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Comment by spelunker | Hacker News Reader

Obviously this won't work at a small startup, but at our large tech company there are plenty of tech leadership roles to bring design questions to. Senior/lead engineers on my team, as well as a principal engineer in my group that encourages us to meet with them when we need help.

I guess my point is be sure to enable paths for those types of roles to exist in your company as it grows - technical leadership that isn't people leadership.

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As someone who's been at larger companies for a good portion of my career - this is the expertise at large internet companies that is really difficult to find at most smaller places. Not many services hit 1k+ QPS, not many companies really work at scale. I'd recommend almost every senior-ish eng to spend some time in big tech just to get exposure to some of these patterns and thoughts. And ideally not cargo cult them just because AWS does it.

Thanks for this input. I do hope that we are able to build both a valuable product and a company that I would be excited to work for even if it were not my own.

I hesitated to post earlier, intending to chide you for (or rather our industry for this relatively recent trend of) treating system architecture and design as a sort of commodity information. The technical bones of your business are no less an expert subject matter, requiring continual oversight, than the financial, marketing, and operational aspects, and you should treat it as such.

I totally agree. This sort of thing is not commodity information. I am not looking for a right answer or an oracle (and certainly not Oracle!) to consult for issues we face.

I chose my wording carefully in my question to emphasize discussion, feedback, tradeoffs, and inputs. I do not expect anyone to give me an answer, but I would greatly appreciate being challenged, questioned, and perhaps informed of alternatives. I am also happy to do the same for others where I have worthwhile experience.

The closest thing to commodity information would be an awareness of alternatives/options in a broad category. This also has value, and can sometimes be found. The most common source I have seen for this sort of thing is a cursory overview of the options that a product is replacing in thinly veiled sales copy for a product aiming to solve the problem.

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