One Way Smart Developers Make Bad Strategic Decisions
Nice, interesting article.<p>But I would stress less that &quot;Seeing Like a State&quot; -- that is a top-down, global solution -- was not the problem.<p>The problem was that &quot;Tim&quot; didn&#x27;t really understand the problem he was trying to solve (well, none of us truly understand very much at all, but he didn&#x27;t understand it better than many of the teams associated with the individual services).<p>&quot;Tim&quot;&#x27;s proposal probably solved some problems but created various other problems.<p>The best solution, though, (IMO) isn&#x27;t that Tim should be smarted and better informed than everyone else combined, nor that every team should continue to create an independent solution. Instead &quot;Tim&quot; could propose a solution, and the 100 micro service teams would be tasked with responding constructively. Iterations would ensue. You still really, really need &quot;Tim&quot;, though, because multiple teams, even sincere and proficient ones, will not arrive at a coherent solution without leadership&#x2F;direction.<p>&gt; A global solution, by necessity, has to ignore local conditions.<p>That&#x27;s just flat wrong. A global solution can solve global concerns and also allow for local conditions.