Signs that a startup is focused on stuff that doesn’t matter
This is my opinion, and I know it won&#x27;t be popular, so give me some slack for admitting that and posting it anyway.<p>You can tell a startup is focusing on the wrong thing when: They&#x27;re using the &#x27;newest&#x27;, most obscure, programming language or frameworks available because it&#x27;s the &#x27;best&#x27; for some unscientific reason.<p>Instantly I hear the argument &quot;Yah, but if we need to scale, we don&#x27;t want to re-write.&quot; Ok, you&#x27;re going to rewrite anyway. Right now your problem is producing quality code that additional people can onboard themselves with. Chances are you can produce something very practical using plain GET&#x2F;POST operations and gradually add more interactivity on the client side if you prove your product out.<p>The stem of my rant is this: Recently I was thinking about picking up some side work for extra $. The company I was interviewing with described their front end team as struggling to keep pace and needed some temporary help. The product is under NDA, so let&#x27;s just say it&#x27;s a shared calendar. Their stack was insane: 18 different javascript frameworks, required a certain version of Node.js to &quot;compile&quot; to ES6, then another to run it in your browser, and the stylesheets were written in some other obscure language. In the second interview, I told the product manager I think he&#x27;s been had: the reason your front end team is struggling is because they&#x27;re not being practical, they&#x27;re busy with shiny toys. He said he had a feeling, but given his situation he didn&#x27;t have much of a choice but to continue. He thanked me for being honest and said he understood if I wasn&#x27;t interested anymore.<p>Anyway, there&#x27;s a lot of really &quot;cool&quot; stuff to get distracted by as developers. I think a lot of us need to sober up and really meditate on the phrase &quot;do the simplest thing that could possibly work&quot;.