[hippich]

At my last place "architecture by committee" did not appear to work at all. I think there were two reasons:

1) Lack of focus - everyone had their own annoying part of the system they wanted to fix badly and were not aware much about what going on elsewhere.

2) Our group of ~10 people would cost 10x of senior salaries to the company to do such architecture work. No manager would ever authorize that.

[codyb]

I worked at one company which did design reviews for major projects where one person would present and everyone would pick at it until some semblance of a decent consensus was reached and then said designer would go off and build their stuff.

That worked pretty well and kept each review fairly focused.

And it was generally one of my favorite parts of the day from either end.

It’s really nice to be able to sit with a group of engineers, hear each other’s thoughts, find things you missed, and get away from the laptops for a bit to thing about new systems.

[JohnBooty]

How big were the committees?

A group of 10 seems too large and counterproductive. I think a group of roughly 3 seems about right.