetent team. A codebase with massive technical debt, tight coupling, and accidental complexity will be hard to improve incrementally. Impossible without competent engineers.
You don't use it because you haven't heard of it; = not competent.
I'm sure it happens. And then you get the next job with 5y PHP experience or whatever, employer doesn't mind no formal training (not that I'm saying they should in general - but if they're non-technical hiring someone to 'do it', or first hire to build the team or whatever, then they probably should as a reasonable proxy!), rinse and repeat.
> I'm sure it happens
Yeah it does happen. While using the Internet, quite frequently, you are looking at such products developed by such teams, making millions of dollars a year. Even as the good engineering that is being done at FAANG is now being questioned over profitability, with even Google talking about 'inefficiency'.
I think many people here are reacting to $20M forgetting not everything's a SaaS/in the business of selling software (but mostly still has some (in-house) software somewhere).
The shitty software is what sells the product, from the description. Even if the shitty software is a sales/inventory management tool or 'whatever', from the description it is obvious that it is vital to whatever business they are doing.
It doesn't matter whether it was built with Microsoft Access and Excel files. If its contributing a major part of that $20m /year, its not shitty, its golden.
Anyone who understands the trials of modern business, including any tech lead who had to deal with even merely stakeholders and low-level business decisions would prefer to have a $20 m/year sh*t before a well-crafted, 'properly built' architecture. The difficult thing is getting to that $20 m/year. The difficulty of rearchitecting or maintaining things pale in comparison to that.
> I think many people here are reacting to $20M forgetting not everything's a SaaS/in the business of selling software (but mostly still has some (in-house) software somewhere).
Everyone is aware of that. Many are also aware that getting to $20m/year in WHATEVER form is more difficult than architecting a 'great' stack & infra.
My point about Access (or Excel or whatever as you say) was that that would be the very early days of something starting to happen in-house, that wouldn't even be the hypothetical 'script kiddies'.
Nope. Not really. Your average SV startup idea in which the end users will do some simple, but catchy things with your app - yeah, go all no-code if you want to get it started.
But, in real business, in which there are inventories, sales, vendors, shipping companies, deliveries, contracts, quotas, FIFO and LIFO queues and all kinds of weird stuff, things don't work that way. You may end up having to code something specific in order to be able to work with just one vendor or a big customer even. They may even be using Excel. You do it without blinking because millions of dollars of ongoing revenue depend on such stuff.