4 ms·
> A "silo" is incomprehsible in a factory Efficient factories are built on silos. You do your job in your area and the next person does theirs. You might colla
by dpark 5y ago
> A "silo" is incomprehsible in a factory
Efficient factories are built on silos. You do your job in your area and the next person does theirs. You might collaborate, but you absolutely have a clear division of labor.
If you don’t have a division of labor and silos, you don’t have a factory. You have artisans.
- hinkley 5y agoBecause a lot of the profit comes in vertical integration. I mean that’s why you built the factory right? To take materials in one end and put something that is greater than the sum if its parts out the other?
- akkartik 5y agoYes. And that's ok! The world ran on artisans for hundreds of years. It's even better than that right now, because we already have factories: the programs. Do we need factories to build the factories? I don't think we're there yet, not to mention we don't know how to build these meta-factories right. Quoting myself from OP: "Libraries with non-trivial functionality take a long time to get right, and in the meantime they are produced more like guilds of craftsmen than factories. (Even if the products themselves permit factory-like operation at scale.) In that initial bake-in period we are ill-served by conventional metaphors of software components, building blocks, etc. We should be dealing more in vertically-integrated self-contained systems rather than plug-and-play libraries. More OpenBSD, less `gem install`." Efficiency is great, but it's not the only thing to optimize for.
- dpark 5y agoTo be clear, I was not comparing factories to software engineering. I was merely responding to the claim about factories not being silo’d. Software engineering looks nothing like a factory. At least not at the point of coding. Maybe at the deployment side.