> There seems to be a correlation between unnecessary product complexity and unnecessary corporate complexity.

That's Conway's law.

"Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Conway's Law is sorely overlooked. It really does have broad applicability in the industry, and sometimes you can use it to evaluate vendors better (read: this product is a bit haphazard...the vendor probably is also. Warning.)

Totally agree. The best succinct summary of Conway’s Law I've heard is “you ship your org chart.”

I like "the org chart is the asymptote," i.e. it's the best you could possibly do, and your reality will actually be worse. (see Casey Muratori)

Which is a good way to word it because if your org chart is screwy enough you won't ship at all.

Most of the useful insights in the Devops movement can be derived from knowing Conway's law and thinking about organizational patterns holistically. As usual the success stories get cargo culted by others without understanding the principles and thought processes that led there, and usually fail because every organization is different and has different needs. Change is hard. This will happen with every shiny new movement like Devops or Agile.

I'm sure we're due for a new one soon which will follow the same path, since people seem to be admitting that Devops has problems on here more and more. Will that cause deeper reflection? Probably not for many orgs, because soon some consultants will dream up a new brand of silver bullet to slay the immortal monster of organizational dysfunction and that's much more exciting.

That depends on the complexity of the development lifecycle, doesn’t it? If a single person can maintain it, having three different roles would mean unnecessary corporate complexity.

Not sure what you mean with "development lifecycle" exactly. Aren't maintenance and development both part of the product lifecycle?

Roles are muddy because life is muddy...and because people can do more than one thing at a time. Also because save for a few roles, businesses rarely need people 100% allocated to one role or task. Responsibilities are nice, and job titles mean people mostly do x or y.

My favorite example is that of a restaurant. You hire waitors, diswashers, bartenders, line cooks, prep cooks, hosts and hostesses, and managers. And your waiters might be 100% focused on taking orders during prime dining hours, but at the end of the night, they help clean up assuming other roles. Your bartender might be busy making drinks, but they take a table or two if they can. Your prep cook might finish the prep early, and come on the line to help out. Your manager focuses on expediting everything and keeping the ship running smooth, but also can fill holes at time.

Communication with the other roles you work with is key though in that case, otherwise you'll have chaos - e.g. because the waiters don't know that the bartender took the table, or because the cooks need things the next morning that aren't where they're supposed to be.

Exactly.

You wouldn’t expect a bartender to table every person, prepare all their drinks, cook all their food and clean up their table.

But that’s kind of what we keep trying to do, because we have new bartending tools that make it so that you need fewer and because we claim communication is harder than doing everything in one role.

Then when that person invariably gets overloaded; we hire more bartenders and complain they’re not good enough at cooking your specific dish.