A recent article titled “Why Developers are Quietly Quitting Golang” has been making the rounds. It highlights a Medium post where a startup founder describes choosing Go (Golang) for their company as “the biggest mistake of [their] life.” That’s a heavy statement. It’s understandably attention-grabbing, and borderline clickbait, but also one that deserves a more careful unpacking.

This post isn’t meant a defense of Go. It’s not a fanboy post. It’s not a rebuttal aimed at invalidating the author’s experience. It’s a reflection on the real lesson hidden inside their story—one that has little to do with Go itself.

Because here’s the truth: when you’re building a startup, the best language is almost always going to be the one you’re most fluent in — the one that lets you iterate fast, solve problems quickly, and keep your focus on product-market fit, not fighting your tooling.

The Misstep Wasn’t Go. It Was the Mindset.

Startups are about speed, learning, and iteration. In the early stages, your bottleneck isn’t CPU-bound performance or the theoretical elegance of your backend — it’s survival. It’s shipping a working prototype, validating your idea, and having the flexibility to change direction three times in a week if needed. In a startup it is always build first, scale later. That means your tooling should work with you, not against you. Choosing something you’re unfamiliar with because it’s “industry cool” or “designed for scale” can backfire. Hard.

In the case described in the article, it seems the founder chose Go not because they knew it well, but because it seemed like the “right” language for backend services. But “right” is subjective. For an engineer at Google writing a high-throughput system, Go might be perfect. For a startup founder building a prototype with limited sleep and no one else on the team? Maybe not.

This isn’t a knock against Go. Go has a clear syntax, great concurrency support, a vibrant ecosystem, and a strong focus on simplicity. But like any language, it comes with tradeoffs—and if you’re learning those tradeoffs on the fly while trying to build a company, you’re stacking the deck against yourself.

The Industry’s Shiny-Thing Syndrome

The article also rightly critiques our industry’s obsession with newness. The tech world is addicted to novelty—always searching for the next great framework, architecture, or language. Sometimes that’s a strength: it’s what pushes innovation forward. But other times, it distracts us from the fundamentals. We chase hype instead of value. We adopt complexity in the name of modernity.

And that’s the teal crux of the issue.

The author’s real pain came not from Go, but from the disconnect between what they needed (a fast, reliable way to build and iterate) and what they chose (a language they weren’t fluent in). Go just happened to be the language in the spotlight at the time. Honestly, it could have been any language if they weren’t familiar with it. In fact, the article even references the other “new shiny” languages: Zig, Kotlin, and Rust.

Use What Lets You Build

If you’re a founder — or even just the tech lead of a small team—the best advice I can give is: use the language that lets you move. Whether that’s Ruby, Python, PHP, Node, Dart, or yes, even Go. Your job is to create value, not to win language purity contests on Hacker News.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn new tools. But the time to do that is before you start a company, or after you’ve validated your product, not in the critical zero-to-one phase.

Remember that the goal of a startup is to ship. Get your product built first, if you discover you have scaling problems, then you’re actually in a better place than most startups are because that means you’ve got customers who want your product.

Closing Thoughts

I have immense sympathy for any founder who’s walked through the fire and come out burned. Startups are incredibly hard. Building things from scratch is hard. But when we look back on the scars, we should be careful not to blame the hammer for where we swung it.

If you’re navigating similar decisions—picking tools, validating ideas, or trying to avoid the common early-stage pitfalls, I’ve been there. Through Caffeinated Softworks, I help founders and teams make smarter, calmer technical decisions rooted in experience, not hype.

Sometimes all you need is a sounding board or to speak to someone who’s already made the hard calls.