[3np]

My experience mirrors yours. This is pretty closely related to the "visual programming" discussions we had on HN the other day.

Another observation: If you do not have competent engineering representation in owning business units, no amount of rearchitecturing will save you. On the other hand, if you do manage to have decent engineers in each owning team while maintaning quality of your core/platform and don't wreck incentives and empowerment, things have a larger tendency to sort themselves out.

It's when you shuffle your actual insightful engineers into middle/upper management and put helpless "Senior Engineer"s in charge of entire projects with a clueless PM or burnt-out-and-checked-out ex-dev in the middle that things go south.