If you find product/market fit before you run out of money... that's when you need to hire engineers who are in it for the long hall. People who focus on reliability and scaling. People who might stick around for 5 years to see if your startup becomes a unicorn.
You can also tell the story of how you worked really hard to engineer a solution that was good enough to carry a startup to viability given the 4 months you had. I would choose the second person over the first person because they have a sense of practicality which is really important. But it can be career limiting to not communicate that in your resume somehow, so I understand how you can think it would be a bad thing. And as always you have to be aware that your employer is in that situation, and so if they don't tell you then you're screwed.
There are a lot of people out there who want to hire practical engineers. It's just a different market and you have to signal differently in your resume.
startups are generally moreso a business endeavor than an engineering one, although the engineering must correctly support the business
the engineering begins to take the driver’s seat as the tech debt and cost of scaling catch up to successful companies and begin to create excess drag
but for many years, such companies can typically still afford to throw away money to solve business problems, including these problems of scale
Some startups (like mine) are delivering a service, and the technology used to deliver that service is instrumental. Our back-end is an Airtable I configured myself, and it's been sufficient so far; better tech is not make or break for what we do. Other startups, like Flexport some years ago, fundamentally depend on technical function because that's the core of what they do.
One of the common mistakes founders make, in my expetience, is not asking which camp they're in. It's not a hard question to answer (usually), but it's an easy one not to ask.
