[PaulStatezny]

Sounds like you're saying either:

1. Engineers don't care about the health of the codebase and it becomes/stays a ball of mud, OR...

2. They do care, and end up refactoring/rewriting it in a way that just creates even MORE complexity.

But I think this is a false dichotomy. It just happens to be very difficult, and as much of an art as a science to keep huge codebases moving in the right direction.

I haven't worked at Google, but from what I've heard they have huge codebases, but they're not typically falling apart at the seams.

[forgetfreeman]

1. I reject the notion that a ball of mud signifies lack of care. Nobody gets up in the morning planning on shooting themselves in the foot daily for the next N years and culturally devs aren't great about embracing the healthy benefits of pragmatism. With few exceptions architectural best practices are either largely esthetic or born from the particular constraints of specific tech stack and then leak due to concerted evangelical efforts by individuals polishing their street cred and organizations eager to bolster their in-house devs with unwitting volunteers (see also the near complete capture of open source by industry).

2. They absolutely care, but possibly about the wrong things, and this happens so often it's a cliche. Remember when a big chunk of the industry woke up one moring and decided RDBMs just had to be bullshit because my god look how old they are and collectively dove themselves, their projects, and their organizations off the cliff that was shoehorning mapreduce into a project NOT owned by Google?

Speaking of Google, I feel like there are few things less relevant to the industry writ large than whatever they happen to be up to at any given moment. From tech stack to hiring practices their needs are so totally orthogonal to what any other org requires they honestly may as well be operating in another dimension. Chasing after Google is like running around with a fork in your hand in search of a wall outlet.

Anyway, to finish up my thoughts on architecture as a concept, yeah having some structure to a codebase is something of a no-brainer, but dogma is as dogma does. There are very few unimpeachable capital T truths come from the software architecture intelligentsia. We could talk at some length about the decades of churn in this space as roughly every 5 years another crop of grad students gets unleashed into the industry dead-ass certain that they have found The Way.