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title Conway's Law and Unix Philosophy
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(1) An ancient, famous piece of IT wisdowm is Conway's Law. It says:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly)
will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the
organization's communication structure. [1]

(2) There is another old saying, part of "UNIX philosophy":

Write programs that do just one thing and do it well. [2]

Conway looks at IT system structure and says: "Hey, that sprawling module structure here, the messy communication pattern, the spaghetti code inside the modules resembles me something. It's exactly how our organisation is structured!". Unix philosophy also talks about IT system structure, yet makes no connection to organisation structure.

Question: What might be a management counterpart of Unix philosophy?

Research, analyse, and try to answer:

  • Does the Unix philosophy have some analogy, homomorphism, or corresponding management theory, organisational design paradigm, etc?
  • What is Conway's Law? Research internet [3], and if possible - academic papers - to find some information on how the Law has been received and used
  • What is Unix philosophy? Use internet to find in what contexts it is used
  • What characteristics should an organisation have, to produce IT that would meet the Unix philosophy?
  • Conway's Law was "discovered" in 1968, Unix philosophy in 1978. What social and technological currents and trends of 1960s and 70s might have been influencing appearance of Conway's Law, Unix philosophy a.o. similar laws (Murphy's law?)
  • Are Conway's Law and Unix philosophy still relevant?
  • Have you observed Conway's Law and Unix philosophy in action? How? Please describe
  • (*extra points) Might Unix philosophy have a connection to Finnish culture? If yes, then how?

Your analysis does not have to be politically correct, but avoid revealing any business secrets or other damaging data.

[1] Mel Conway's original article "How Do Committees Invent?" from 1968 is available here: http://www.melconway.com/research/committees.html. Author presents his backstory and gives a link to Wikipedia article about Conway's Law.

[2] probably the best starting point to Unix philosophy is Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy. There is a link to Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan original article.

[3] Hacker News, https://news.ycombinator.com/ is one good source.

EDIT:

[4] Martin Kleppmann Apache Kafka, Samza and the Unix Philosophy of Distributed Data. -- technical article