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This has to be the 50th or 100th version of this article that repeats the same thing Every single point in this article was already explicitly described betwee
by AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
This has to be the 50th or 100th version of this article that repeats the same thing
Every single point in this article was already explicitly described between roughly 1968 and 1987: Brooks formalized coordination cost and the fallacy of adding manpower in The Mythical Man-Month
Conway showed that system architecture inevitably mirrors organizational communication structure in 1968
Parnas defined information hiding and modularity as organizational constraints, not coding style, in 1972
Dijkstra *repeatedly warned* that complexity grows faster than human comprehension and cannot be managed socially after the fact
None of this is new, reframed, or extended here; it is a faithful re-enumeration of half-century-old constraints.
These lists keep reappearing because we refuse to solve is the structural one: none of these constraints are enforceable inside modern incentive systems.
So almost like clockwork somebody comes out of nowhere saying hey I’ve I’ve observed these things that are consistently documented in history of organizational management and specifically computing and software management look at this list.
It’s so Exhausting
- DenisM 10mo agoThe fact that people don’t learn from the older books is somewhat annoying, but rewriting them makes sense precisely because people will likely trust it more. Software engineers are prone to novelty bias. Thats in contrast to some other demographic groups who very much prefer ancient texts.
- AndrewKemendo 10mo agoWell both of them are wrong because they can’t walk the middle path
- dasil003 10mo agoYeah but what do you want to do about it? The engineers I see making these mistakes day-to-day are not going to connect the dots if I just point them to the seminal writings. Heck, half of their complaints are of the same form as yours: if only the majority of [engineers, colleagues, stakeholders] were aware of [A, B, C principles] then we could avoid repeating [X, Y, Z failures]. Yeah it's exhausting, life is exhausting, and it doesn't inherently get better with knowledge and experience as the gap to the lowest common denominator only increases; the only balm I've found is focusing on what I can control.
- AndrewKemendo 10mo agoWell for starters I literally organized our company and all engineering around Conway‘s law and it’s working great That’s like the absolute bare minimum you can do, it’s trivially easy and solves a good half of these “problems.”
- dasil003 10mo agoHow big is your company?
- AndrewKemendo 10mo agoA better question is how quickly are we growing… We’re currently around 30 in engineering full time and 40 if you include ops, logistics etc…with new funding and coming out of stealth etc we expect to hit the dunbar number (~150 this year)