Earning the privilege to work on unoriginal problems
I worked at a startup in the very early 2000s that was making online games in Java. Think applets with 2D sprite graphics.<p>They developed their own custom database, a shitty key value store that didn’t even have transactions because “Oracle doesn’t scale and it’s too expensive”. They couldn’t make reporting work so they copied the data hourly to Oracle anyway. (It turned out that Oracle does scale.)<p>They also invented their own RPC protocol, had their own threading library, used an obscure build system, an even more obscure SCM, etc…<p>Nothing was standard. It was all bespoke, <i>webscale</i>, and in-house.<p>When I started there as a junior they had me fix bugs in their code. Instead, I would simply delete thousands of lines of spaghetti and replace it with a call to a standard library. It was like spitting into a volcano to put out the fires of hell itself. There was no hope.<p>They burned $10M and made $250K revenue and collapsed.<p>Their competition used Oracle, ordinary tooling, and made tens of millions in profit.