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Comment by BinaryIdiot | Hacker News Reader

You're right it's pretty challenging but 27+ months and 300+ engineers challenging? I would have suspected to take half the time which makes me wonder what their architecture originally looked like and what they've been doing for so long.

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What I think you're hinting at is that a development organization with nobody driving direction devolves into a pile of people working on pet projects rather than doing the terrible boring work of shipping product.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

I don't see how Conway's law relates to what you said. Can you please elaborate? Do you think if no hirearchy is driving direction then there is a lack of communication between groups that work on projects?

If there is no hierarchy driving direction then there are 350 groups.

Holacracy implies no organization. It is a freeform, organic, shapeless philosophy with possibly no direction.

The migration project has taken 27 months with 300 staff, about 8100 man-months, with apparently little to show for progress. Lots of people in a project with no tangible features, like a blob.

I would say Conway's law fits perfectly.

I feel like you give any talented engineer 2 years and they could write Zappos from scratch on Amazon architecture.

Amazon took many years to move its own website onto AWS-like stack.

That's a bit of a false comparison though. Amazon developed and used AWS as it was becoming a thing and transitioned parts when certain pieces of AWS was ready for them. This Super Cloud move seems really different though if we had more details of both company's transitions this would be a little easier to talk about.

And here I am trying to build meaningful apps on my own :/

I've noticed that often one man can accomplish more than a whole group, especially if the group gets larger.

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