Melvin Conway invented the term coroutines and was heavily involved in the development of MUMPS, a fairly arcane programming language still used in the medical/health record industry. But perhaps his most famous contribution, at least in systems and software organization circles, is Conway's Law:

Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of those organizations

It's hard to avoid seeing it when you become aware of it. Why does Facebook have those specific items in its side panel? Better than even odds it matches VP level subgroups within the larger organization.

One example I vividly recall was several years ago at a Seattle Python meetup. I asked an Uber employee to what extent they used the language: "Oh, half the engineering group actively writes in Python. But not the other half. It's from way back at the start of the company, when they outsourced the Marketplace" An early organizational decision effectively dictated technical ones (Seemingly confirmed by Uber's Blog here).

But is this just limited to organizations that design systems?

I was reminded of Conway's Law while I was reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It's a fascinating work that throws a lot of assumptions about early human civilization into question, based on archeological evidence produced in the last few decades.

The chapter "The Ecology of Freedom" is about early farmers, and how our records of them suggest not a linear path of foraging -> cultivation -> farming -> states, but rather a dabbling with occasions of people abandoning farming or conciously resisting practicing it (and why not, foraging often gave you better bang for your buck).

The title of their chapter comes from a book by Murray Bookchin, and it's the footnote they have referencing his work that jumped out at me:

...we cannot follow his own ideas about human prehistory or the origins of agriculture, which are based on information that is now many decades out of date. We do, however, find much to learn from his basic insight: that human engagements with the biosphere are always strongly conditioned by the types of social relationships and social systems that people form among themselves.

(emphasis mine)

I found it fascinating that a correspondance between the social relationships of software/systems engineers and the products they produce would echo some of the earliest known activities of our species

Despite hundreds of years of technological innovation and an overarching economic system that demands efficiency at seemingly all costs, there is no escaping the fact human social interactions and communiction cannot be entirely Taylorized out of the story of how we build things, and what they look like when they are finished.

As deeply alianating and dehumanizing that system can be - Ted Chiang famously likens it to the doomsday AI of science fiction imagination, but already here and doing damage without any machine intelligence needed - that this aspect of the creator(s) shows up, even if only in internal systems, is heartening.