Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?

I feel like it always comes down to a communication issue. Team members need to feel heard, and feel acknowledged that you fully understood what they are suggesting. On the other hand they need to understand that there are constraints that force a decision that might not technically be the best, but is pareto optimal. When this discussion occurs I sometimes bring up the analogy of these space movies where they put everything on a table that the astronauts have up there and try to make something out of it that mostly consists of duct-tape. Sure there are better tools, but the stuff on the table is all we have. Another thing that took me very long to understand as a developer is that innovation is a risk that might not always make sense economically. A thing that took me long to understand as a manager is that the happiness of your devs is one of your most precious resources that you have to manage well.

The (appropriate) question was “We have 5 months of runway, does this make sense?”

Assuming the manager is halfway competent in listening to their team, then this should be a useful focusing activity for both the dev and the manager.

In business, and in life, it isn’t about what you “can” do, it is more about focusing on the handful of things that give you the biggest “bang” for the buck. Think Pareto law, and how you can get 80% of a result, for 20% if the effort.

So, in the context of the scenario, the developer should be asking themselves: 1. What problem does solve now or will solve in next 5 months? 2. How painful is the problem, and what is it’s frequency (High impact, but low probability; moderate impact, but high probability).

3. What is the cost of the new process/tool to the team? (Time, cognitive load, $$$ that could be spent elsewhere).

As long as ratio of value to cost is large (10X or more), in the timeframe that matters (in this example 5 months, for most companies time is measured in years), and you can articulate it, selling the idea should be a no brainer.

However unless you can truly get that 10X(or more) return, then it might be better to focus your improvement activities elsewhere.

All that said, I do think the “Command voice” at the end is a bit of an issue... at least for me. You are “pulling rank”. This is “okay” if you have built up the “rep”/karma/trust to do so, but unless you have, will likely make the dev (long term) run for the hills. It might take a bit more time/coaching to explain something like the above to them, but that is an investment in people that lasts a lifetime, whether or not the startup lasts past 5 months.

- It's taken four months since my project (a personal-use hybrid OLTP/OLAP streaming BI framework) has started, and I'm only wrapping up the development now. I'm fine with this because I know what I want and I don't want to deal with users while things are in flux, but if this was a business, I'd be out on the street by now.

- Engineers are paid well because there's not that many of us. It's not because we're important. Sales is what brings home the bacon, marketing kicks off the sales funnel, customer support closes the sales loop, product management translates sales' requirements to engineers...and engineers just build the thing according to requirements. Many one-person startups don't have engineers, or even anybody technical, they just use no-code tools and pay contractors and they do just fine.

I'd consider broadening your options in order to grant yourself more agency, especially paid solutions that you can form a demonstrable ROI-based argument for. Terraform may seem like a bit overkill, esp. if you don't have serious cloud charges. Maybe managed APIs as a service makes sense, like Netlify, that have CI/CD and can spin up various apps for money. Then you can say "for $25 / mo. we save X developer hours, which @ market rate saves us $XXX per mo. which increases our runway by this much."

But I guess there's plenty of games that don't have that kind of criticality. Just mentioning a counter-example. (Personally I'm still salty that GTA Online was released for free but the servers couldn't handle it, I mean come on, it's a decade old, you'd think they'd have sorted out scalability and stability by now. That game still earns its publisher hundreds of millions a year).