Corporate anthropology is not a metaphor. It is the practice of studying organizations as living systems, shaped by incentives, fears, rituals, and informal power. Software engineering, whether it admits it or not, operates inside these systems. Every production incident tells a story. Not only about technology, but about communication paths, trust boundaries, and decision latency. … Read more
Every organization has two structures. One is written. The other is practiced. The written structure lives in org charts, process documents, and presentations. The practiced structure lives in shortcuts, exceptions, workarounds, and silent approvals. Production systems always obey the second one. Observing structures means watching how decisions are actually made, not how they are described. … Read more
Most software failures are not technical. They are organizational. Systems rarely collapse because of a missing semicolon or an inefficient algorithm. They fail because incentives were misaligned, ownership was unclear, or responsibility was diluted until no one could see the whole. In production environments, code does not exist in isolation. It lives inside companies, hierarchies, … Read more