[joahua]

I like your “programming at the edge” turn of phrase.

Centralised IT functions have some bearing here at an org level, not just the wider market. It’s vexed because while I deeply believe business needs would be better met locally, we still want a line of accountability on things like security and availability and data integrity that require a bit of longer term thought. Feature factory thinking certainly exists in bigger centralised teams, the kind that accrete management-speak and overbearing agile processes — but it’s also a false dichotomy to say “just build with the business and nothing of value was lost”.

[namaria]

Isn't the reason we want/need this central accountability precisely the fact that everything software related is an extension of some web based software now a days? It's funny because we preach 'modularity' yet we keep building on this amorphous borg and then we get bitten by its complexity. Not to mention the enterprise drive to streamline everything and destroy silos.

Modularity requires redundancy, it's inefficiency that buys us resilience. But forcefully erasing emergent social boundaries on one side and forcing overtly complex structures for the sake of some ill define ideal on software architecture (OOP! microservices!) just nets us the worse of both worlds.