It took a while to emerge but a couple years into my F50 gig we ran into a situation where we had a bus number if 3 in a domain, we all knew that solution A sounds good on paper but is a shitshow in practice, but the rest of the team was still enamored of it and our reasoned explanations just weren’t being persuasive enough.
The popular vote was going to load us up with little emergencies that were going to slow several divisions down and we ended up talking to the bosses and ignoring the vote.
In trying to smooth this over, I realized that the problem is that the people who would be dealing with the consequences of a decision wanted solution C and everyone else wanted solution A. And I think it’s something worth remembering for future indecisions, that the people with skin in the game need to be able to veto a popular vote. If you don’t want the project to lose momentum.
Generally on a large project you will have a bunch of leads all dealing with different domains, and they will reach quorum on major architectural decisions, particularly cross cutting concerns and interfaces between Conway’s Law modularizations. The boss only needs to break ties when a consensus does not emerge. And I mean NEEDS. Second worst boss I ever had refused to break ties and we had an even number of leads, so it happened half a dozen times. We wasted hours every month venting to each other about what we hated about him and one of the regular attendees just about wanted to murder him for that, and have us help him hide the body.
The popular vote was going to load us up with little emergencies that were going to slow several divisions down and we ended up talking to the bosses and ignoring the vote.
In trying to smooth this over, I realized that the problem is that the people who would be dealing with the consequences of a decision wanted solution C and everyone else wanted solution A. And I think it’s something worth remembering for future indecisions, that the people with skin in the game need to be able to veto a popular vote. If you don’t want the project to lose momentum.
Generally on a large project you will have a bunch of leads all dealing with different domains, and they will reach quorum on major architectural decisions, particularly cross cutting concerns and interfaces between Conway’s Law modularizations. The boss only needs to break ties when a consensus does not emerge. And I mean NEEDS. Second worst boss I ever had refused to break ties and we had an even number of leads, so it happened half a dozen times. We wasted hours every month venting to each other about what we hated about him and one of the regular attendees just about wanted to murder him for that, and have us help him hide the body.