The example of the structureless team also applies to technical decisions and processes. There is a reason that you often find a lot of spaghetti code in early startups. When work is done to satisfy an immediate task, in a unified code base worked on by a team of interchangeables, the result is not usually a larger thoughtful structure, but a tweak here, a hack there — anything to get things done and moving forward. It’s no surprise that we usually end up refactoring spaghetti code when we want to make it scalable, because refactoring usually involves identifying and explicitly drawing out
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