I tell you what its not, being a great engineer. That can help in someways in understanding the technical aspects, but the amount of startups I know who have written incredible clean code with beautiful architecture who have run out of funding compared to the folks who wrote a janky frankensteins monster which they sold to customers, is very high.
> who wrote a janky frankensteins monster which they sold to customers
That's likely because they are focused on building products not fancy toys. No wonder they succeed. Once cash flow is established you can hire workers to tidy things up and argue over what indentation style to use or which shiny new framework to adopt.
Furthermore, we’re now in a far more cash-constrained business environment, and it’s much harder to justify having staff that have a vague impact on the bottom line (“argue over indentation style”, “argue over which shiny new framework to adopt”).
If you're selling an API, you probably cannot afford to have a shitty API design because no one will want to use your API.
If you're selling a B2B product, you can probably have a shitty architecture because it's all internal and B2B app are generally lower scale.
Though in saying that I would expect that B2B products like Snowflake and other 'deep tech' products require good engineering, otherwise the product just wouldn't work.
