[omnicognate]

Conway's Law:

> Organizations which design systems... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

[whilenot-dev]

Tell this to a company of 4 engineers that created a system with 40 microservices, deployed as one VM image, to be running on 1 machine.

[noir_lord]

They wouldn't have time to hear it because they'd be trying to fix their local dev environment.

I worked for a company that had done pretty much that - not fun at all (for extra fun half the microservices where in a language only half the dev team had even passing familiarity with).

You need someone in charge with "taste" enough to not allow that to happen or it can happen.

[omnicognate]

LOL, perhaps the communication structure there was "silent, internalised turmoil".

[whilenot-dev]

Probably =), or Conway's law was always about the lower ends of the communication nodes in a company graph. I think it's time we also always include the upper ends of our cognitive limits of multitasking when we design systems in relation to organization structures.

[hinkley]

Lesser known trick: reorganize your teams so the code isn’t batshit.

[noir_lord]

That does imply that the people in the business with the authority to do that know how to do that and they in my experience don't - they can't solve a problem they don't understand and are unwilling to delegate it to someone who can understand it.

The same pattern repeats across multiple companies - it comes down to trust and delegation, if the people with the power are unwilling to delegate bad things happen.