Yup, and it makes perfectly intuitive sense once you know about it.
If you’ve ever used a software product with one of those left hand menus with a big list of capabilities from any “big” company, it’s almost assured that each item in that list is it’s own development team that’s only tangentially aware of what the others are doing, and the team in charge of maintaining the menu.
I was on a team for a bit whose goal was to find places where we were shipping our org chart and make our tools play more nicely with each other.
End result: we found some really good areas to make them play better with each other, implemented them, and… They got their own entry in the left hand menu because maintaining a feature fully integrated with four disparate teams with different goals is really hard.
To our credit though, once you turn it on, our thing makes the lines between the products essentially disappear for our end users.
Huh, well this is one of those things I’m going to see everywhere now
Melvin Conway and Hannah Arendt probably could have had a really fascinating with each other comparing ideas in computer and political sciences
Yup, and it makes perfectly intuitive sense once you know about it.
If you’ve ever used a software product with one of those left hand menus with a big list of capabilities from any “big” company, it’s almost assured that each item in that list is it’s own development team that’s only tangentially aware of what the others are doing, and the team in charge of maintaining the menu.
I was on a team for a bit whose goal was to find places where we were shipping our org chart and make our tools play more nicely with each other.
End result: we found some really good areas to make them play better with each other, implemented them, and… They got their own entry in the left hand menu because maintaining a feature fully integrated with four disparate teams with different goals is really hard.
To our credit though, once you turn it on, our thing makes the lines between the products essentially disappear for our end users.
TIL Foucault wasn’t the first person to have that idea, I’ve always heard it referred to as Foucault’s Boomerang