Avoid Shipping Your Org Chart
15 points by binarycleric
15 points by binarycleric
really expected this to explicitly mention Conway’s law…
yes and the point of it being a "law" is that it's impossible to avoid over the long term. What's shipping will shift to fit the org chart because trying to fight against the friction points in your org is going to cause more friction.
The alternative is for the org chart to shift to fit what is shipping (or what you want to be shipping).
Yep. It's not avoidable in the short term either, but coyote time allows organizations to temporarily ignore any consequences from their actions from any source. I like the phrasing from the nLab page on Conway's Law:
A lone builder, working in a short span of time, has no structural limitations on what they produce. However, a highly structured team of builders, working across a long period of time where individual humans join and leave, has a large structure with many edges that each provoke a corresponding interaction in the resulting system. Note that formally the organization actually stamps out a preimage of the homomorphism [implied by Conway's Law].
I get the spirit of what they're trying to say, but speaking from experience, lone builders absolutely have structural limitations on what they produce. In fact, I believe the structural limitations of what groups of people produce arises not just from their coordination but from their necessary individual limits
The alternative is for the org chart to shift to fit what is shipping (or what you want to be shipping).
But this is difficult because org charts are decided by company politics, and managers vying for influence. Most engineers are happy to build a system that makes architectural sense, but then it slowly fractures to match the org chart.