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As mostly an engineer (though I've spent time as a tech/team lead and engineering manager in the past), I think you've missed the point.

Most of the things will not need to be "scaled" at all. Ever.

As an engineer, I mostly struggle to come up with a simple solution while accommodating all the crappy, leaky abstractions in the rest of the code: that's the hard part of the job. And 20 years in, I still wonder why people think it's smarter to introduce seventeen layers of abstractions for things that have one or at most two implementations, but that's what they do.




> I still wonder why people think it's smarter to introduce seventeen layers of abstractions for things that have one or at most two implementations

Tell me you are a Java dev without telling me you are a Java dev. :)

(While I know it's not just Java with this problem, my personal experience is that Java is the worst.)


> Tell me you are a Java dev without telling me you are a Java dev. :)

FWIW, I am not :)


Indeed, concern about how well your product might scale to handle high load and use of umpteen layers of abstraction sounds somewhat contradictory to me! (I'd also say most scaling problems aren't necessarily all that hard to solve, but having some idea of what limits might be hit fairly quickly if there was an anticipated need to grow the userbase is a pretty key part of building SaaS platforms. Even single user apps can suffer from scaling issues if suddenly they're expected to deal with far more data than anyone had bothered testing with. Allowing the engineering team, including QA, time to assess potential scaling issues is surely the first step.)




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