this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
301 points (95.2% liked)

Programmer Humor

33722 readers
549 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

For reference (as per Wikipedia):

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

— Melvin E. Conway

Imagine interpreting that as advice on how you should try to design things, lol.

Tbf, I think most of the post is just typical LinkedIn fluff, but I didn't want to take the poor fellow out of context.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago (2 children)

So I don’t wholly disagree with your point, but even if I take that context at face value it still comes off as “ hey if your orgs are designed in perfect harmony w/ your objectives, your product will meet those objectives”.

Sure that’s logical as far as it goes, but it’s pretty much never the case in practice that you have a context that’s actually optimized to needs like that.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I feel like the subtext the post doesn't say explicitly is that most management structure are not setup this way and thus software projects end up with a non-optimal design.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

That is pretty much a given. Why else write about it at all?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I read it similar, but also kind of from the other side: If your organization is set up in a way that ignores the technical requirements of the product, your are going to have a bad time.

And yes, of course this is more often on the bad side than on the good side in practice. If everything was already fine most of the time, there would be no point in discussing this topic.