
How Do Committees Invent? (1968) - mike_ivanov
http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html
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panic
_As long as the manager 's prestige and power are tied to the size of his
budget, he will be motivated to expand his organization. This is an
inappropriate motive in the management of a system design activity. Once the
organization exists, of course, it will be used. Probably the greatest single
common factor behind many poorly designed systems now in existence has been
the availability of a design organization in need of work._

This is a great point, and it's not widely understood. Organizations always
try to grow, and once they've grown, they will continue to do work, regardless
of whether that's what anyone actually wants or needs them to do.

For example, say a popular website has gone a long time without much design
work, and people are complaining that the site is hard to use. In response,
the people in charge of the website form a design team, which succeeds in
redesigning the site. But now that there's a design team, they will continue
to do design work, and the site will likely be redesigned periodically. This
will happen regardless of whether anyone actually using the site wants a new
design.

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JTon
From my experience, Facebook described to a T. I have a hunch you were
thinking of the same site. Any other examples? I'm struggling to find any
other examples that are as compelling

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njr123
I think is this also what happened at Microsoft to cause them to put out a new
programming framework every 18 months. They got some huge architecture team
together to design .net, but then never disbanded them.

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seanmcdirmid
A new programming framework every 18 months? Is that an exaggeration? Teams
are fairly dynamic; e.g. many of the .NET people went over to do Typescript.
Then there is something like WPF that hasn't moved much recently (for better
or worse).

Also, users really like the fact that there will be a new version of C# with
more features (async, pattern matching, etc...) with some continuity.

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ggchappell
To put it differently, committees don't invent. People invent. Committees
coordinate (or gather, edit, filter, etc.).

So if three people invent three things, and they form a committee to put the
parts together, then they typically end up with a thing having three parts.

This way of looking at it makes it all seem much less mysterious and profound,
IMHO.

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fidotron
That's a much better way of thinking about it.

The real problems I've seen emerge when there is a clear mismatch between the
organisational structure and the obvious (to everyone) solution to the problem
involves altering that structure, even slightly. At that point everything
becomes impossible.

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slagfart
This is the most practical and important paper I have read this year, and I'm
doing a masters in Information Systems.

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keeptrying
Maybe this is the true reason why Google lets engineers rule ?

Restricting them in hard ways essentially implies that the software produced
would just reflect the final bureaucracy?

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dasil003
There's no way around the rule though, if the communication is ad-hoc it might
be better than being dictated by clueless bosses, but everyone is still
operating with imperfect information, just at a different level. Witness the
chaos of their login systems before the sound of the Google+ battle horn.

