Exactly. The greater problem is that the ways to fail monolith specific work vastly outnumbers the way to succeed. Furthermore, the primary work involved is mo

Exactly. The greater problem is that the ways to fail monolith specific work vastly outnumbers the way to succeed. Furthermore, the primary work involved is months to years worth of horrible unattractive refactoring. Then this is compounded by it being very hard to measure success. So you run into a situation that makes principal engineers run or look for the door. Rather than working on an actually hard problem, they would rather pad their resumes with increasingly complex novel work, further detracting from the commons. So not only is it an un-owned common, but senior engineer alignment is directly against work involving the root problem because no one in their right mind would be responsible or accountable for something with so few avenues to success. Not only is senior engineering alignment individually against being directly responsible for the monolith, but managerial leadership is as well. You have infrastructure with infrastructure concerns, and product worried about shipping product, and then you have to ask where this monolith responsible team is. Pushing code, monitoring, capacity management, oncall, etc. are all traditionally under the infra umbrella. Business logic is traditionally under the product umbrella. So who takes responsibility for the monolith, the chief repository of business logic? A monolith is a marriage between the two entities. Each individual product team doesn't want to do monolith work, because it makes it harder to ship the features they promised. Infra doesn't want to do monolith work because it is business logic code that needs to be refactored. So no infra team and no product team will directly feel responsible. Senior managerial leadership is at the mercy of senior engineering leadership, and therefore also cannot claim responsibility for the monolith. If you travel up the management hierarchy, that leaves roughly 4 people capable of doing anything about this most critical problem. The CEO, who has ultimate responsibility for all problems, the VP of infra, who could choose to claim responsibility for this area, the VP of product, who could choose to claim responsibility for this area, or the CTO who is the most directly responsible person for solving this problem as the de facto mediator of product and infra concerns and responsibilities. The answer is probably inventing a 3rd VP responsible for the area between product and infra and giving them proper authority.