Comment by phkahler
1 day ago
>> Yes, but it's not difficult to do something silly without even noticing until too late. Implicitly (and unintentionally) calling something with the wrong big-O, for example.
On a non-scalable system you're going to notice that big-O problem and correct it quickly. On a scalable system you're not going to notice it until you get your AWS bill.
Also, instead of having a small team of people to fight scalable infrastructure configuration, you could put 1-2 full time engineers on performance engineering. They'd find big-O and constant factor problems way before they mattered in production.
Of course, those people's weekly status reports would always be "we spent all week tracking down a dumb mistake, wrote one line of code and solved a scaling problem we'd hit at 100x our current scale".
That's equivalent to waving a "fire me" flag at the bean counters and any borderline engineering managers.