Comment by moonchrome

>Once you get to that point, it becomes SUPER hard to start splitting things out. All the sudden you have 10000 "just a one off" queries against several domains that are broken by trying carve out a domain into a single owner.

But that's survivorship bias and looking back at things from current problems perspective.

You know what's the least future proof and scalable project ? The one that gets canceled because they failed to deliver any value in reasonable time in the early phase. Once you get to "huge project status" you can afford glacial pace. Most of the time you can't afford that early on - so even if by some miracle you knew what scaling issues you're going to have long term and invested in fixing them early on - it's rarely been a good tradeoff in my experience.

I've seen more projects fail because they tangle themselves up in unnecessary complexity early on and fail to execute on core value proposition, than I've seen fail from being unable to manage the tech debt 10 years in. Developers like to complain about the second, but they get fired on the first kind. Unfortunately in todays job market they just resume pad their failures as "relevant experience" and move on to the next project - so there is not correcting feedback.