Comment by tetha

I agree. I generally don't ask "Do we need to future proof this?", I rather ask: "Do we paint ourself into a corner?"

For example, if you implement a job framework of things calling a REST API to do stuff async, a sufficient first implementation is a simple monolith doing the stuff and some retries or periodic calls. Because, if it does not scale, we can start thinking about replacing that with something to put things into queues and scaling stuff-doers horizontally and such. But often enough, these simple things scale quite the distance.

On the other hand, if you start introducing in-memory caches into a singular instance to taper around database performance... that's a huge issue. That always leads to pain.

Additionally though, I"ve started to keep notes about people doing simple, efficient things without fanfare. This way, if my boss asks me what Bob did over the year, I can tell them that Bob made these problems disappear and how Bob is starting to handle this area of topics more and more. Suddenly Bob is growing responsible for this area, and if my boss asks Bob about these topics they did well in an annual review, Bob can shine. Hope they learn though.