Notes on being the first engineer and the last

At ten people, your job is to make decisions cheap to reverse. At fifty, your job is to make them expensive to make badly. Almost every mistake I made in between came from applying the wrong one at the wrong size.

The early instinct — ship it, watch it, fix it — works because the blast radius is one afternoon. The later instinct is not caution for its own sake; it is the recognition that the blast radius is now other people's weeks.

The hard part is that nobody tells you when you crossed over. You notice it retroactively, in the shape of a postmortem.