I agree that it's _easier_ for teams to have their own little fiefdoms, but not necessarily _better_. Shipping the org-chart is often a symptom of a leadership problem. When natural service boundaries exist, good leadership may choose to ship the org-chart, but too often extrinsic factors such as the arrangement of dev's desks dictates the architecture.
[Disclaimer: I've never worked for MS or Amazon, working solely off of reported info here...]
A kinda-random example off the top of my head of "shipping the org chart" would be the historical gaps between Windows, Development, and Office at Microsoft. Ie Office is getting a new ribbon, but no development can't supply those icons or any components because they're an "office thing", or the internal API/VBA battles along the same lines.
On the opposite side, as reported in the press, Amazon has used this effect to create manageable teams and build up their own SOA: the two-pizza rule for teams means that teams can only really make targeted self-contained services. In this case Amazon worked backwards and re-structured their teams so that 'shipping their org chart' created the desired architecture.
My favourite Microsoft 'ship the org chart' example is their app store.
Microsoft has an app store built into every Windows 10 computer worldwide. And of course, you can not download Microsoft Office from it. However, it does helpfully tell you to get Office by heading to 'MicrosoftStore.com'.
It's all sort of head scratching. A normal person might ask a lot of totally reasonable questions about this, like:
- Why does Microsoft's App Store not have Microsoft's own Apps in it? Office isn't the only missing app, Visual Studio is missing too (even the free 'Code' electron editor).
- Why does the phrase 'Microsoft Store' refer to something 100% different (in products and functions) than 'MicrosoftStore.com'?
- Why does the Office team have their own app updating utility, when there's already supposed to be one 'blessed' place for App Updates inside the Store? (Same question for Visual Studio Code).
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Anyway, I know a lot of the above is org chart related, or enterprise needs / backwards compatibility related. But they are all reasonable questions despite that.
And stuff like this is part of the reason why reasonable people still fall for phishing schemes. The above sounded to me like some weird popup advertisement trick, until I saw it first hand.
Just go work somewhere that is big enough for that to happen. Usually large tech cos with the amount of devs larger than dunbars number by about 2x or greater.
