A year ago I thought Conway's law was nonsense, but recent experience has led me to walk some of that back. I would replace "are constrained to" with "grow to",

A year ago I thought Conway's law was nonsense, but recent experience has led me to walk some of that back. I would replace "are constrained to" with "grow to", or perhaps just "often". On my first day of my current job, Mufasa (my boss) took me up on Pride Rock at sunrise, and we cast our eyes over the system diagram of the back-end supporting our product. And he told me, "We work on this box here." Our team's box gets data from that team's box, and we output data to be consumed by this other team's box... "Any what about that shadowy land?" I asked, pointing to the arrows coming from outside the diagram. "That is the Front-end. You must never go there." So yeah, Conway's law through and through. This is a big company, though, and a long-lived product. At my last job, at a startup that was ~3 years old, things were intentionally very different. This month you and a few others worked on feature X. Not on this system or that system, you were implementing something for the customer. Maybe you're a backend engineer, but you still wrote the database migration, the queries, the endpoints, the front-end logic, markup, CSS, whatever. Some of it you sucked at, but a lot of that was handled by good team composition. If another engineer on that feature knew CSS better, they mostly styled the things and you reviewed their work. Maybe you styled the next thing. I was frustrated in that job, because I didn't like writing CSS, and I wasn't good at it, and I was very good at some other things. Why couldn't I just do those things I was good at? It would have kept me a lot more productive, and saved (and made) the company a lot of money! Why did I have to do things I was bad at? Did they think engineers were interchangeable? Well, now I know. In my current job, working on five different features in my box in the system diagram, I'm super productive when pointed in the right direction with enough to work on and some autonomy. That just doesn't happen as often. We need to communicate between teams a lot more. We need to align our quarterly deliverables. We duplicate functionality on both sides of an interface, (or in each of N components), with subtly different semantics, because nobody technical is responsible for the feature. Show-stopping bugs before launch are a fact of life, because integration tests between our components suck. Generously (though for other reasons too), we're 1/3 as productive as my last gig was. Conway's law is strangling us.