One of the most popular blog posts from Paul Graham (founder of YCombinator) tells founders to do things that don’t scale. While good founders do a decent job of internalizing this for all sorts of parts of the business, I still find that engineers at startups are horrible at making the right tradeoff when it comes to software and code. Part of it is that it feels bad to do things manually; it’s almost the antithesis of being an engineer. The other part is that scaling and automating are often more exciting engineering problems and make people think they’re better engineers for doing them.