Last month, a company I advised shut down.
Not because their product was bad. Not because they ran out of money. They failed because their CTO spent nine months building a microservices architecture for an app that had forty-seven users.
I watched them burn through runway, rewriting working code into eighteen separate services because a conference talk convinced them that’s how “real” companies build software.
The worst part? I tried to stop them. They didn’t listen because telling your team to build a monolith sounds like admitting defeat.
It’s not. It’s called being smart.
Not a Medium member? Read it free with my friend link → Here
The Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves
Walk into any tech company. Ask the engineers about their architecture. You’ll hear the same story.
“We’re planning to move to microservices soon.”
“We need to implement event sourcing for auditability.”
“We’re researching service mesh solutions.”
Meanwhile, their database has forty-three tables and they ship one feature per month.
I’ve been that engineer. Spending weeks designing the perfect service boundary while competitors ship features built on “bad” architecture.