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"If you are institutionally incapable of..." This is the road to bullshit. Of course no manager or CEO will admit that their team/company is that. Admitting te

"If you are institutionally incapable of..." This is the road to bullshit. Of course no manager or CEO will admit that their team/company is that. Admitting technical non-excellence is nearly impossible. Organisation inadequacy... impossible. So the best course of action is to pretend your organisational methods are really just software architecture... and back to square one.

BackBlast 4y ago
If you can't admit the problem. Can't stare it down. Can't comprehend it. Then I don't know how you can ever solve it. I try to avoid these places, not easy though.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  Are there any examples of large organizations that don't have this problem? I can imagine places with small teams that are basically isolated that can operate efficiently, but once you scale to point where dozens to hundreds of teams needing to cooperate, it seems like all you have is tradeoffs and fundamental coordination and scaling issues. I've never heard of a big org that didn't have some flavor of disfunction resulting from that kind of complexity. Some places seem to be "less-bad" but that doesn't mean good or efficient.
  - locutous 4y ago
    Jim Keller mentioned this problem in the hardware space. Basically when people breach the interface design and couple things and how that coupling limits your ability to grow the design. When he helped set the tone for the Zen architecture he took AMDs existing people, set them on a more aggressive path and one of the cardinal tenants was you could not cheat on the interfaces. This is one of the nuggets you can pull from his interviews. It's possible. It happens. And the end results can be industry changing.
guywhocodes 4y ago
This is something I'm painfully familiar with and I'm starting to seem to me that "definition creep" that I thought was the result of marketing. Such as we see with terms like "AI" and "ML", actually mostly comes from this. If you are a dumpster-fire S&P500 company CTO and there is a new shiny thing that would actually improve things, you are probably more capable of redefining that new term into the horse-shit you are currently doing; than actually do it.

BackBlast 4y ago

If you can't admit the problem. Can't stare it down. Can't comprehend it. Then I don't know how you can ever solve it. I try to avoid these places, not easy though.

jacobr1 4y ago
Are there any examples of large organizations that don't have this problem? I can imagine places with small teams that are basically isolated that can operate efficiently, but once you scale to point where dozens to hundreds of teams needing to cooperate, it seems like all you have is tradeoffs and fundamental coordination and scaling issues. I've never heard of a big org that didn't have some flavor of disfunction resulting from that kind of complexity. Some places seem to be "less-bad" but that doesn't mean good or efficient.
- locutous 4y ago
  Jim Keller mentioned this problem in the hardware space. Basically when people breach the interface design and couple things and how that coupling limits your ability to grow the design. When he helped set the tone for the Zen architecture he took AMDs existing people, set them on a more aggressive path and one of the cardinal tenants was you could not cheat on the interfaces. This is one of the nuggets you can pull from his interviews. It's possible. It happens. And the end results can be industry changing.

guywhocodes 4y ago

This is something I'm painfully familiar with and I'm starting to seem to me that "definition creep" that I thought was the result of marketing. Such as we see with terms like "AI" and "ML", actually mostly comes from this. If you are a dumpster-fire S&P500 company CTO and there is a new shiny thing that would actually improve things, you are probably more capable of redefining that new term into the horse-shit you are currently doing; than actually do it.