Duplication of effort is common-place at scale because there are too many communication paths to even hope for very much collaboration, much less organize every

Duplication of effort is common-place at scale because there are too many communication paths to even hope for very much collaboration, much less organize everyone/everything top-down (eg, impossible). Technical debt is like the national debt: interest gets paid along with way, but sooner or later there will be a reckoning. There is often too much ego-investment, NIH and sunk costs bias for people to diverge much from whichever direction they were moving, even if it's not a good direction to go. There is no perfect; and in fact, the perfect is the enemy of the shipping; and there's a infinitely massive continuum from fragile to awesome.