Is this truly a management failure?

If a few things are true, I could see this as a win:

* I can isolate my developers from outside interests using microservices. * My developers are more effective in each dimension (quality, retention/happiness, velocity) because they are isolated from outside interests. * My software is easier to operate and more reliable because it is a microservice.

If any of these three things aren't true, then I agree. But I'm not sure that a "communication culture" can scale to a large organization and I'd like to see a truly large company (1000+ developers) successfully doing so. I've seen more success come from separation of concerns and well-deployed microservices seem to be fairly effective to this end.

Microservice architectures [usually] represent a management failure because they usually don't work well in the real world. It's easy to concoct a paper-only, theoretical version of an idealized microservice architecture, since you can gloss over all the real-world details and practicalities. Mapping that theory into the real physical world is a whole different ball game.

Conway's Law might as well be renamed "The Law of Microservices". Per Wikipedia [0], it states:

> "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

"Microservices" are on a tear because they make a perfect cover for the blatant and bare expression of unbridled Conway's Law.

Such unbridled expression is much easier in the course of greenfield development, because it lets the core team of 2-3 people per service go about their development work without consulting anyone external. It lets them throw away any overriding convention or cultural concerns, and it avoids the difficulties of cross-group coordination. But it leads to a completely unmaintainable wreck when things transition into production.

This is not to say that no one will have a successful microservice deployment or that it's always a bad choice, but it usually goes way off the rails.

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

This I can entirely agree with - framing my point around Conway's law works well and I think I can reframe my question as "is the expression of Conway's law a management failure, or is it the mis-structuring of the organization causing the expression to be harmful?"

The parent post I was replying to seemed to simplify things down to "let your developers communicate and they'll build a more coupled system that works, instead of a morass of microservices that don't." That's another thing that looks good on paper but doesn't scale, at least in my experience.

I think my point was misunderstood, probably because I did a poor job of explaining it as I was cramming a hamburger in my facehole and watching the Pats win the AFC :)

I think in many cases microservice architectures appeal to engineering organizations with poor communication and cooperation skills where developers desire to be strongly independent because of the lack of management creating a cooperative and coordinated dev and work environment. I think that's actually saying something very similar to the Conway Law idea brought up by the other poster.

I wouldn't dismiss the effect of résumé based development either. Even if subconscious, having the latest buzzwords on your CV is a motivator.

For me that'a conscious motivator :-)

" Microserivces desire springs up because of a lack of communication culture and desire for siloification" - Would have upvoted this more than once if possible.