Some companies adopt micro-services to turn impossible problems into merely hard problems; some companies adopt micro-services to turn simple problems into hard problems.

There's a simpler explanation : Conway's Law.

Yeah, I don't understand why HN commenters refuse to understand this.

The real advantages of microservices (I would say the only advantage but YMMV) is that it greatly simplifies development work, CI etc. when your organisation reaches a certain point.

Even at 200 devs, working on just one monolith has a lot of friction. Open a pull request for something trivial and you'll have to wait hours for the CI to finish.

ever tried to scale monolithic development beyond 3 teams? the point of micro services is simple: to make technical infrastructure resemble the human organization it is designed to support. that’s it.

And I've been at a company where they did exactly this and turned out to be a complete mess and nearly bankrupted the company (it was even a unicorn).. Without the proper efficient layout and oversight of how a microservice architecture should work for your system you are better off reducing the engineers working on the monolith before telling everyone to switch it over to microservices. Otherwise if you can guarantee the above criteria then yes, I'd agree.