I’m not saying SOA inherently makes it worse. I’m saying SOA still comes with its own costs.
> It sounds like it's working really well to expose an organizational failure.
Exactly. But there’s a belief that having individual services leads to efficiencies because everyone is decoupled and works across established contracts.
The reality of the game is far more complex. While it is an organizational problem, at scale the organizational issue is also hard to resolve because of competing goals and priorities.
But to analyze SOA, we have to consider this reality. Looking at SOA as a silver bullet in a vacuum is near sighted - that’s all I’m trying to say.
> Whoever owns the business priorities will have to make the call on what happens here.
In large, distributed organizations, there often isn’t a single person, or the common owner is much higher in the org tree that people don’t want to go to them. We can call that a management failure, but that’s not the point. In reality, this inefficiency burns out engineers and leads to a lot of churn. And this is a ground reality in at least two of the companies whose products you most likely use every day.
These companies are viewed as exemplars of operating at scale. If they're failing at this, there's a deeper problem that requires a second look. Saying these companies "suck organizationally" isn't productive or helpful.
My main point was SOA comes with its own set of issues when you implement it at large scale. You're talking around me instead of listening to what I'm trying to communicate. I'll stop engaging with you since it's not productive.
> These companies are viewed as exemplars of operating at scale.
I mean we can just talk openly about the companies - like are we talking Google? Because I don't know anyone who thinks Google is organizationally functional.
I’m not saying SOA inherently makes it worse. I’m saying SOA still comes with its own costs.
> It sounds like it's working really well to expose an organizational failure.
Exactly. But there’s a belief that having individual services leads to efficiencies because everyone is decoupled and works across established contracts.
The reality of the game is far more complex. While it is an organizational problem, at scale the organizational issue is also hard to resolve because of competing goals and priorities.
But to analyze SOA, we have to consider this reality. Looking at SOA as a silver bullet in a vacuum is near sighted - that’s all I’m trying to say.
> Whoever owns the business priorities will have to make the call on what happens here.
In large, distributed organizations, there often isn’t a single person, or the common owner is much higher in the org tree that people don’t want to go to them. We can call that a management failure, but that’s not the point. In reality, this inefficiency burns out engineers and leads to a lot of churn. And this is a ground reality in at least two of the companies whose products you most likely use every day.