Comment by deaux

In this case I think it was a bit of CTO envisioning scale, then a bit of CTO genuinely overestimating what is needed, plus a good amount of CTO just being the average nerdy dev who likes the idea of shiny toys and cool sounding stuff - "we're running on k8s!".

A year or so after I left they ran out of money. They would've lasted longer if the infra guy would've just stayed the backend guy and helped get projects done more quickly instead of shiny k8s setups for projects with a dozen end-users per day. Recently I saw that the CTO has started a new startup - and ironically the only guy who he took with him onto the new team looks to have been the infra guy!

I don't blame infra guy, he genuinely believed he was doing the right thing.