[willvarfar]

Real medium and large companies are so much messier. Almost guaranteed to have different iterations of each architecture and multiple competing architectures all running in parallel, with divided siloed and opposing ownership and perverse incentives and all the rest. Show me the spaghetti dataflow chart of an org and I will reverse-engineer the history of power struggles, resume-engineering and fads and failures that created it :)

[piva00]

Hilarious how true this can be, at some point I worked at a place that had three different competing setups for data workflows, with completely different stacks in all the possible ways: different programming languages, data stores, pipeline orchestrators, etc.

An absolute mess of technologies that no single person could make sense, backfilling when something went wrong could need 5-10 people to coordinate.

The running joke was that the data engineering department was trying to compete with the frontend devs on how fast they could throw a whole architecture out for a new fad.