[0xbadcafebee]

"And with every few orders of magnitude of growth the current architecture would start to show cracks in reliability and performance, and engineers would start to spend more time with virtual duct tape and WD40 than building new innovative products. At each of these inflection points, engineers would invent their way into a new architectural structure to be ready for the next orders of magnitude growth."

That last part, to me, is the key to success: getting the whole business to do things in a new way. That is fucking hard. If you can get your business to do it, you have an invaluable superpower. The more things that you can reinvent, faster, gives you more and more superpowers. It's one thing to change your architecture. But also imagine getting every employee to change how they deal with vacations, suppliers, customers, finance, or involving entirely new industries. The easier it is to adapt and change, the longer you survive and the more you thrive. Evolution, baby.

[yedava]

I wish there was a way to quantify the externalities of "success" of this kind. How many developers had to burnout? How many relationships had to suffer, or never even had a chance to bloom because "success" didn't leave time for anything else? And also to be considered are the downstream effects of a culture of such "success", like how Amazon's warehouse employees are treated.

[bwestergard]

"But also imagine getting every employee to change how they deal with vacations"

Interesting example. Why would changing distributed computing architecture have an impact on vacation policy?

[0xbadcafebee]

I'm saying architecture is just one way of changing an organization. Other ways of changing an organization, separate from anything technical, might include changing people's schedules or vacation policy, or who you hire, or where, or how. Another would be how you store parts, make orders, assemble products. Or starting work in an entirely new industry.

Maybe you work at a company that sometimes works with the government. As a result, the whole company might develop a hiring process which is very slow, very detailed, and excludes certain people from being hired. But probably only a very small number of employees actually have to conform to those government requirements. You can apply them to all new hires "for simplicity", but it makes it harder to hire for non-government positions. So changing how you hire, to make it easier and faster to hire people of a wider background, benefits your organization. If your org can't easily make those changes, it will be disadvantaged.

[bwestergard]

Oh, I got it, you meant the "architecture" of the firm (i.e. the org chart).