Non-technical factors affecting software architecture

Next month I complete 5 years since I started working as a software engineer for money. In these 5 years my thought process while designing or writing software has changed dramatically. And the reason for that is not that I've learned a lot of new concepts in Computer Science over the years. But, most of things affected these changes have very less or nothing to do with actual Computer Science. I tried to list a few of them below. Some of these might be pretty obvious to experienced engineers but they might be surprising to beginners.

What costs less money?

I've worked with resource constrained environments such as PaaS a lot. Everything is managed by somebody else and they ask for a lot of money if you want to scale up vertically. This makes me choose my moves by what component costs less. For example, I would load records from different tables in web app memory one by one instead of doing a join in the database. Because database instance does not have sufficient memory and upgrading its memory costs twice the current cost.

Can we find people to maintain?

All of my last 5 years have been in Tokyo. Sometimes it can be very challenging to find suitable engineers here. So, whenever I’ve tried to write something new from scratch, I had to keep in mind if the tools (programming language, frameworks, etc.) being used are well known in Tokyo. If the tools are not well-known then I at least make sure they are not ridiculously difficult to understand.

Co-worker's comfort

Sometimes even though I have a perfect tool for something only I am responsible for and am well versed with it, my co-workers aren't. I always keep in mind the scenario where either I go on a vacation or move on to another job. In those scenarios my co-workers have to maintain the system, although it’s not their main responsibility. So, I always try to choose what everyone is comfortable with.

Convincing a superior

As a beginner I've caused my share of bugs. But at the same time, I've delivered way more working features. But somehow, some of my superiors always remembered that one time I caused a bug and they had to answer clients or their superiors. So, when I am explaining a better solution for a certain problem, they're less open minded. And this affects my choice of right design a lot. I try to balance between the amount of effort put in convincing my boss and actual implementation effort.

Sometimes I absolutely hate that I’ve to take above factors into consideration (especially the last one) while creating something new. But it can’t be helped and I do what I have to do.