One Way Smart Developers Make Bad Strategic Decisions
Nice, interesting article.But I would stress less that "Seeing Like a State" -- that is a top-down, global solution -- was not the problem.The problem was that "Tim" didn't really understand the problem he was trying to solve (well, none of us truly understand very much at all, but he didn't understand it better than many of the teams associated with the individual services)."Tim"'s proposal probably solved some problems but created various other problems.The best solution, though, (IMO) isn'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 "Tim" could propose a solution, and the 100 micro service teams would be tasked with responding constructively. Iterations would ensue. You still really, really need "Tim", though, because multiple teams, even sincere and proficient ones, will not arrive at a coherent solution without leadership/direction.> A global solution, by necessity, has to ignore local conditions.That's just flat wrong. A global solution can solve global concerns and also allow for local conditions.