[quinnirill]

Yep, it can be done right. I’ve been in a team where we had more services than people yet most of the services were just chugging along with little to no maintenance (thanks to most being in a monorepo with few dependencies so the spam of dependencies getting out of date was manageable).

It was a constant uphill battle though, my time was largely spent on trying to prevent the creep of services born out of trying to enforce Conway’s law rather than to contain it’s impact. When people put in the effort of shaping the team/organization around the most optimal architecture rather than shaping out the architecture to fit the organization, it works out rather nicely and yields good productivity and an efficient system. Luckily at the time even ICs like me had enough sway to keep things at check.