Why is everything so scalable?

Summary

Everyone is a FAANG engineerI’m entirely convinced that basically every developer alive today heard the adage “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” and figured that, since they always wear jeans and a t-shirt anyway, they might as well apply it to their systems’ architecture. This explains why the stack of every single company I’ve seen is invariably AWS/GCP with at least thirty microservices (how else will you keep the code tidy?), a distributed datastore that charges per query but whose reads depend on how long it’s been before the last write, a convoluted orchestrator to make sure that you never know which actual computer your code runs on, autoscaling so random midnight breakages ensure you don’t get too complacent with your sleep schedule, and exactly two customers (well, potential customers). I don’t know the exact point when everything went wrong, but I suspect it was somewhere in the 2000s, when Google introduced Map/Reduce and every developer thought “well that’s cool, I’m going to base all our production code on that paradigm, and eventually I will hopefully understand how it works”. We’ve been in “FAANG architecture by default” hell ever since. FAANG architecture by default I asked ChatGPT for some filler images. Thanks ChatGPT, thanks for nothing.The first problem every startup solves is scalability. The first problem every startup should solve is “how do we have enough money to not go bust in two months”, but that’s a hard problem, whereas scalability is trivially solvable by reading a few engineering blogs, and anyway it’s not like anyone will ever call you out on it, since you’ll go bust in two months. Solving problems like “how do we make something people want” and “how do we make people give us more money” are questions as uninteresting to developers as “how do elderly people have sex”. In both cases, the answer is “with great difficulty and by taking risks”, but developers would much rather answer the question “how do we make our infra...