So what is growth? The number of developers you have doing stuff. You hire more and more, and every few months you parade some Patagonia vests through your offices to show them. "Observe, more devs! Growth!"
The problems is, the devs all have to do something.
I stopped feeling productive years ago. It's all just never-ending grind, dealing with complexity that has no f--ing business being there. And the younger engineers have no idea. They think this is normal.
This is mostly what we have done. We want to make money. There are barely 10 of us. We don't have time for make believe work that doesn't bring in extra revenue. We used to play in traffic with conversations like "micro services" and "one repo per service" but our investor killed that mode of business and gave us one more chance to do it right.
I recall the original reason for moving away from one big database being something approximating "it won't scale". How well are those various k8s contraptions scaling relative to the "legacy" verticals they purport to replace? How many of us would go back in an instant if given the opportunity?
I think the biggest fear for most on HN is going through ego death over this. The fact that even your "hard" problem is trivially solved with boring tools that were invented before you were born.
I instead started writing my own product for pull request assignments and direct Slack notifications for those (my personal frustration).
I needed to get away from it all and decompress. It's been refreshing writing code.