I’ve had the opportunity to work in organizations of 20 people and others with over 10k, and there is a curious phenomenon that occurs as an organization grows: small changes become monumental tasks.
It blows my mind how autonomy is lost as we divide the system into domains. We expect each team to own their boundary, but software doesn’t always respect those limits.
When a technically simple change touches several domains:
- It becomes a matter of conflicting interests: Your change might not fit into another team’s migration plans.
- Side effects appear: A simple validation can trigger alerts in a service due to unexpected changes in the user flow.
- The risk of the “unknown unknowns”: A service you didn’t even know existed can break because it depended on the flow you changed.
In the end, communication becomes part of engineering. If teams don’t align, not even the best code, the best architecture, or every test passing green will make the initiative a success. The change may work technically, but fail organizationally.
So, the invisible tax is: Coordination.