[HN Gopher] How do Committees Invent? (1968) [pdf]
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       How do Committees Invent? (1968) [pdf]
        
       Author : arkj
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2022-03-20 03:46 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.melconway.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.melconway.com)
        
       | drallison wrote:
       | Back when figuring out software engineering and systems design
       | was all the rage, Mel Conway's paper was a fave. His observation
       | --that system designs tend to mimic the social structure of the
       | development team--was critical when it came to understanding
       | systems and their development. Now, I suspect that, 52 years
       | later, the observation (based upon longitudinal studies) still
       | holds and that the ways committees invent are still not
       | understood.
       | 
       | Mel wrote an influential paper on coroutines and compilers,
       | "Design of a Separable Transition-diagram Compiler", which
       | included the first published explanation of the concept proposed
       | organizing a compiler as a set of coroutines. Several compilers
       | based upon his approach were built in the early 1970s at SRI and
       | at consulting firm Polymorphic.
       | 
       | Mel also applied for and received US Patent 6272622, Dataflow
       | Processing With Events, which expired in 2019. The patent is very
       | broad and insightful.
        
         | cryptonector wrote:
         | A great example of Conway's law is Active Directory. Someone at
         | Microsoft figured out that they needed a) new authentication
         | technology (Kerberos, which was new in the sense of "better
         | than NTLM"), b) a general-purpose directory that (a) could use,
         | c) also a general-purpose directory that could be used to serve
         | DNS. What's surprising is that this then led MSFT to create a
         | team to do all three things rather than have disparate, far-
         | flung teams to do it. AD was a huge reason for MSFT's success
         | in the oughts, and still is.
         | 
         | The competition completely failed to see the advantage of that
         | approach, and so failed to compete. At Sun Microsystems, for
         | example, the directory server team was very far-flung from the
         | Solaris Security team that owned Kerberos support, and neither
         | had anything to do with DNS in any Sun products, and Sun never
         | did anything about that in part because Solaris was seen as a
         | cost center while the Directory Server product was seen as a
         | profit center.
        
       | fuzzfactor wrote:
       | >How do Committees Invent?
       | 
       | In many different ways throughout this seminal paper, he seems to
       | be saying _they don 't_.
       | 
       | An important enough question raised by Conway's Law to merit the
       | title of the piece.
       | 
       | "To the extent that an organization is not completely flexible in
       | its communication structure, that organization will stamp out an
       | image of itself in every design it produces."
       | 
       | "The larger an organization is, the less flexibility it has and
       | the more pronounced is the phenomenon."
       | 
       | Or maybe he is saying _good luck, you 've got me_ and pleading
       | for help.
       | 
       | "philosophy promises to unearth basic questions about value of
       | resources and techniques of communication which will need to be
       | answered before our system-building technology can proceed with
       | confidence."
       | 
       | in his final sentence.
        
       | jadbox wrote:
       | The only way to reduce complexity in a long running project is:
       | 
       | - diligence to propoerly research the domain and provide defined
       | solution(s)
       | 
       | - leadership with courage to make the right choice that may have
       | risk
       | 
       | - comittment from stakeholders to fund the scope of the
       | initiative
       | 
       | - the team's grit to see projects through to the end (and not
       | leave things half-refactored)
       | 
       | If any of the above breaks down, you get the problem of half-
       | baked solutions that only end up making things worse by adding
       | additional complexity.
        
       | iamwil wrote:
       | Funny, just watched Casey Muratori cover the same topic on his
       | channel: https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY?t=699
       | 
       | I thought he covered it well. He considered the temporal aspect
       | of orgs, which meant that software, over the years not only mimic
       | the org, but every org that had ever been there over time.
       | 
       | edit: oh, and unexpectedly, he's still around and on twitter.
       | https://twitter.com/conways_law
        
         | cma wrote:
         | Interestingly Twitter's org chart, or something, crept into
         | Conway's work as well, producing this tweet-unroll-as-a-pdf
         | communication monstrosity:
         | 
         | https://melconway.com/Home/pdf/politics-emergence.pdf
        
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