josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart

You see, there are actually three ways things can go from a startup. It can crash and burn (doesn't matter what you planned, every dollar spent making it scale is now worthless), it can explode with success (everything that doesn't scale means incredible pain and expense) but it can also trundle along steadily growing by increments.

The latter is boring, not many books about it, no amazing slide show presentations with violent asymptotic charts. But it's probably reality for way more engineers. In this scenario there isn't enough money to solve problems by throwing money at them, you will run out.

And it's for this reason that you ought to do a little bit of thinking about the things Josh mentions on a new project. You don't have to solve every problem now, that leads to paralysis, but you need some awareness of which bits of the system will need work in six weeks, or in six months with the kind of steady growth that means there's no risk of unemployment but you also won't all be rich.

Smart clients would be coming to Josh because they actually do have a specific scalability problem in PostgreSQL, and they expect him to fix it so that they can avoid spending a lot of money on faster servers as a workaround. Paying a PostgreSQL consultant to tell you that you'd got a switch port running at 10 Half duplex is not smart.