> Are we going back to the days where there were programmers who did the grunt work and architects who told them what to do? As long as Conway's law holds, sys

> Are we going back to the days where there were programmers who did the grunt work and architects who told them what to do? As long as Conway's law holds, system design is going to be at the mercy of the person who designs the team organization. It doesn't really matter what title you give things. I can tell you from experience that powering through a conways law mismatch doesnt yield good results. "communications overhead" feels abstract, so let me make it more concrete. When the org structure has no mapping to the software structure, the following bad things happen: - there is no clear rule for who's job it is to fix a bug. You have to always inspect the code and guess. - same issue for code review, and your code quality standard ends up beholden to the team with the tightest deadlines - nobody knows which manager to escalate issues to, and the only effective strategy is to haul a bunch of PMs and senior engineers into a conf call to analyze and decide - the testing and release strategy becomes one size fits all, and cannot make any assumptions about independent subcomponents of software -- you have to test and release the entire product in one go This is the form communication overhead takes.