While we are griping about Amazon, my main complaints are about the fulfillment centers/working conditions, the anti-union activity, building their own versions of products that sell well on their platform, and the penalizing of companies that price higher on-amazon than off-amazon.
I worked at a large, publicly-traded multinational where decades prior and they were still just a 4 man startup they decided the database server and all timestamps should be in the local timezone.
They are still using EST today even when they have global sharding of their customers/databases between US, EU, LATAM, SEA...
--- you're also assuming that the product roadmap will afford your engineers any time to build it the second, third, fourth, etc. time.
(1) We're a small startup/new product team/etc, let's just build the MVP and keep everything simple!
(2) Now we're not small anymore and suddenly have all kinds of nonfunctional requirements we never imagined before! But our simple architecture from before is making everything a pain now!
The natural instinct is then to compromise on the "simpleness" of the first prototype and already try to anticipate all the scaling and nonfunctional requirements that might come later - but that rarely seems to work, as you can't really how (and if) the project will grow.
Seems to me, the real question here is why those teams are still using the "MVP" code even after being well inside the "scale up" phase. Shouldn't this be the point where you gradually migrate to a codebase that is more manageable at scale?
The key to reversing a decision is getting over Sunk Cost, to start thinking of some code as scaffolding. Scaffolding allows you to get on to other work and then remove it after, because it's either not needed or the 'real' solution has been installed. People get defensive when you propose to rip out their code. Hey that code made us $250k at a time when we were about to miss payroll. Yes. It did. Thank you for your service. But now it's costing us $30k a month and that shit needs to go.
Getting people to figure out that if a decision is important, making it later is actually the sane thing to do, is a challenge. Because many people's intuition is that we should put energy into this now while it's fresh and we have abundant energy. We can 'solve' it and not have it dangling over our heads. But we don't know the right answer yet. We don't know the strength of our tools or the expertise of our coworkers.
The product roadmap is now and has ever been complete bullshit. Refactoring teaches that you amortize rework across all new stories. That's just how it goes.
(And everything should be in GMT unless you can literally point me to a several hundred page treatise on why another time zone is the correct one. Yeah I've worked west coast places that got bought by NY or Chicago companies and it's a clusterfuck if you both didn't use GMT)
Thank you for the added detail.
> The product roadmap is now and has ever been complete bullshit. Refactoring teaches that you amortize rework across all new stories. That's just how it goes.
Also agree, but teams use sprints and "the roadmap" as a way to say no to fixing bottlenecks they've created for other teams and don't want to take the time and effort to resolve.