Part of the fallacy of this is the implication that you need &quot;good&quot; engineers for most startups. I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow.<p>Very few things require genuinely novel pieces of code to work. Yes, lots of value can be captured using code, but you could totally start something like airbnb with a lot of manual labor clicking in a GUI.<p>Djikstra said &quot;Beware premature optimization&quot; and that&#x27;s quite true. I think automation should be used when things hurt to bad to do manually anymore. For some people, that&#x27;s any task which must be performed twice and then you write a script. For others it might be years manually updating excel for bookkeeping every night. One can go real far manually updating excel...