One Way Smart Developers Make Bad Strategic Decisions

I don't suppose we have any foresters on this board who can comment?

If you think of the United States, you might argue having a central government was better than each state being its own country and maybe that's the edge the US has over Europe.

Deciding to build roads everywhere top down definitely helped with overall car transportation.

Having HDMI as a common format for streaming video and audio sources is a big improvement over each TV using its own format.

There's plenty of counterexample to what the article talks about. So what gives? And on the example mentioned, how do you know if that's a great use of standardization or not?

I've been in many companies and I think they often fail to invest enough in frameworks and standards across the tech side. AWS was born out of Amazon's own effort to do top down standardization for example. And now it's their biggest cash cow and the entire industry is standardizing over its services.

Way too often I see people stuck on contract like work. Each locally scoped small problem needs its own locally scoped big project to be handled. That just simply doesn't scale.

The beauty of most engineering is exactly finding these top-down mechanism that do scale, even if it involves changing the business processes themselves. Think of a dishwasher for example, a top-down design that can wash most things but not all, eventually things that are not dishwasher safe became less and less popular and almost extinct, because people want to scale their efficiency.

Can top-down standards fail, ya sometimes, but when they succeed they take things to the next level of scale.

Don't shoehorn every problem in the same solution, but also, don't solve every solution independently of one another and reinvent the same wheel, or your engineering team of 10 will quickly become thousands while your business product will have barely grown.

Author makes no claim to why Tim's approach couldn't work. Instead they bring up other scenarios about different things in different contexts and somehow try to say, see, attempting standardization never works. Except in many cases where it did work, like the internet, like USB, like HDMI, like all SaaS and cloud vendors, like Ruby on Rails, like Scikit, like GitHub, etc.

Maybe everyone understands "unification" differently, but for me making something simpler means making things that are small, independent, and where if they change internally they break nothing externally.

But for this to work, you need common patterns, properties, interfaces, otherwise you can't combine your modules into a greater more complex system.

If you do it right, the system as a whole might be complex, but each piece is simple to understand and reason about and making changes to them is not a risk to breaking the whole system.

But it also means reuse, those small simple independent parts can be reused for more than one thing, that's why the system grows complex, so each micro-service is very much a unified standard on its own, just of a small enough scope to successfully build and maintain for multiple clients to leverage.

But now, if you go to the next level up, you have a problem with the complex set of micro-services you now have, and that complex arrangement gets hard to reason about. That is where people added the idea of Supervisor, to have systems that watch over the subsystems, it serves as a way to unify a set of micro-services into a more reliable and understandable hole.