Personal experience from a past job: Coming from a clunky, overused but underdesigned monolithic structure, the work to standardize inter-team/inter-department

Personal experience from a past job: Coming from a clunky, overused but underdesigned monolithic structure, the work to standardize inter-team/inter-department communication is really hard. In general, the easiest thing is to overspecify those APIs and fight anyone who wants to simplify them. Complicated work looks good on a CV, after all. So now you have hard-to-implement, full-of-cruft API designs. At that point, teams realize that the easiest thing is to work around them. And off you go into splintered components which ignore the standard APIs as much as possible. Turns out that's much easier, and you deliver results with higher velocity! From far enough away, you can just see "more standard APIs => higher velocity", so obviously you keep doing that, right?