For reference (as per Wikipedia):
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.
— Melvin E. Conway
Imagine interpreting that as advice on how you should try to design things, lol.
Tbf, I think most of the post is just typical LinkedIn fluff, but I didn’t want to take the poor fellow out of context.
Funny thing is, this is essentially the same here for me - I just don’t have the standing right now to push such an effort through.
We’re not in a “fast changing” market at all, it’s dog slow actually. But our customers are currently shitting money and often just want to get things done. We don’t even have to “get a foot in the door”, they’re holding the doors open for us - and some have years of contracts already.
Currently, our revenue is limited by the amount of developers, or rather the amount of developer output (however you want to meter that). The problem is, essentially our revenue is made by renting out devs by the hour. Our proposals (and contracts) usually say “We’ll buid this thing within 1000 dev days at 1000€/day”, as long as our rates and time estimates are competitive, we can charge full market price.
Now comes the bummer: If we would build a common platform/product/library, we would need to invest a certain amount of dev time and then roll that investment over to the external costs. So we might say only 500 dev days for this project, but each dev now costs 1500€/day. The sum total is much lower, but our clients will argue, that 1500€/day is totally unreasonable. We also might choose a license model, were we license our own software, but many clients don’t want to buy licenses, unless it’s something like MS, Oracle, etc.
It’s infuriating.
I’m currently trying to convince some managers, that we could at least build some of the more general components in a way that would allow us to build a small toolbox or library, so that we at least have something like common starting point, but even that gets opposition, because some of the project leads are totally convinced that a) their absolute vanilla project is super special and b) the existing of a toolbox means use of that toolbox is enforced by threat of violence.
Yeah, and contracting is weird, too. I worked for a company that built a product to regression test that upgrades to major components that our systems integrated with didn’t change some functionality that would cause incorrect pricing or other issues. The testers at the companies that bought it loved it, but it was an annual fee and they couldn’t justify the cost without a specific upgrade planned in advance. Instead, they all went back to spending up to 100x as much hiring contractors to manually create test data and analyze the results. Worst part is the divisions of the companies that purchased the software could easily have convinced the other divisions to use the software and there would have been plenty of projects every year even if one division only had one project every two years or so.
But nope. Can’t collaborate and share expenses or they’ll lose their funding. Better to have big spikes in spending so that they could look like they were saving money all the rest of the time. Otherwise, they would lose all of their permanent staff to budget cuts.