I've watched a lot of Casey Muratori's other presentations but just happened to find this one last week and I wholeheartedly agree. Like many people I'd heard of Conway's Law but always imagined it as a pithy truism and hadn't thought that the effects could run so deep.
Casey's example is focused on a (frankly, ridiculously) large organisation but I've seen the same thing in numerous small companies with just 20-30 developers, and it's hard not to imagine that this is universal, which is a pretty depressing thought.
Recently I've been involved in a new project where teams were set up to be 'domain-specific' with the idea that this somehow avoided the issues of Conway's Law, but this just feels like exactly the same problem because team structures and the software that they end up producing is siloed in exactly the same way as the organisation structures that existed at the time.
Casey's point that the final design is inherently limited by the lack of high-bandwidth communication between the groups of people that need it most is also fairly demotivating, personally.
Tangentially, having been writing more Golang recently this made me think of Golang's mantra (or was it Rob Pike's quote) of "Don't communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating.". Go/CSPs concurrency and sharing model is interesting, but I wonder if it's a fair analogue to compare sharing memory by communicating as low-bandwidth communication, and communication by sharing memory as the high-bandwidth communication that seems to be needed for effective designs.
Casey's example is focused on a (frankly, ridiculously) large organisation but I've seen the same thing in numerous small companies with just 20-30 developers, and it's hard not to imagine that this is universal, which is a pretty depressing thought.
Recently I've been involved in a new project where teams were set up to be 'domain-specific' with the idea that this somehow avoided the issues of Conway's Law, but this just feels like exactly the same problem because team structures and the software that they end up producing is siloed in exactly the same way as the organisation structures that existed at the time.
Casey's point that the final design is inherently limited by the lack of high-bandwidth communication between the groups of people that need it most is also fairly demotivating, personally.
Tangentially, having been writing more Golang recently this made me think of Golang's mantra (or was it Rob Pike's quote) of "Don't communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating.". Go/CSPs concurrency and sharing model is interesting, but I wonder if it's a fair analogue to compare sharing memory by communicating as low-bandwidth communication, and communication by sharing memory as the high-bandwidth communication that seems to be needed for effective designs.