A Danish startup who wasted funding with juniors

Published: February 1, 2023

This was one of my first few jobs, and I applied to it when my previous employer laid us all due to financial problems. I was hired as a software developer with a pretty low salary, but I was happy to have a job at that time.

I was assigned to work on a mix of "legacy", "legacy of legacy", and the "new" codebases. Based on what I saw, I started to wonder if, in Denmark, people at universities learn even simple things like the concept of normalization in designing relational databases??

Basically, we had one legacy-of-legacy system in which the backend (mixed with the frontend) was creating one database per customer (yes, you read it right!!!)

Then, to fix the issues caused by this flawed design, they created a newer solution, in which the system was creating one table per customer (yes, you read it right, again!!!)

And then, they hired a few more people to work with the previous team to fix the issues caused by the lousy design of both solutions.

Finally, they had 3 tightly coupled systems, directly reading from and modifying each other's databases in a way that people had to spend hours fixing all the issues introduced right after each small change. The system was too slow, very expensive to operate, and very difficult to understand which data resides where, even though back then, they didn't even have 1,000 customers!

Later, they fired the Danish CTO and replaced him with a new one in Poland, building a completely new product from scratch with a new team using a different technology stack. This transformation was huge, took them a while to finish, and needed a lot of money. Still, with that horribly un-scalable and un-maintainable digital setup, it was a matter of life and death for the business that was just about to scale. In my opinion they finally did the right thing. Even though they wasted a lot of money, now, with the new setup, they could scale and become one of the largest companies in their domain. (business-wise they were very good and also had strong connections to financially back them up)

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The contents of this article should not be construed as legal advice.
Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.
English is not my mother-tongue language, so even though I try my best to express myself correctly, there might be a chance of miscommunication.
Links or references to other websites, including the use of information from 3rd-parties, are provided for the benefit of people who use this website. I am not responsible for the accuracy of the content on the websites that I have put a link to and I do not endorse any of those organizations or their contents.
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A Danish startup who wasted funding with juniors

Published: February 1, 2023

A Danish startup who wasted funding with juniors

Basically, we had one legacy-of-legacy system in which the backend (mixed with the frontend) was creating one database per customer (yes, you read it right!!!)

Then, to fix the issues caused by this flawed design, they created a newer solution, in which the system was creating one table per customer (yes, you read it right, again!!!)

And then, they hired a few more people to work with the previous team to fix the issues caused by the lousy design of both solutions.

If you liked the article, feel free to share it with your friends, family, or colleagues. You can also follow me on Medium or LinkedIn.

Copyright & Disclaimer

All content provided on this article is for informational and educational purposes only. The author makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site.
All the content is copyrighted, except the assets and content I have referenced to other people's work, and may not be reproduced on other websites, blogs, or social media. You are not allowed to reproduce, summarize to create derivative work, or use any content from this website under your name. This includes creating a similar article or summary based on AI/GenAI. For educational purposes, you may refer to parts of the content, and only refer, but you must provide a link back to the original article on this website. This is allowed only if your content is less than 10% similar to the original article.
While every care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the content of this website, I make no representation as to the accuracy, correctness, or fitness for any purpose of the site content, nor do I accept any liability for loss or damage (including consequential loss or damage), however, caused, which may be incurred by any person or organization from reliance on or use of information on this site.
The contents of this article should not be construed as legal advice.
Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.
English is not my mother-tongue language, so even though I try my best to express myself correctly, there might be a chance of miscommunication.
Links or references to other websites, including the use of information from 3rd-parties, are provided for the benefit of people who use this website. I am not responsible for the accuracy of the content on the websites that I have put a link to and I do not endorse any of those organizations or their contents.
If you have any queries or if you believe any information on this article is inaccurate, or if you think any of the assets used in this article are in violation of copyright, please contact me and let me know.