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I don't know why this post has so many downvotes. Kingdom building has come to developer teams. You no longer see large dev teams that collaborate really well

I don't know why this post has so many downvotes. Kingdom building has come to developer teams. You no longer see large dev teams that collaborate really well, instead you see silos and pizza teams. No one talks, everything becomes a political turf war, and the end result is everyone taking their ball and going home. Higher ups don't understand the complexity of the stack, they just hear we're constantly shipping new things--that has to be good? New is better than maintenance right? Microservices are just managers codifying the boundaries of their kingdom.

pydry 6y ago
It's hardly accurate to say it's come to developer teams - it's always been like this. This is simply human nature manifested in large groups. Large groups operating well together without clearly defined boundaries of responsibility is very much the exception rather than the norm and always has been.
- candiddevmike 6y ago
  I would argue that a lot of the "famed agility" and effectiveness of startups is their flat structure and lack of middle management bloat, especially for the devs. As soon as you start splitting the dev teams apart, productivity grinds to a halt and you start hearing phrases like "this team owns that" and other territory marking behavior.
  - pydry 6y ago
    I think that well defined software teams that can integrate effectively with one another in large companies could spell the end of software startups. The dysfunctionality of middle management outweighed economies of scale for a long time but I doubt it will last forever.
  - jonfw 6y ago
    That's probably because startups are small organizations. Nobody is arguing that productivity increases linearly as you add 2 pizza teams. Productivity increases logarithmically. '2 pizza teams' are supposed to represent where the productivity gains of adding a dev to a team are marginal.

pydry 6y ago

It's hardly accurate to say it's come to developer teams - it's always been like this. This is simply human nature manifested in large groups. Large groups operating well together without clearly defined boundaries of responsibility is very much the exception rather than the norm and always has been.

candiddevmike 6y ago
I would argue that a lot of the "famed agility" and effectiveness of startups is their flat structure and lack of middle management bloat, especially for the devs. As soon as you start splitting the dev teams apart, productivity grinds to a halt and you start hearing phrases like "this team owns that" and other territory marking behavior.
- pydry 6y ago
  I think that well defined software teams that can integrate effectively with one another in large companies could spell the end of software startups. The dysfunctionality of middle management outweighed economies of scale for a long time but I doubt it will last forever.
- jonfw 6y ago
  That's probably because startups are small organizations. Nobody is arguing that productivity increases linearly as you add 2 pizza teams. Productivity increases logarithmically. '2 pizza teams' are supposed to represent where the productivity gains of adding a dev to a team are marginal.