The Majestic Monolith via 37Signals Blog

37Signals, makers of Basecamp and ever the buckers-of-trends, wrote this piece about why a monolith architecture (vs. the trendy micro service) is the right technological solution for them. At a more general level, they make this important observation:

The patterns that make sense for organizations orders of magnitude larger than yours, are often the exact opposite ones that’ll make sense for you. It’s the essence of cargo culting. If I dance like these behemoths, surely I too will grow into one. I’m sorry, but that’s just not how the tango goes.

This is true of not just technical patterns, but general organizational approaches too. But that you shouldn’t run HR like a 50,000-person company when you have 50 seems obvious to most though (with some exceptions)