Disclaimer: This is a mad reckon, it’s based on observations over time as a SWE.
A recent discussion with a friend (Hi Mark!) on social media inspired me to write this.
There are multiple stages, or phases, in a company lifecycle. Some say startup, growth, maturity, transition and succession.
The first two are sometimes referred to as Start up, and Scale up.
A Start up company (especially in tech) is a pressure cooker, it’s frenetically paced, long hours, high risk work where ideas are deployed, trialed with users, and then possibly discarded in very short cycles. There’s little time for documentation, testing, or even properly working code, the pressure is to get something, anything, delivered before the seed money runs out.
Further there’s little point in testing and documentation because the idea being trialed might not exist tomorrow, or is highly likely to be changed. The luxury of time and money often doesn’t exist where those things are valued.
The focus is purely “Get it going”.
Eventually, though, the start up comes to a point where it’s either dead (read: ran out of money or ideas) or, has hit a “winner”, that is, it’s found something that people want and are using (hopefully the latter).
At this point the start up has to change into a scale up. Dealing with all this new traffic requires a change in attitude. rigor, strong software engineering principles, the need to maintain the codebase, documentation, and testing, start to become important.
The tools chosen for the original codebase may also need to be re-evaluated - what was needed to get something up and running quickly may be expensive and unable to cope with the load that it’s now under.
The dynamics change once a transition from start up to scale up occurs. There’s a hard need for future based thinking, that need would be nice in a start up, and start ups are often criticised for putting resources toward the future goals, but, as I’ve already pointed out, there is a high likelihood that there isn’t a future for a lot of the work.
Developers too are of mindsets that are better positioned for one or the other - I personally am much more strongly geared to the scale-up. I tidy code bases up, I strongly advocate for testing and knowledge transfer (documentation). I make plans for the future.
Those things make me terrible for a start-up. A start-up developer has a “rip shit and bust” attitude, excited by the idea of hitting the jackpot, not so concerned about the future of their code, as long as it looks like it works.