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tl;dr: there's a reason most startups prefer javascript to smalltalk.

Which is a quality of a fundamentally broken organizational system

No, it's a quality of a robust organizational system. Let's take a program that parses html as an example. What would you think of an html parser that only works well with high quality, strictly structured html and breaks under poorly formatted html? You would call it a fragile, broken system. But a parser that deals equally well with low quality html would be a well thought out, robust system. And here's the key to the point I was making: the robust system could be relied upon to do its job consistently even under less than ideal conditions.

A system that requires exceptional engineers to maintain it is a huge source of risk for any company. If your current exceptional engineer leaves for whatever reason, you have to find another one. If the reason your engineer left is your company is suddenly facing insolvency thanks to a nasty patent dispute, all you may be able to afford to hire is a college grad to maintain what you've already got.

[mindslight]

You're speaking from the perspective of someone who has to be responsible for something without understanding it, which is another pathology endemic to that system. By only using black box reasoning, of course you come to the conclusion that you need many such boxen in case one malfunctions in an unforeseeable way.

The thing is, the level of intelligence to maintain the software has to exist somewhere. If it's not vested in a small number of people able to actually understand the system, then the intelligence ends up being an emergent property of the human automatons, Chinese-room style, with the now-important "manager" pretending to control it when in fact nobody does.

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You're the only one in this thread talking about human automatons, outsourcing and broken corporate structures. I'm explaining why a healthy corporation would want to use a simpler and easier to understand system over a more complex, harder to understand one. Nothing more, nothing less.

The thing is, the level of intelligence to maintain the software has to exist somewhere.

Yes it does. Nothing I've said suggests otherwise. But, let's say you can lower the amount of intelligence required to actually understand the system. Not much, just from "exceptional" (by which I mean 10x or the top 1% of programmers working in the field) to "average" (by which I mean the median level of intelligence for programmers working in the field). If you can do that, you lower your risk over the long term. If someone leaves, you can easily hire a replacement and get them up to speed.

[hga]

I guess you don't agree with our host's "Beating the Averages" essay: http://paulgraham.com/avg.html, specifically:

The average big company grows at about ten percent a year. So if you're running a big company and you do everything the way the average big company does it, you can expect to do as well as the average big company-- that is, to grow about ten percent a year.

The same thing will happen if you're running a startup, of course. If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.

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I couldn't agree with the article more. I should have come up with a different tl;dr for the previous post, considering everything I wrote in this thread has specifically been about corporations and not startups. Sorry about the confusion.