Comment by maebert
6 hours ago
I love the vision, but it glosses over the most important difference between Infrastructure and Companies.
Infrastructure as code is prescriptive. The code is the source of truth, and the world gets crested from it.
Company as code is descriptive. It is constantly catching up to meat-space, rather than creating it. Changes are gradual instead of instant roll-outs. Patterns change over time and only get documented later.
Making the company code prescriptive would require an insane amount of discipline that might be more stifling and restrictive than it is freeing.
Nailed it. I think about prescriptivism / descriptivism in terms of these archetypes:
- "Rule followers" think an org will be better off if everyone agreed on a set of rules to follow. At the boundaries, they will think about establishing new rules to clarify and codify new things. Charitably, I'd add that they might remove rules that are obsolete, but we all know this is not sufficiently true in practice: governments, for example, are much more likely to add new rules than to remove old ones.
- "Rule breakers" think that most rules are suggestions. At the boundaries, they will see rules other people are needlessly bound by, and translate those into strategic openings for whatever game they're playing. For better and for worse, start-up ecosystems are full of people like this.
Rule followers want to be told what's allowed, while rule breakers try to figure out what _should_ be allowed from first principles. At the extreme, they tug the world towards authoritarianism or towards anarchy.
This is obviously a spectrum, so everyone has both of these archetypes in them, albeit in different proportions (e.g. most people pay taxes, but almost no one drives the speed limit).