Do you know what corners can't be cut in advance though? Sure, you can have a tiny post-seed team bogged down for a month rolling out Hashicorp Vault for everything because "that's how it should be done", or play forever with microservices, or roll out Bazel in a two person team writing Python, don't ship enough, and get out of business. Alternatively, they can be passing an .env file with secrets around, build a monolith, and deploy it with bash/make. It might be tedious or even dangerous at some scale, but which way would leave more time to create real-world value, hopefully somewhat captured and used to pay salaries?
The question of responsibility is a funny one. For every PM jumping ship and leaving developers with tech debt, there are tens of developers bogging businesses down with unnecessary complexity [1] and jumping ship with newly padded CVs. Do you think it's any better? In fact, what do you think is worse for the world?
[1] Too much complexity can kill a business much faster than failing to scale. Loads of unicorns were unstable and failing under load (failwhale!), but that's a problem that comes with customers, which means money, which means it's much easier to resolve than having no money and a beautiful scalable stack.
The question of responsibility is a funny one. For every PM jumping ship and leaving developers with tech debt, there are tens of developers bogging businesses down with unnecessary complexity [1] and jumping ship with newly padded CVs. Do you think it's any better? In fact, what do you think is worse for the world?
[1] Too much complexity can kill a business much faster than failing to scale. Loads of unicorns were unstable and failing under load (failwhale!), but that's a problem that comes with customers, which means money, which means it's much easier to resolve than having no money and a beautiful scalable stack.