If you are paid according to time and material, you could be sailing in bad legal waters. Ask an attorney about fraudulent billing.
If you are paid like an FTE, As long as your employer is satisfied with your level of productivity, then it really does not matter how long it took you to produce results.
Nevertheless, it's shady to insert bugs into your products. My work is my pride is what matters in the end.
When companies hoard profits, they really serve no purpose and no-one but to perpetuate their control and to reduce and eliminate the ability of others to compete. The massive access to capital is akin to a super power. Well, superpower can be used by for better or for worse.
Just as anti-trust laws are necessary, there will be drives for measures to encourage and even force companies to put their cash piles to use. Cash is the life of an economy, it needs to flow and flow.
It's way too easy for anyone to pick up Node and CRUD a few pieces of data into a NOSQL store and voila, I am an architect :)
Selecting the right framework, platform, model for current needs with reasonable forward looking support takes experience and strong formal fundamentals.
You need hard numbers and intelligence available to only you. Once you have the data, talk to people you trust, then make a decision. If you hold 5%, you have rights, rights to information. Obtain the information, then decide.
As far as a rabbit in your hand now versus 10 in the bushes provided the hunt goes well, consider your own situation and what the 100K would mean. Would you be able obtain a better ROI with 100K in your own hand versus say, staying with the company? Are you young young or young at heart?
Possibly. However, tooling and code generation can help.
If the smarts is just a state machine, and the rules are abstracted at the right level, it would not be that hard to support.
"Thick" smartpoints can save on operating cost (infrastructure, personnel, complexity, level of expertise) when your system is "simple enough"
At massive scale, from an economies of scale (all things considered), it may make better sense to go with "Thin" smart endpoints.
The migration between the 2 models is where the art of the design comes in play :) It's an art because it is a decision process involving many players with conflicting and competing goals, decisions, time frames, motivations etc.
I architected and built a system based on MQ a number of years ago. The very same design / implementation went from supporting 0 messages to a billion messages a day quietly and silently with full message tracing, retries, multi language support, etc.
Maybe I should have blogged about it :)
Anyway, although all the design principles are the same: 1) Transparent and seamless to application code, 2) Control communication end points, the MQ constructs and languages are not as accessible and readily available and visible as HTTP and RESTful.
A MQ can be temperamental and hard to operate. On the other hand, even middle-schoolers can master nginx, haproxy, write their own, etc with a bit of guidance :)
Popularity and rate of adoption depends on availability to the masses and the ease with which the masses can learn to use. If it takes to long (say, 15 minutes) to bring a framework up, hordes of engineers will find a massive number of reasons to roll their own ...
You are making assumptions about both the premise and the conclusion :)
Designing and building for scalability, flexibility, availability, etc does not mean going all out to boil the ocean and then find that you attempted to boil the wrong ocean.
I frankly have no idea what you are talking about. You are making wild assumptions that monolith are better just because...
It will all come down the the experience of the team, esp. the leadership - the managers, the leads.
A strong, experienced, mature and effective leadeship will enable a team to perform "magic" and set the right technology foundation that will prove its worth as the business grows over time
Yes, you will want to seek the advice of a lawyer before you start
However, let's not make a mountain out of a molehill. The lawyer may be good with the use of the sledgehammer of the laws but they will probably not be good with helping you navigate the "inter personal" ends specific to your situation.
Btw, I have worked contracts larger than 25K without a lawyer and using the client's "master contract". I always review carefully clauses that concern me the most: ownership of IP, payment schedule, breach of contract, termination of contract, damages.
For my own consulting business, we have had disagreement at times (IP, amount upward 100K) but all were sorted out just fine without lawyers involved.
And when I represented Fortune 10/100 company, I have resolved 6-7 digits issues without lawyers just fine. However, when you represent Fortune 10/100 companies, things tend to be easier :)
In your case, try to work "inter personally" to get your 25K or even see if those 25K can translate into "credit/equity" that may give you a "slice" of the liquidation, if any. Talk to a lawyer about this one.
If you are paid like an FTE, As long as your employer is satisfied with your level of productivity, then it really does not matter how long it took you to produce results.
Nevertheless, it's shady to insert bugs into your products. My work is my pride is what matters in the end.