I wonder at what point the financial pressure to stop designing bad software becomes so high that it overrides the political pressures that created the bad designs and practices? To a community like HN it's just normal every day thinking to design even at least a decent web application, but at some companies that's seen as either visionary and impossible or even immature. But at some point it seems there would be so much money on the line to trim the number of man hours going into maintenance nightmares they would fix it. I sometimes wonder if big companies will wake up to this across the country and there will be big lay offs becuase they adopt modern architecture and they don't need so many people? Does this seem feasible or will conways law hold even as financial pressure to do better starts to really go up? Or will the rewrites take even more people and therefore there won't be layoffs/pressure on job market?
Well, Conway's Law states that code reflects the organization's bureaucracy... bad software means bad leadership and decision making, likely spread throughout the company. Companies will root out those inefficiencies if and only if they are doing poorly. Deep cultural changes are hard to drive if the company is doing relatively well, no one wants to take the "risk" of trying to improve.
