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Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

Does Conway’s law imply that an organization of size 1 produces a system with components that are optimally integrated?

I sometimes wonder what would happen if a company hired 100 software engineers, gave them all the same task to program the entire thing independently on their own, and then paid them as a monotonic function of the ranking of their output against their peers. (Obviously, there are limits on what type of product could be developed here, but I think this still encompasses far more company products than you would suspect.)

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> Does Conway’s law imply that an organization of size 1 produces a system with components that are optimally integrated?

It’s creative work, like anything else. 1 is not necessarily always the right size, but 100 certainly isn’t. If you look at musical bands usually a sweet spot is between 1-6. You can add more in eg an orchestra or choir but everyone’s not involved in the creative work.

Then it depends on how well you vibe with people. If you have extremely unique ideas and thoughts, you may be better off alone. If you find peers with similar values, preferences and experiences, you might be fine with 5 people.

This feels like something that is just crazy enough to work.

Most teams I've been on or managed were at their optimal efficiency with three people. Just enough to keep any one person from making too many poor decisions, but not to many to spend half a day in meetings.

An organization of size 1 has other constraints, like time.. But also, Conway's law applies outside the organization as well, communication constraints shape society at large and the way a society is organized limits the communication channels available.

On the topic of Microsoft/Linkedin, aren't they the ones who used to or maybe still assign the same task to multiple teams and let the teams compete for who can deliver? That does sound vaguely like what you propose.

Run all 100 in parallel in production and monitor for inconsistencies.

I remember one time we had to provide some important numbers to auditors. A data analyst on the team wrote some queries to collect this information, but my manager decided to write his own queries independently as a consistency check. The numbers didn’t match at all.

So he asked me to write my own queries as well to see who was right. Lo and behold, my numbers didn’t match either of theirs at all.

3 wrongs makes for a much more interesting conversation than 1

Fred brooks believes the Max is 1 or 2 (if they have experience together), and explains how to scale an org around those people.

Does he say what to do when they die, quit, or retire?

So clever! The brief answer is you have many staff who have knowledge but not creative authority. If you think about it for a few minutes I think you’ll find some options.

The best way to de-risk a project is to run three at once. Just don't let the teams find out about the other ones.

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