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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

Of the three startups I've worked with, two of the three were ridiculously over-engineered monstrosities that were way over time budget. It was clear that the CIO/CTO wanted to do cool fun stuff and not build a marketable product.

The other was cobbled together with completely shit code, was constantly breaking on releases, and was glued together with perl scripts. They're now publicly traded.

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This

A lot of people think following all best practices and offering a unit test sacrifice to Uncle Bob will lead to success

Shipping will put food on the table. Of course, if your system can't stand 5 simultaneous users it won't, still it's difficult to get that bad. (but yeah, some people manage to get to that level)

And some "online services" have very bad code, and still they sell millions. Get rich first, then you can improve your code.

Get rich first, then you can improve your code.

>Get rich first, then you can improve your code.

I agree with you, but the second part never happens.

Sure, but how can you fearlessly refactor the code without having automated tests in the first place for example?

Technical debt accumulates interrest.

Version 2.0

Or you start adding unit tests, which may be harder than rewriting

Doing a version 2.0 is easier (but maybe harder) than it looks

Can you name names? Specifically the publically traded one ?

I can, but I wont.

I'm sure you could guess at it if you had to, its all publicly available information.

Here's my guess: Synacor. Took me only a few minutes of googling.

Can we refrain from punishing people for sharing their insights, especially when they explicitly opt to not share those details?

You're right. I tried to remove it, but I can't edit the comment anymore.

publically traded != startup (in my opinion)

I inferred that the parent comment meant he/she worked for a startup, that became successful and is now a publicly traded company.

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