A few years ago, I helped a friend who, as CEO, was having problems with their CTO and cofounder. The symptoms: things constantly breaking, nothing working as expected, and a technical leader who turned combative the moment anyone asked questions.
A year or two later, I came back to help bringing along two friends, to actually look at the architecture. My friend's assessment to the CEO: "This is the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean."
He wasn't exaggerating. It was the worst code and architecture I've ever seen.
The Flagship Disaster
The component responsible for calculating customer KPIs consistently gave customers completely wrong data. Not edge cases. Not rounding errors. Wrong.
The codebase for this single component had so many lines it would require a dedicated book to explain.
And the tests the CTO swore existed? When we finally tracked them down, they were copy-pasted production code with some assertions tacked on.
250 Lambdas. 250 Classes.
The AWS infrastructure from this "top 3% architect"? Approximately 250 Lambda functions. You might think: aggressive microservices approach, overkill, but there's surely an interesting philosophy there.
No.
Each Lambda was responsible for a single class. One class. One Lambda. Not one service. Not one domain. ONE. CLASS.
The Titanic, indeed. Except the Titanic was at least structurally sound before it hit the iceberg.
The Defensive Posture
Every time we asked to see tests, he got mad. Every time we asked about architectural decisions, he got mad. Eventually he texted me that "he was a top 3% architect from AWS."
If you have to proclaim this, because your work clearly doesn't reflect it, someone is lying.
The Pivot Parade
After 100% customer churn year after year after year, they changed their name. The churn continued. Now, with basically everyone gone except the CEO, CTO, and a junior engineer, they've pivoted again, and of course they're proclaiming AI will solve everything.
I'd love to point an LLM at their codebase. The response would be: "My recommendation is to start over. Actually, please go bag groceries."
❤️
Jake