When to bring in the heavy hitters (2017)
I think you need senior _technology_ people from day one, if you want to build to scale, and you don&#x27;t really want to pay to build everything twice _and_ pay for extreme server costs _and_ pay to migrate from the old to the new system.<p>Maybe this means something different than &quot;Heavy Hitters&quot;. I&#x27;ve never run a huge company division; I prefer to work in a startup environment, and except for a short stint at Amazon, that&#x27;s where I&#x27;ve stayed. But I have been able to step into small companies as an interim CTO and turn their technology from a mess that won&#x27;t scale and that was written by junior developers into something that will scale cleanly from day one.<p>And I typically do this by throwing away most of what was there to begin with and rebuilding from the ground up. Most junior devs just don&#x27;t have good architecture and design in their blood like a strong senior developer. Which means there&#x27;s 2-3x extra work to prevent the current system from dying or failing during the transition process (&quot;Changing the tires while driving at 60MPH&quot;).<p>If instead you have someone like me drive the project from the start, when the project is _finally_ seeing traction you can focus on adding features your customers are demanding and pivoting if necessary. And you don&#x27;t end up hemorrhaging money by paying for 50x as many servers as you would need if you&#x27;d start with a strong architecture.<p>And the funny thing? Hiring a strong dev early on will likely get you to a working product much sooner than several junior devs, and you overall save money due to launching sooner. So it&#x27;s a huge win. And a lot of the time, founders _are_ junior devs (I&#x27;ve been coding for 30 years; anyone with less than five years is junior, from where I sit, and a decade is bare minimum to be &quot;senior&quot;).<p>But everyone wants to cut costs and hire the $10&#x2F;hour developers, or the green developers fresh out of college. And now articles like this are being written that imply that you shouldn&#x27;t even hire a &quot;heavy hitter&quot; until some vague criteria have occurred...<p>Well, good luck with that. You might be able to pivot and improve your technology in time. Or you might end up going the way of Friendster, pissing off your user base because your site keeps failing, and by the time you have it working reliably, they&#x27;ve all left. [1] Or maybe the fact that they left allowed it to work reliably? Hard to say.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Friendster" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Friendster</a>