1. There are many organizations invested in keeping the disconnected status quo
2. The true things you want to connect are owned by giants that are slow and dont trust or need you
3. You need to play by the big players rules or get nowhere here
Company as Code
71–80 of 135 posts
Re: Company as Code
#72This is not a new or novel idea. I proposed such a thing at the start of my career in tech, and repeatedly propose it when I feel I have ears willing to listen. The problem - and I do mean the problem, the only problem - is the threat this poses to power dynamics in the organization. Compliance people do not benefit from their outputs being readily searchable and indexed like this, because it means there’s less need…
"Compliance" as we know it today is going away
Re: Company as Code
#73It's all cool as long as you keep all of this up to date, and that requires a lot of scrutiny and discipline. Once I had to go through a security audit at a job I had. Part of it was to show managing secret keys and who had access to them. And then I realized that the list of people who had access to one key was different than the list of the code owners of the service I was looking at, which was yet different than t…
Isn't the point that this is the source of truth?
If someone needs access to a secret, you would implement it in this DSL and commit that to the system. A side effect would run on that which would grant access to that secret. When you want to revoke access, you commit a change removing that permission and the side effect runs to revoke it.
Re: Company as Code
#74Am I the only one who is mystified by this whole idea? People aren't CPU's. Good luck getting them to follow the code that you thought you were using to define their roles. On the contrary, what makes any complex system work is flexibility. And yes, if that calls into question the whole regulatory regime some companies (believe they) live under ... well, yes.
Re: Company as Code
#75This is not a new or novel idea. I proposed such a thing at the start of my career in tech, and repeatedly propose it when I feel I have ears willing to listen. The problem - and I do mean the problem, the only problem - is the threat this poses to power dynamics in the organization. Compliance people do not benefit from their outputs being readily searchable and indexed like this, because it means there’s less need…
> That said, I would love to work for an organization placing importance on this degree of internal cooperation. I suspect I’d thrive there.
I've been looking for such a org my entire career but recently resigned myself[1] to the fact it'll probably not happen unless I come into a situation when I can create it myself.
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[1] https://blog.webb.page/WM-081>
Re: Company as Code
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is incredibly cool. Licensing it as AGPL-v3 throws up an interesting question - given the thing this produces is your company as code, if you use this does your entire company count as a larger work that would need to be open sourced? Or is there an explicit distinction between the "firmware" (excuse me) and the work product?
Licensing generally applies only to the thing being licensed and not its output. Otherwise all software written with a GPLv3 editor would also be GPLv3…or all software built with a GPLv3 compiler would be GPLv3. (Neither are true)
That's because the output isn't a derivative work of the licensed software.
Re: Company as Code
#77This sort of approach is likely intractable. A company is more than the function of it's org chart. There's business description being uncaptured sporadically in every Slack message, watercooler moment and email. (two of those are much easier than the other). If you boil someone's actual job down to a HR job spec and assume that will suffice... you'll produce both absurdly long HR job specs and still fail to capture…
> A company is more than the function of it's org chart.
Of course - but the org chart is context. It reflects how the work of individuals contributes to the whole (or at least, it should!)
Having all this in "code" means AI can put it into context.
Re: Company as Code
#78The cyclical relationship graph this article mentions is doable with Gel[1], my favorite database (the team building it recently got acquired by Vercel so the database is in community's hands now).
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[1] https://www.geldata.com>
Re: Company as Code
#79I love the vision, but it glosses over the most important difference between Infrastructure and Companies.
Infrastructure as code is prescriptive. The code is the source of truth, and the world gets crested from it.
Company as code is descriptive. It is constantly catching up to meat-space, rather than creating it. Changes are gradual instead of instant roll-outs. Patterns change over time and only get documented later.
Making the company code prescriptive would require an insane amount of discipline that might be more stifling and restrictive than it is freeing.
Re: Company as Code
#80We tried this at Hats Protocol, I think you’ll find our approach very aligned! https://blog.hatsprotocol.xyz/organizational-graphs We came at it from the perspective of DAOs, which was helpful at first but ultimately limiting. I think a non-blockchain version of this will take off. Tailscale is in a good position to do it. Our earned insight is that you need to build the right primitive for delegation that works up a…
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Are you a bot or bot-assisted? Repeating back the content of a comment and then asking a generic follow-up is a strange pattern.