
Ask HN: Is There a Technical Decision That Snowballed and Crippled Your Startup? - dpflan
I began thinking about how some decisions that seem innocuous or well-intended or naive or desperate eventually grow into very large problems that are resource sinks and from which recovery is difficult or not possible (i.e. fatal). I ask the community because I am curious about patterns that may exist or pitfalls that can be or have been identified (and any good stories&#x2F;anecdotes!).
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RNeff
In one multi company contract situation, we spent more than six months arguing
about which object-oriented database to use. Always arguments about C versus
C++ versus Java.

Many technical decisions are based on strong opinions, and not any facts like
benchmarks.

There are decisions that went bad after the fact. Like a database vendor that
went out of business, or operating system updates that killed third party
libraries, or changes in pricing or licensing, or bugs the vendor would not
fix.

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dpflan
Thanks for sharing. That's an good point about subjectivity (opinion) versus
objectivity (facts + benchmarks).

In those 6 months was there an attempt to benchmark the two leading
candidates?

