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Ask HN: Where/How did you meet your non technical cofounder
If you're a CTO or an engineer who found a business partner. How did you find them or how did they find you ?
A new engineer on the team suggests that we merge all the applications together. We render the frontend using express, and combine the microservices together.
He's argument is that monolithic apps can still scale well. Furthermore, it'll be easier for engineer to roll out features since the entire code is in one project, and a feature can be developed all the way from the back to the frontend.
I'm finding his argument hard to believe. An app of that size can end up very coupled. It will be a single point of failure. If one child process crashes so much damage can be done. DB ORM will run slower because of how DB intensive the app will be. Obviously many of these issues can be solved with sufficient scaling. Which would also cost more since we're not scaling whats in demand, but instead the entire app. -- Even if we decide to split the app down the road that only means a way larger effort.
Lastly a very smart person told me once to shard early. It's hard enough to shard early he said, so why do it when you're running out of time.
That engineers argument is to just keep scaling up the DB. While I agree that's a temporary solution, in a world that produces and collects more data each day, sharding in my opinion is inevitable.
5 months ago I joined a startup as a senior engineer/ employee 0. During my interview I shared my goals with the cofounders of wanting to move into management and hopefully become the CTO one day. The cofounders said they'd love nothing more than to see that happen, and agreed that I'd be the most suitable candidate for the job since I'll pretty much be designing the entire system. Shortly after joining we got into an accelerator.
3 months go by, 2 weeks after our release I heard my CEO chat about how he asked one of our advisors to join as the CTO. When I asked him wondering, he said that VC firms were pressuring them to get an experienced CTO.
I had no issue with accepting the fact that I am not experienced enough to be a CTO. But I felt used and hurt because my CEO knew that fact from the beginning, and didn't tell me a thing. The only reason I found out about the whole situation was because I was around when he was having that conversation.
During my conversation with the CEO he said they weren't concerned with getting a CTO at the moment but much more focused on getting more engineers since the other engineer and I pretty much can't pull 18 hour days anymore.
2 weeks after my conversation with the CEO, I met one of the cofounders friends who later I find out was in consideration for the CTO position.
Today my CEO was telling me about how it looks like that friend is probably joining as the CTO.
I spoke to my mentor and others. Everyone told me to take this opportunity to learn from someone great. But I can't help but feel angry because the cofounders say one thing, and another thing happens.
EDIT:I'm feeling very unmotivated, and pretty depressed. I feel like I failed, and I have no goals to work for. I am pretty much stuck as an engineer for at least 2-3 years until we even grow large enough to layer up
What would you do? am I being immature about this?