👏 more 👏 developers 👏 need 👏 to 👏 hear 👏 this
I can count on one hand the number of my clients over the past couple of years who haven't either over-architected for scale or were unnecessarily concerned about it (prior to coming to me for strategic advice, of course 😉).
You don't need to understand Distributional Little's Law to figure this out, it's obvious with primary school level math.
(screenshot excerpt from https://tailscale.com/blog/new-internet)
@ryantownsend I think their answer to "how did we get here" is missing a crucial bit of nuance: the influence of tech company blogs.
I've noticed a pretty clear pattern over the years where some tech company has to solve a problem at scale, blogs about how they've done it, and then there's a horde of developers who excitedly reads that blogpost and declares it the new best practice, elevating it to the level of "you are not a serious developer if you don't do this", often egged on by the tech company in question.
When prodded as to why, given that they are not a big tech company themselves, the answer has always been the same: a *belief*, not merely a hope, that they will be soon. Many of them outright reasoning along the lines of "if I do the same thing as this big tech company, I *will* grow as big as them and get rich, because clearly it worked for them".
This is, IMO, a much stronger effect than that article implies; this kind of technical writing actually drives entire hype cycles and steers entire developer communities in specific directions (as opposed to individual developers just being a bit optimistic), and I've seen it happen first-hand many times.
@joepie91 This is an interesting point, as you see similar with politics: so many people will support tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations because while they will never earn enough to be affected, they hope and believe that they will soon. Meanwhile, the cuts to public services that fund the tax cut will definitely affect them sooner or later, directly or indirectly, but few want to think about becoming seriously ill, disabled or unemployed.
@petrichor @joepie91 ah yes, John Steinbeck’s “everyone sees themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”… we need a version for tech, how about “everyone sees themselves as temporarily undiscovered unicorns”?