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Comment by criticaltinker | Hacker News Reader

Had to read quite a bit before Conway’s Law was mentioned, but glad it was.

Viewing organizations and software engineering through this lens has been a game changer for me personally. As an individual contributor I now appreciate horrendous technical debt and glacially slow development as systematic organizational issues, rather than blaming burnt out or lazy engineers.

Now I’m much more aware and critical of technical and executive leadership. “A fish rots from the head” is one of those quotes that resonates with me more and more everyday.

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This is why my dream is to work completely alone. I still need employment to survive but hope one day I won't

Another good quote is "a cow with 2 owners gives no milk and eats no grain" (castilian proverb)

DuckDuckGo and Google give me no results for that proverb in English; what does it mean?

Each owner steals the other's grain intended for the cow and the cow dies and gives no milk?

The common english version is "The fastest way to starve a horse is to assign two people to feed it."

In other words: when everyone is responsible for getting something done, nobody is.

See also: Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs) https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/directly-resp...

My guess: Each owner says "it's your turn to feed it", and so the cow is never fed. And when the cow does give milk, each owner quickly takes the milk, claiming they haven't got their share yet.

It's like the human-scale version of socializing the costs/risks and privatizing the gains.

That's exactly right. The original is "vaca de dos amos: ni da leche, ni come grano" (it rhymes as these things often do). Castilian proverbs are neat ("Refranero castellano"). Centuries packed into short sentences

I'm guessing it means that nobody actually feeds it or milks it: there's somebody else who can do it.

Seems similar to the saying that 'success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.'

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