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This article does a good job describing one failure mode that's not understood well, but the opposite failure mode is much more common in my experience- having

This article does a good job describing one failure mode that's not understood well, but the opposite failure mode is much more common in my experience- having lots of ways to do the same thing can be very inefficient and brittle, even at small companies. The right answer is not "never unify systems" or "always unify systems", but develop judgement about when things should be unified.

didibus 5y ago
Agree, I too have seen the lack of unification more often then not, because business projects are always local. This client wants feature Y, why build it for all clients right now if only one client wants it, I only want to pay for getting the feature out to the client as cheaply and quickly as possible. And now you've got a single use feature. Then next client comes over, and you can't reuse the feature, so you build it again in a slightly different way by different people, maybe even in a different team, rince and repeat. I see that all the time. And that's just one example of how people get their velocity down to a crawl over time. The only solution then is to hire more and more engineers until you're a huge engineering department maintaining a single product. Of course, this is such a rampant problem in the software industry that a whole market for reusable standard generic solutions was created. That's why we got the cloud, and the array of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc. And don't forget the entire open source is about standards, being able to reuse existing components and frameworks. What I think the article doesn't mention is that unifying and creating a standard solution is a harder task then creating custom solutions one after the other for each use case/local context. In practice I've seen people try and fail, but often it's not the person with most experience trying, or the business isn't truly willing to put in the effort to succeed, both of these can sabotage things. And again, because it is hard, you have to be willing to fail the first time, but use those learning to try again, and again, until you crack it. And doing that is often worth it long term, cause when you crack it the efficiency and scale will go through the roof, if your business is smart, you might even realize what you have is more valuable than your current business, and pivot to being a SaaS vendor haha. Or you can keep it secret as a competitive advantage.

didibus 5y ago

Agree, I too have seen the lack of unification more often then not, because business projects are always local. This client wants feature Y, why build it for all clients right now if only one client wants it, I only want to pay for getting the feature out to the client as cheaply and quickly as possible. And now you've got a single use feature. Then next client comes over, and you can't reuse the feature, so you build it again in a slightly different way by different people, maybe even in a different team, rince and repeat. I see that all the time. And that's just one example of how people get their velocity down to a crawl over time. The only solution then is to hire more and more engineers until you're a huge engineering department maintaining a single product. Of course, this is such a rampant problem in the software industry that a whole market for reusable standard generic solutions was created. That's why we got the cloud, and the array of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc. And don't forget the entire open source is about standards, being able to reuse existing components and frameworks. What I think the article doesn't mention is that unifying and creating a standard solution is a harder task then creating custom solutions one after the other for each use case/local context. In practice I've seen people try and fail, but often it's not the person with most experience trying, or the business isn't truly willing to put in the effort to succeed, both of these can sabotage things. And again, because it is hard, you have to be willing to fail the first time, but use those learning to try again, and again, until you crack it. And doing that is often worth it long term, cause when you crack it the efficiency and scale will go through the roof, if your business is smart, you might even realize what you have is more valuable than your current business, and pivot to being a SaaS vendor haha. Or you can keep it secret as a competitive advantage.