This is very glib. Hindsight is always 20/20 vision. No corpse appreciates the coroner explaining why they died. A patient prefers a doctor who prevents them moving from a patient to a corpse. A lot of startups have 3-6 months before they're dead. Stone dead! Architectural review sounds great, and it is, but the requirements change every day - they know what those requirements are right now; but later, even a day later, who knows? Can any company do a review before they know the "shape" of what they're trying to achieve? They have 3-6 months, and they need to ship. No startup has a reasonable chance of getting the architecture right unless the requirements for the product (a product that should generate income, and should pay the bills) are at least close. Testing? Test what? The product hasn't gelled. What are they testing? They're fumbling though. That reddit fella should cut them some slack at the funeral, and not dance on the grave. Ex post facto bs.
It's precisely hindsight.
It seems harsh to blame the dev who wrote the query for the death of the business. It makes good copy on reddit; funny, and sticky, but harsh. That stuff is bad. The dev should feel bad. But, was that the root cause for the failure; was it even a proximate cause? None of this was teased out satisfactorily in the original piece. All the tech silliness at the failed companies was presented as being both necessary and sufficient for the failures. I feel that there may have been _something_ else, but you'd never know from the original post.
If the business couldn't hire a dev that knows that you don't write a query without ensuring it uses some index when it runs then the business deserved to die and I wouldn't place any blame on the dev who in business terms is just a resource. Bad resource, but just a resource, so they can't be blamed for the failure of the business.
And the root cause is hiring process that admits devs that can do db api call but have no idea what having database as a component of your app actually entails.
Oh c'mon. This is circa 202x not 1960. Hind sight of what? If you can't understand 13% utilization of servers for the bills you're paying or indexing queries ... what did you expect? To be taken seriously? Please ... they had to hire an outsider to point out the stunningly obvious.
I don't get the sense that these companies hired an outsider to perform a post-mortem. All I got from the reddit post was that some johnnie took it on himself to trawl through the repos of failed startups, came up with some laughably simple weaknesses, and published a post to demonstrate how clever he was and how stupid they were. It reeks of glib, self-satisfaction. At no point was a business case examined, or business management, or market size, or burn-rate, or cashflows, or anything else that's likely to signal imminent or eventual demise more clearly than a missing index. The absolute dollars weren't even clear. 13% utilization on a total bill of $100 has a different level of materiality than if the total bill was $100,000. The former is a bit loose, but probably not fatal. Get the business right then get the tech right. Bad business plus great tech is probably still a dead business.
