This article buries the lede with a bunch of horrendous strawmen. The actual thesis is that software craftsmanship should be applied in the same way at all stages of a company. This is a very dangerous line of thinking that has killed many a startup staffed by experienced who engineers who are working in large scale systems and teams. I've seen it many times, and TBH it's not just an engineering problem, it's that people who have only worked in large companies don't have a real sense of what is truly essential, and so a huge percentage of their practices are effectively cargo culted over without any real reflection.<p>In the case of engineering, you need to apply a lot of judgement based on the situation that the company is in—how much runway, how much traction, actual product goals, etc. You must keep things as simple as possible at all times to optimize for future optionality as you search for product-market fit. All code is a liability, and you must fight tooth and nail against any individual who is getting ahead of their skis in terms of losing focus on the next thing needed to prevent the company from dying. The absolute worst thing you can do is bring some journeyman engineer and don't give them enough scope and ownership to satisfy their brain capacity or you'll end up with ridiculously over-engineered systems that impose a huge velocity tax for what needs to be a very lean and agile phase. I say this disclaimer first because 99% of people in tech trying to do a startup will fail by trying to do too much too soon, and have no intuitive sense of how narrow the tightrope from 0 to 1 success really is.<p>Of course that doesn't mean you shouldn't focus on code and system quality. Absolutely you should have tests, but you should apply serious judgement onto the nature of the tests in light of your best predictions about the future. You should think about what code is foundational, and what decisions may be one way doors, but not obsess over leaf nodes and experiments that are just as likely to be abandoned or scrapped as they are to be built upon. Making these calls is tough—no one can predict the future—but long tenures in fast growing code bases helps. Seeing the impact of ones decisions 2, 5, 10 years down the line is eye opening, experience is useful here as long as one still thinks from first principles and doesn't just rely on rote practices because they are comfortable.